  Central to the idea that concepts are embodied is the description of such concepts as modal. This label is intended to make stark the anti-computationalism that proponents of embodied concepts endorse. Symbols in a computer—strings of 1s and 0s—are amodal, in the sense that their relationship to their contents is arbitrary. Words too are amodal symbols. The symbol ‘lake’ means lake, but not in virtue of any resemblance or nomological connection it bears towards lakes. There is no reason that ‘lake’, rather than some other symbol, should mean lake—as is obvious when thinking about words that mean lake in non-English languages. All mental symbols, from the perspective of computational cognitive science, are amodal in this sense.