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An abstraction is an idea, concept, or word which defines the phenomena which make up the concrete events or things which the abstraction refers to, the referents. Abstractions are sometimes used that have ambiguous referents, for example, "happiness" used as an abstraction, can refer to as many things as there are people and events or states of being which make them happy. An idea (Greek: ιδέα) is the result of thinking. ...
A concept is an abstract, universal idea, notion or entity that serves to designate a category or class of entities, events or relations. ...
Word can mean one of several things: A linguistic word—a unit of language that symbolizes or communicates a meaning, consisting of one or more morphemes. ...
A definition may be a statement of the essential properties of a certain thing, or a statement of equivalence between a term and that terms meaning. ...
A phenomenon (plural: phenomena) is an observable event, especially something special (literally something that can be seen from the Greek word phainomenon = observable). ...
Wikipedia does not yet have an article with this exact name. ...
This article is about an emotion. ...
A further example, suppose one attempts to define the term architecture and what it refers to: architecture is more than simply designing safe functional buildings; it involves also an element of creation which aims at elegant solutions to problems of construction and use of space. At its best, it evokes an emotional response in the builders, owners, viewers and users of the building Architecture (in Greek αρχή = first and τέχνη = craftsmanship) is the art and science of designing buildings and structures. ...
Wiktionary has a definition of: Creation For the word creation, the act or result of bringing something into existence, see Wiktionary. ...
Construction on the North Bytown Bridge in Ottawa, Canada. ...
In psychology and common terminology, emotion is the language of a persons internal state of being, normally based in or tied to their internal (physical) and external (social) sensory feeling. ...
In philosophical terminology abstraction is the thought process wherein ideas are distanced from objects. Philosophy (from a combination of the Greek words philos meaning love and sophia meaning wisdom), as a practice, aims at some kind of understanding, knowledge or wisdom about fundamental matters such as reality, knowledge, meaning, value, being and truth. ...
Thought or thinking is a mental process which allows beings to model the world, and so to deal with it effectively according to their goals, plans, ends and desires. ...
An idea (Greek: ιδέα) is the result of thinking. ...
As used in philosophy, in general, an object is something that can have properties and relations. ...
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. A strategy is a long term plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal. ...
This article is about the construction material. ...
Intuition has many meanings across many cultures, including: quick and ready insight seemingly independent of previous experiences and empirical knowledge immediate apprehension or cognition knowledge or conviction gained by intuition the power or faculty of attaining to direct knowledge or cognition without evident rational thought and inference. ...
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. Red re-directs here; for alternate uses see Red (disambiguation) Red is a color at the lowest frequencies of light discernible by the human eye. ...
In mathematics, a relation is a generalization of arithmetic relations such as = and < which occur in statements such as 5 < 6 or 2 + 2 = 4. See relation (mathematics), binary relation and relational algebra. ...
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, of it can exist in many different places and/or times (we say that what is abstract can be multiply instantiated). An object is fundamental concept in object-oriented programming. ...
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. This article is about the construction material. ...
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? Reality in everyday usage means everything that exists. ...
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. Philosophy (from a combination of the Greek words philos meaning love and sophia meaning wisdom), as a practice, aims at some kind of understanding, knowledge or wisdom about fundamental matters such as reality, knowledge, meaning, value, being and truth. ...
In metaphysics and statistics, the word individual, while sometimes meaning a person, more typically describes any numerically singular thing. ...
Empiricism is generally regarded as being at the heart of the modern scientific method, that our theories should be based on our observations of the world rather than on intuition or faith; that is, empirical research and a posteriori inductive reasoning rather than purely deductive logic. ...
The problem of universals is a conventional term given to what is in fact a nest of intertwined problems, some within the domain of cognitive psychology, others within that of epistemology, still others within ontology. ...
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. In metaphysics (in particular, ontology), the different kinds or ways of being are called categories of being or simply According to the Aristotelian tradition, a being is anything that can be said to be in the various senses of this word. ...
On the other hand the apple and an individual human being are said to be concrete, and particulars, and individuals. This article is about the construction material. ...
In metaphysics, particulars are, one might say, identified by what they are not: they are not abstract, not multiply instantiated. ...
In metaphysics and statistics, the word individual, while sometimes meaning a person, more typically describes any numerically singular thing. ...
Confusingly, philosophers sometimes refer to tropes, or property-instances (e.g., the particular redness of this particular apple), as abstract particulars. A philosopher is a person devoted to studying and producing results in philosophy. ...
Another meaning of Trope is Jewish cantillation. ...
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. Reification, also called hypostatisation, is treating an abstract concept as if it were a real, concrete thing. ...
A logical fallacy is an error in logical argument which is independent of the truth of the premises. ...
Broadly conceived, linguistics is the study of human language, and a linguist is someone who engages in this study. ...
The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ...
As with any complex, emergent concept, language is somewhat resistant to definition. ...
A noun, or noun substantive, is a word or phrase that refers to a person, place, thing, event, substance or quality. ...
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". A constituent is someone who can or does appoint or elect (and often by implication can also remove or recall) another as her agent or representative. ...
This article is about the philosophical term . ...
In psychology and the cognitive sciences, perception is the process of acquiring, interpreting, selecting, and organizing sensory information. ...
In geometry, two sets of points are of the same shape precisely if one can be transformed to another by dilating (i. ...
In general, semantics (from the Greek semantikos, or significant meaning, derived from sema, sign) is the study of meaning, in some sense of that term. ...
This conceptual scheme entails no specific heirarchical taxonomy (such as the one mentioned involving cars and machines), only a progressive compression of detail. A hierarchy (in Greek hieros = sacred, arkho = rule) is a system of ranking and organizing things. ...
Taxonomy (from Greek ταξινομία from the words taxis = order and nomos = law) may refer to either a hierarchical classification of things, or the principles underlying the classification. ...
There are several types of compression: physical compression data compression multimedia compression image compression audio compression video compression bandwidth compression audio level compression compression (functional analysis) This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ...
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. In the anatomy of animals, the brain, or encephalon, is the supervisory center of the nervous system. ...
A concept is an abstract, universal idea, notion or entity that serves to designate a category or class of entities, events or relations. ...
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. Synonyms (in ancient Greek syn συν = plus and onoma όνομα = name) are different words with similar or identical meanings. ...
One of Kandiskys most famous paintings Yellow Red Blue (Kandinsky 1925) Abstract art is now generally understood to mean art that does not depict objects in the natural world, but instead uses shapes and colours in a non-representational or non-objective way. ...
Related articles One of Kandiskys most famous paintings Yellow Red Blue (Kandinsky 1925) Abstract art is now generally understood to mean art that does not depict objects in the natural world, but instead uses shapes and colours in a non-representational or non-objective way. ...
In computer science, abstraction refers to two related, but different concepts. ...
Abstraction in mathematics is the process of extracting the underlying essence of a mathematical concept, removing any dependence on real world objects with which it might originally have been connected, and generalising it so that it has wider applications. ...
An abstract structure is a set of rules, properties and relationships that is defined independently of any physical objects. ...
In journal articles and research papers, an abstract is a short summary placed prior to the introduction, often with different line justification (blockquote) from the rest of the article, used to help readers determine the purpose of the paper. ...
An abstract model (or conceptual model) is a theoretical construct that represents physical, biological or social processes, with a set of variables and a set of logical and quantitative relationships between them. ...
Abstract interpretation is a theory of sound approximation of the semantics of computer programs, based on monotonic functions over ordered sets, especially execution of a computer program which gains information about its semantics (e. ...
Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege (November 8, 1848 - July 26, 1925) was a German mathematician, logician, and philosopher who is regarded as a founder of both modern mathematical logic and analytic philosophy. ...
This article is about the philosophical meaning of ontology. ...
External links
References - Eugene Raskin, Architecturally Speaking, 2nd edition, a Delta book, Dell (1966), trade paperback, 129 pages
- The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 3rd edition, Houghton Mifflin (1992), hardcover, 2140 pages, ISBN 0395448956
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