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16-September-2008 16:15:13 - Abstraction This article is about the concept of abstraction in general. For other uses, see abstraction disambiguation. 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 happiness to an emotional state 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 ideas1 are distanced from objects. 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. Cat on Mat picture 1 Cat on Mat picture 1 For example, many different things can be red. 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. 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. 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. Conceptual graph for A Cat sitting on the Mat graph 1 Conceptual graph for A Cat sitting on the Mat graph 1 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. 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 ion of the Chronicle 5 my copy of the May 18 ion of the Chronicle 6 my copy of the May 18 ion 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.g. good. Questions about the properties of things are then propositions about predicates, which propositions remain to be evaluated by the investigator. 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. The notion of abstraction is important to understanding some philosophical controversies surrounding empiricism and the problem of universals. It has also recently become popular in formal logic under predicate abstraction. 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. That difference accounts for the ontological usefulness of the word abstract. 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. E.g., the particular redness of a particular apple is an abstract particular. 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 linguistics this is called metonymy, in which abstract concepts are referred to using the same sorts of nouns that signify concrete objects. 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. 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. 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. 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. The neurology of abstraction Some research into the human brain suggests that the left and right hemispheres differ in their handling of abstraction. 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. Strictly speaking, it refers to art unconcerned with the literal depiction of things from the visible world3--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. Atonal music has no key signature, and lacking an externally imposed standard, is characterized by its internal relationships.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. 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.78 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 Look up abstraction in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Abstraction Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Gottlob Frege Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Abstract Objects Discussion at The Well concerning Abstraction hierarchy Notes ^ But an idea can be symbolized. A symbol is any device whereby we are enabled to make an abstraction. -- p.xi and chapter 20 of Suzanne K. Langer 1953, Feeling and Form: a theory of art developed from Philosophy in a New Key: New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 431 pages, index. ^ James W. Lewis Cortical Networks Related to Human Use of Tools 12 3: 211-231 The Neuroscientist June 1, 2006. ^ Encyclopaedia Britannica ^ Catherine de Zegher and Hendel Teicher eds., 3 X Abstraction. NY/New Haven: The Drawing Center/Yale University Press. 2005. ISBN 0-300-10826-5 ^ National Gallery of Art: Abstraction. ^ Washington State University: Glossary of Abstraction. ^ Abstract Engravings Show Modern Behavior Emerged Earlier Than Previously Thought ^ Ancient Engravings Push Back Origin of Abstract Thought References Eugene Raskin, Architecturally Speaking, 2nd ion, a Delta book, Dell 1966, trade paperback, 129 pages The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 3rd ion, 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. Retrieved from http://en..org/wiki/Abstraction Categories: Abstraction | Philosophical terminology | Thought Views Article Discussion this page History Personal tools Log in / create account Navigation Main page Contents Featured content Current events Random article Search Go Search Interaction Community portal Recent changes Contact Donate to Help Toolbox What links here Related changes Upload file Special pages Printable version Permanent link Cite this page Languages العربية БеларуÑ?каÑ? тарашкевіца Bosanski ÄŒesky Dansk Deutsch Español Esperanto Ù?ارسی Français Galego Interlingua Italiano עברית Magyar МакедонÑ?ки Nederlands ‪Norsk bokmÃ¥l‬ ‪Norsk nynorsk‬ Polski Português Română РуÑ?Ñ?кий SlovenÄ?ina СрпÑ?ки / Srpski Svenska ไทย Türkçe УкраїнÑ?ька ä¸æ–‡ This page was last modified on 6 August 2008, at 13:25
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