Abstraction is the process or result of generalization by reducing the information content of a concept or an observable phenomenon, typically in order to retain only information which is relevant for a particular purpose. For example, abstracting a leather soccer ball to a ball retains only the information on general ball attributes and behaviour. Similarly, abstracting an emotional state to happiness reduces the amount of information conveyed about the emotional state. Computer scientists use abstraction to understand and solve problems and communicate their solutions with the computer in some particular computer language.

Contents 1 Thought process 2 Referents 2.1 Instantiation 2.2 Physicality 3 Abstraction used in philosophy 3.1 Ontological status 3.2 In linguistics 3.3 Compression 4 The neurology of abstraction 5 Abstraction in art 6 Abstraction in psychology 7 Origins 8 See also 9 External links 10 Notes 11 References

Thought process

In philosophical terminology, abstraction is the thought process wherein ideas^[1] are distanced from objects. Philosophy is the study of general problems concerning matters such as existence knowledge truth beauty justice validity mind and language Thought and thinking are mental forms and Processes respectively ("thought" is both An idea is a form (such as a Thought) formed by Consciousness (including Mind) through the Process of ideation. For other uses of Object see Object. In Philosophy, an object is a thing an Entity, or a Being.

Abstraction uses a strategy of simplification, wherein formerly concrete details are left ambiguous, vague, or undefined; thus effective communication about things in the abstract requires an intuitive or common experience between the communicator and the communication recipient. A Strategy is a long term plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal, most often "winning Communication is the process of conveying information from a sender to a receiver with the use of a medium in which the communicated information is understood the same way

For example, many different things can be red. Red is any of a number of similar Colors evoked by light consisting predominantly of the longest wavelengths of Light discernible by the human eye in the wavelength Likewise, many things sit on surfaces (as in picture 1, to the right). The property of redness and the relation sitting-on are therefore abstractions of those objects. Red is any of a number of similar Colors evoked by light consisting predominantly of the longest wavelengths of Light discernible by the human eye in the wavelength A Relation of Ideas, in the Humean sense is the type of knowledge that can be characterized as arising out of pure conceptual thought and logical operations (in contrast to Specifically, the conceptual diagram graph 1 identifies only three boxes, two ellipses, and four arrows (and their nine labels), whereas the picture 1 shows much more pictorial detail, with the scores of implied relationships as implicit in the picture rather than with the nine explicit details in the graph.

Graph 1 details some explicit relationships between the objects of the diagram. For example the arrow between the agent and CAT:Elsie depicts an example of an is-a relationship, as does the arrow between the location and the MAT. In Knowledge representation and Object-oriented programming and design, is-a is a relationship where one class D is a Subclass The arrows between the gerund SITTING and the nouns agent and location express the diagram's basic relationship; "agent is SITTING on location"; Elsie is an instance of CAT. In Linguistics, “gerund” is a term used to refer to various non-finite verb forms in various languages As applied to English, A diagram is a 2D geometric symbolic Representation of Information according to some Visualization technique

Although the description sitting-on (graph 1) is more abstract than the graphic image of a cat sitting on a mat (picture 1), the delineation of abstract things from concrete things is somewhat ambiguous; this ambiguity or vagueness is characteristic of abstraction. A conceptual graph (CG is a notation for logic based on the Existential graphs of Charles Sanders Peirce and the Semantic networks of Artificial Thus something as simple as a newspaper might be specified to six levels, as in Douglas R. Hofstadter's illustration of that ambiguity, with a progression from abstract to concrete in Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979):

(1) a publication

(2) a newspaper

(3) The San Francisco Chronicle

(4) the May 18 edition of the Chronicle

(5) my copy of the May 18 edition of the Chronicle

(6) my copy of the May 18 edition of the Chronicle as it was when I first picked it up (as contrasted with my copy as it was a few days later: in my fireplace, burning)

An abstraction can thus encapsulate each of these levels of detail with no loss of generality. Douglas Richard Hofstadter (born February 15 1945 in New York New York) is an American academic whose research focuses on consciousness thinking and creativity Gödel Escher Bach an Eternal Golden Braid (commonly GEB) is a Pulitzer Prize -winning book by Douglas Hofstadter, described But perhaps a detective or philosopher/scientist/engineer might seek to learn about some thing, at progressively deeper levels of detail, to solve a crime or a puzzle.

Referents

Abstractions sometimes have ambiguous referents; for example, "happiness" (when used as an abstraction) can refer to as many things as there are people and events or states of being which make them happy. In general a reference is a relation between objects in which one object designates by linking to another object Happiness is an Emotion associated with feelings ranging from contentment and satisfaction to Bliss and intense Joy. Disambiguation For the Wigwam album see Being (album, for spiritual or religious beingness, see Ego (spirituality Likewise, "architecture" refers not only to the design of safe, functional buildings, but also to elements of creation and innovation which aim at elegant solutions to construction problems, to the use of space, and at its best, to the attempt to evoke an emotional response in the builders, owners, viewers and users of the building. The term architecture (from Greek αρχιτεκτονικήarchitektoniki) can be used to mean a process a profession or documentation The term innovation means a new way of doing something It may refer to incremental radical and revolutionary changes in thinking products processes or organisations In the fields of Architecture and Civil engineering, construction is a process that consists of the Building or assembling of Infrastructure An emotion is a mental and physiological state associated with a wide variety of feelings thoughts and behaviours

Instantiation

Things that do not exist at any particular place and time are often considered abstract. By contrast, instances, or members, of such an abstract thing might exist in many different places and times. Those abstract things are then said to be multiply instantiated, in the sense of picture 1, picture 2, etc. , shown above.

It is not sufficient, however, to define abstract ideas as those that can be instantiated and to define abstraction as the movement in the opposite direction to instantiation. Doing so would make the concepts 'cat' and 'telephone' abstract ideas since despite their varying appearances, a particular cat or a particular telephone is an instance of the concept "cat" or the concept "telephone". Although the concepts "cat" and "telephone" are abstractions, they are not abstract in the sense of the objects in graph 1 above.

We might look at other graphs, in a progression from cat 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. Marsupials are an Infraclass of Mammals characterized by a distinctive pouch (called the marsupium) in which females carry their young through

Physicality

A physical object (a possible referent of a concept or word) is considered concrete (not abstract) if it is a particular individual that occupies a particular place and time.

Abstract things are sometimes defined as those things that do not exist in reality or exist only as sensory experience, like the color red. Reality, in everyday usage means "the state of things as they actually exist" Red is any of a number of similar Colors evoked by light consisting predominantly of the longest wavelengths of Light discernible by the human eye in the wavelength That definition, however, suffers from the difficulty of deciding which things are real (i. e. which things exist in reality). For example, it is difficult to agree to whether concepts like God, the number three, and goodness are real, abstract, or both.

An approach to resolving such difficulty is to use predicates as a general term for whether things are variously real, abstract, concrete, or of a particular property (e. In traditional Grammar, a predicate is one of the two main parts of a sentence (the other being the subject, which the predicate modifies g. good). Questions about the properties of things are then propositions about predicates, which propositions remain to be evaluated by the investigator. In Logic and Philosophy, proposition refers to either (a the content or Meaning of a meaningful Declarative sentence In the graph 1 above, the graphical relationships like the arrows joining boxes and ellipses might denote predicates. Different levels of abstraction might be denoted by a progression of arrows joining boxes or ellipses in multiple rows, where the arrows point from one row to another, in a series of other graphs, say graph 2, etc.

Abstraction used in philosophy

Abstraction in philosophy is the process (or, to some, the alleged process) in concept-formation of recognizing some set of common features in individuals, and on that basis forming a concept of that feature. Philosophy is the study of general problems concerning matters such as existence knowledge truth beauty justice validity mind and language As commonly used, individual refers to a Person or to any specific object in a collection The notion of abstraction is important to understanding some philosophical controversies surrounding empiricism and the problem of universals. In Philosophy, empiricism is a theory of Knowledge which asserts that knowledge arises from Experience. The problem of universals is an ancient problem in Metaphysics about whether universals exist It has also recently become popular in formal logic under predicate abstraction. In Logic, predicate abstraction is the result of creating a predicate from an Open sentence. Another philosophical tool for discussion of abstraction is Thought space.

Ontological status

The way that physical objects, like rocks and trees, have being differs from the way that properties of abstract concepts or relations have being, for example the way the concrete, particular, individuals pictured in picture 1 exist differs from the way the concepts illustrated in graph 1 exist. In Metaphysics (in particular Ontology) the different kinds or ways of Being are called categories of being or simply categories For other uses see Abstract In Philosophy it is commonly considered that every object is either abstract or concrete In Metaphysics, particulars are one might say identified by what they are not they are not Abstractions not multiply-instantiated --i As commonly used, individual refers to a Person or to any specific object in a collection That difference accounts for the ontological usefulness of the word "abstract". In Philosophy, ontology (from the Greek, genitive: of being (part The word applies 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, potentially in many different places and times.

Perhaps confusingly, some philosophies refer to tropes (instances of properties) as abstract particulars. Philosophy is the study of general problems concerning matters such as existence knowledge truth beauty justice validity mind and language The term " Trope " is both a term which denotes figurative and metaphorical language and one which has been used in various technical senses Abstract particulars are metaphysical entities which are both Abstract objects and Particulars Individual Numbers are often classified as abstract E. g. , the particular redness of a particular apple is an abstract particular. Red is any of a number of similar Colors evoked by light consisting predominantly of the longest wavelengths of Light discernible by the human eye in the wavelength The apple is the pomaceous Fruit of the apple tree Species Malus domestica in the Rose family Rosaceae.

In linguistics

Reification, also called hypostatization, might be considered a formal fallacy whenever an abstract concept, such as "society" or "technology" is treated as if it were a concrete object. In philosophy, a formal fallacy or a logical fallacy is a pattern of reasoning which is always wrong In linguistics this is called metonymy, in which abstract concepts are referred to using the same sorts of nouns that signify concrete objects. Linguistics is the scientific study of Language, encompassing a number of sub-fields In Rhetoric, metonymy (mɨˈtɒnɨmi is the use of a word for a concept or object associated with the concept/object originally denoted by the word Metonymy is an aspect of the English language and of other languages. It can blur the distinction between abstract and concrete things:

1805: Horatio Nelson (Battle of Trafalgar) - "England expects that every man will do his duty"

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 constituent data, for example many different physical cats map to the abstraction "CAT". Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson 1st Viscount Nelson 1st Duke of Bronté, KB (29 September 1758– 21 October 1805 was a British The Battle of Trafalgar ( 21 October 1805) was a historic sea battle fought between the British Royal Navy and the combined fleets of the "England expects that every man will do his duty" was a signal sent by Admiral Horatio Nelson 1st Viscount Nelson from his Flagship This conceptual scheme emphasizes the inherent equality of both constituent and abstract data, thus avoiding problems arising from the distinction between "abstract" and "concrete". For other uses see Abstract In Philosophy it is commonly considered that every object is either abstract or 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).

For example, picture 1 above illustrates the concrete relationship "Cat sits on Mat".

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 cat to semantic abstractions such as the "idea" of a CAT to classes of objects such as "mammals" and even categories such as "object" as opposed to "action". In Psychology and the Cognitive sciences perception is the process of attaining awareness or understanding of sensory Information. The shape ( OE sceap Eng created thing) of an object located in some space refers to the part of space occupied by the object as determined Semantics is the study of meaning in communication The word derives from Greek σημαντικός ( semantikos) "significant" from

For example, graph 1 above expresses the abstraction "agent sits on location".

This conceptual scheme entails no specific hierarchical taxonomy (such as the one mentioned involving cats and mammals), only a progressive compression of detail. @@@ main@@@ - title Hierarchy@@@ keywords structure; sociology; information@@@ review@@@ - Taxonomy is the practice and science of classification The word comes from the Greek, taxis (meaning 'order' 'arrangement' and, nomos

The neurology of abstraction

Some research into the human brain suggests that the left and right hemispheres differ in their handling of abstraction. The brain is the center of the Nervous system in animals All Vertebrates and the majority of Invertebrates have a brain For example, one meta-analysis reviewing human brain lesions has shown a left hemisphere bias during tool usage ^[2].

Abstraction in art

Most typically abstraction is used in the arts as a synonym for abstract art in general. This article deals with the general meaning of the term "synonym" Abstract art uses a Visual language of form color and line to create a composition which exists independently of visual references to the world Strictly speaking, it refers to art unconcerned with the literal depiction of things from the visible world^[3]--it can, however, refer to an object or image which has been distilled from the real world, or indeed, another work of art. Artwork that reshapes the natural world for expressive purposes is called abstract; that which derives from, but does not imitate a recognizable subject is called nonobjective abstraction. In the 20th century the trend toward abstraction coincided with advances in science, technology, and changes in urban life, eventually reflecting an interest in psychoanalytic theory. ^[4] Later still, abstraction was manifest in more purely formal terms, such as color, freed from objective context, and a reduction of form to basic geometric designs. ^[5]

In music, abstraction refers to the abandonment of tonality. In Music, the term note has two primary meanings 1 a sign used in Musical notation to represent the relative duration and pitch of a Sound; Atonal music has no key signature, and lacking an externally imposed standard, is characterized by its internal relationships. Atonality in its broadest sense describes Music that lacks a tonal center, or key. ^[6]

Abstraction in psychology

Jung's definition of abstraction broadened its scope beyond the thinking process to include exactly four mutually exclusive, opposing complementary psychological functions: sensation, intuition, feeling, and thinking. Together they form a structural totality of the differentiating abstraction process. Abstraction operates in one of these opposing functions when it excludes the simultaneous influence of the other functions and other irrelevancies such as emotion. Abstraction requires selective use of this structural split of abilities in the psyche. The opposite of abstraction is concretism. Abstraction is one of Jung's 57 definitions in Chapter XI of Psychological Types. Psychological Types is the title of the sixth volume in the Princeton / Bollingen edition of the Collected Works of Carl Jung.

There is an abstract thinking, just as there is abstract feeling, sensation and intuition. Abstract thinking singles out the rational, logical qualities . . . Abstract feeling does the same with . . . its feeling-values. . . . I put abstract feelings on the same level as abstract thoughts. . . . Abstract sensation would be aesthetic as opposed to sensuous sensation and abstract intuition would be symbolic as opposed to fantastic intuition. (Jung, [1921] (1971):par. 678).

Origins

See also: Modern human behaviour

The first symbols of abstract thinking in humans can be traced to fossils dating between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago in Africa. Behavioral modernity is a term used in Anthropology, Archeology and Sociology to refer to a list of traits that distinguish present day humans and their ^[7][8]

See also

Abstract art Abstraction (computer science) Abstraction (mathematics) Abstract structure Abstract (summary) Abstract interpretation Abstract object Gottlob Frege Hypostatic abstraction Leaky abstraction

List of thinking-related topics Model (abstract) Object of the mind Ontology Charles Peirce Prescisive abstraction Portal: thinking

External links

• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Gottlob Frege
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Abstract Objects
• Discussion at The Well concerning Abstraction hierarchy

Notes

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 0-395-44895-6
• Jung, C. G. [1921] (1971). Psychological Types, Collected Works, Volume 6, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-01813-8.

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