Abstraction
- This article is about the concept of abstraction in general.
Abstraction is the thought process wherein ideas are distanced from objects.
Abstraction uses a strategy of simplification of detail, wherein formerly
concrete details are left ambiguous, vague, or undefined; thus speaking of things
in the abstract demands that the listener have an intuitive or common experience
with the speaker, if the speaker expects to be understood.
For example, lots of different things have the property of redness: lots of things are red. And we find the relation sitting-on everywhere: many things sit on
other things. The property of redness and the relation sitting-on are therefore abstract.
Problems begin to arise; however, when we try to define specific rules by which we can determine which things are abstract,
and which concrete.
Conceptual schemes for abstraction
Instantiation
Something is often considered abstract if it does not exist at any particular place and time but instances, or members, if it can exist in many different places and/or times (we say that what is abstract
can be multiply instantiated).
If however we just say that what is abstract is what can be instantiated, and that abstraction is simply the movement in the
opposite direction to instantiation, we haven't explained everything. That makes 'dog' and 'telephone' abstract ideas, but even
small children can recognise a dog or a telephone despite their varying appearances in particular cases. You could say that these
concepts are abstractions but are not found to be very abstract in a conceptual sense. We can look at the
progression from dog to mammal to animal, and see that animal is more abstract than mammal;
but on the other hand mammal is a harder idea to express, certainly in relation to marsupial.
Physicality
Things are often said to be concrete, that is, not abstract, when they have
physical existence or when they occupy space.
In general, a concept is considered concrete if it is not abstract: it must be both particular and an individual, and hence
occupy both space and time. To say that a physical object is concrete is to say, approximately, that it is a particular
individual that is located at a particular place and time.
Realness
Abstract things are sometimes defined as those things that do not exist in reality
or exist only as sensory experience, like red. The problem begins to arise here when we try to decide which things are, in fact,
real. Is God real, or abstract? Even if real, could God also be abstract? Is the number 3 real? Is goodness real, or only its
effects, or is it just an abstract idea created by humans?
Abstraction used in philosophy
Abstraction in philosophy is the (oft-alleged) process, in concept-formation, of
recognizing among a number of individuals some common feature, and on that
basis forming the concept of that feature. The notion of abstraction is important to understanding some philosophical
controversies surrounding empiricism and the problem of universals.
Ontological status of abstract concepts
If we say that properties and relations are, or have being,
clearly we mean they have a different sort of being from that which physical objects, like rocks and trees, have. That accounts
for the usefulness of the word abstract. We apply it to properties and relations to mark the fact that if they exist, they do not
exist in space or time, but that instances of them can exist in many different places.
On the other hand the apple and an individual human being are said to be concrete, and particulars, and individuals.
Confusingly, philosophers sometimes refer to tropes, or property-instances (e.g., the particular redness of this particular apple), as abstract particulars.
Gottlob Frege abstracts abstraction
To be filled with a paragraph or two describing Frege's definition of abstraction.
Reification
Reification, also called hypostatization, is usually considered a logical fallacy wherein an abstract concept, such as "society" or
"technology" is treated as if it were a concrete thing. It is important to note that reification necessarily occurs linguistically in the English language and many other languages wherein abstract
objects are referred to using the same sorts of nouns that signify concrete objects. This
can further confuse us about which things are abstract and which concrete, as our language tends to influence us toward
reification.
Compression
An abstraction can be seen as a process of mapping multiple different pieces of constituent data to a single piece of abstract data based on similarities in the consituent data, for example
many different physical cars map to the abstraction "automobile". This conceptual scheme emphasizes the inherent equality of both
constituent and abstract data, thus avoiding problems arising from the distinction between "abstract" and "concrete". In this sense the process of abstraction entails
the identification of similarities between objects and the process of associating these objects with an abstraction (which is
itself an object). Chains of abstractions can therefore be constructed moving from neural impulses arising from sensory perception to basic abstractions such as color or shape to experiential abstractions such as a specific car to semantic
abstractions such as the "idea" of an automobile to classes of objects such as "machines" and even categories such as "object" as
opposed to "action".
This conceptual scheme entails no specific heirarchical taxonomy (such as the one mentioned involving cars and machines), only a progressive
compression of detail.
The neurology of abstraction
Some research into the human brain suggests that the left and right hemispheres differ
in their handling of abstraction. One side handles collections of examples (eg: examples of a tree) whereas the other handles the
concept itself.
Abstraction in Art
Most typically abstraction is used in the arts as a synonym of Abstract art in general. It can, however, refer to any object or image which has
been distilled from the real world, or indeed another work.
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