One recent development in the philosophy of mind is exploiting cognitive science in a naturalistic epistemology. Early cognitive science overlapped nicely with philosophical and scientific developments from the late 70's and 80's stemming from a variety of fields such as linguistics, AI, psychology, etc. By the 1990's there was a split in the community with early cognitive science growing out of [cognitive psychology], and later cognitive science, what Lakoff refers to as 2nd-generation cognitive science rejecting some of the core tenets of 1st-generation thinking and striking out into concepts like embodied and extended cognition.
The terminology you ask after is employed in embodied cognition (SEP), so to understand it, you have to understand what embodied cognition is:
Embodied Cognition is a wide-ranging research program drawing from and inspiring work in psychology, neuroscience, ethology, philosophy, linguistics, robotics, and artificial intelligence. Whereas traditional cognitive science also encompasses these disciplines, it finds common purpose in a conception of mind wedded to computationalism: mental processes are computational processes; the brain, qua computer, is the seat of cognition. In contrast, embodied cognition variously rejects or reformulates the computational commitments of cognitive science, emphasizing the significance of an agent’s physical body in cognitive abilities. Unifying investigators of embodied cognition is the idea that the body or the body’s interactions with the environment constitute or contribute to cognition in ways that require a new framework for its investigation. Mental processes are not, or not only, computational processes. The brain is not a computer, or not the seat of cognition.
The basic gist is that what you refer to as concept is grounded in bodily experience beyond the brain. Thus, there are concepts that are derived from our physical access to the world and that access extends beyond the brain into the CNS and PNS and tissues more generally. Thus, some concepts are rooted in our concrete existence in the physical world. From this article on embodied cognition (frontiers):
Concrete concepts refer to something that is present in the physical world, such as a tree in a forest. This means that these concepts have physical or spatial constraints. A tree can grow in a forest but not on the moon. Concrete concepts include but are not limited to physical objects in the world. Concrete actions, such as kicking or smiling, are also examples of concrete concepts.
We can read this as that concepts such as tree is shaped by how our body interacts with trees. There are limits or constraints on those physical interactions, and those constraints translate into constraints on our conceptual framework. An abstract concept is different:
Abstract concepts refer to entities that have no physical or spatial constraints because they have no direct representation in the physical world. It does not exist at a particular time or place but as a type of thing. Examples of abstract concepts are emotions, metaphors, and abstract actions (e.g., thinking).
So, do the terms sound like oxymorons? Yes. Do they have narrowly prescribed definitions? Yes. Are they meaningful? Well, if you buy into concepts like embodied or extended cognition, yes. These sorts of philosophical ideas are part and parcel of what might be considered a second generation of cognitive science which challenges the presumptions of researchers who presume that the brain is a machine that processes language internally to think. Such a simple analysis can be better understood by reviewing computationalism (SEP) and language of thought (SEP) which are pillars of the original generation of cognitive scientists but are rejected as excessive by the second.
See also cognitive semantics and cognitive linguistics.
