  Just as defenders of embodied concepts might not be investigating concepts after all, but instead only conceptions—only features associated with concepts—it may be that the motor activity that accompanies thoughts about concepts does not contribute to the meaning of a concept but is instead only associated with the concept. The psychologists Mahon and Caramazza (2008) argue for this way of interpreting the neurological studies taken to support of embodied concepts. The finding that exposure to the word ‘kick’ causes activity in the motor areas of the brain responsible for kicking does not show that kick is a modal concept. Mahon and Caramazza suggest that linguistic processing of a word might create a cascade of activity that flows to areas of the brain that are associated with the meaning of the word. A thought about kick is associated with thoughts about moving one’s leg, which in turn causes activity in the motor system, but there is no motivation for regarding this activity as part of the kick concept—no motivation for seeing it as evidence for the modality of the concept (Mahon 2015). Thinking about a kick causes one to think about moving one’s leg, which causes activity in motor cortex, but the meaning of kick is independent of such activity.