What is abstraction? Abstraction method and its goals

2024 Author: Miguel Ramacey | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 06:11

Surely each of us at least once in our lives has come across such a concept as abstraction. It is often applicable in everyday life, when you need to look at things around you a little differently. How exactly - "otherwise"? What is meant by this and what is abstraction, let's try to figure it out further.

General view

This concept is rooted in Latin and literally translates as “distraction”. More often, this does not mean a change in the type of occupation or activity, but a change in thinking, the ability to look at things from a different angle, from a different angle, including when the analyzed object seems unusual. In this way, our mind combines all the existing ideas about this object and considers it as if it did not have separate properties, connections, phenomena. Ultimately, there is a selection of natural, understandable and essential features of the object. What is abstraction? It is the separation or separation of one from the other. Subsequent recognition is optional. Abstraction can be used temporarily, at a certain moment, returning ideas about the subject tothe initial level or, conversely, opening its new properties. In a narrower sense, the result of abstraction, that is, any abstraction, is a generalization of the obtained (investigated) theoretical features.

Another look at one object

Every person comprehends something in his life. His mind analyzes many factors, looking for individual elements that may have an influencing value, for example, for making a decision or developing an opinion about a particular object. In such a comprehension, the method of abstraction plays an important role. Its goal is the study of objects, as a rule, having much greater properties, relationships, connections, which, due to perception and thinking, a person cannot fully comprehend. As a general method of cognition, abstraction helps to highlight features. Comprehending an object, a person has the right to simplify it, pay attention to the obvious aspects, while forgetting, that is, ignoring the rest.

Are you familiar with such concepts as analysis, synthesis, abstraction? They are widely used in areas such as logic and philosophy, they can exist separately from each other, but to a greater extent they are interconnected. Synthesis is understood as the process of combining isolated, disparate concepts; its purpose is to bring them together into a single whole or group. Synthesis is an important stage in the activity of human consciousness, in which a cognitive function is formed. In other words, having several parts, synthesis serves to collect them.

On the contrary, analysis tends to disassembleexisting whole into its component parts. Together, both concepts give rise to ideas about the connections that occur between the individual elements of the object of study.

Studying reality

From day to day human consciousness is searching for new components, objects and concepts that have not been explored before, in which abstraction indirectly helps. The method of cognition in this case is a set of ways in which new knowledge is discovered, methods for solving and researching, as well as systematization and correction of data. This should include conclusions, principles of reasoning, forecast. So, observing an object, a person puts forward hypotheses and theories that serve as a form of assumption. Later, they can be supported by scientific evidence, experiments, or by collecting additional facts.

Knowledge, as a method of abstraction, has distinctive features from the method of comparison. It is expressed in qualitative, quantitative forms of abstraction, when essential (indisputable) features are highlighted. To make a decision, a person often relies on a comparison method that allows one to evaluate possible (desired) indicators with real ones. All the pros and cons are put on the scales, which subsequently affect the final choice.

The screws of our internal mechanism

So what is abstraction? Undoubtedly, this is a complex mechanism that we resort to, sometimes without even realizing it. Mentally, a person separates the existing from the non-existent, isolating individualelements from the set. It can be a chain of events, a series of processes, a group of objects. So, referring to the individual characteristics of a person, psychology is able to abstract general properties from specific ones applicable to a given individual. This once again proves the indisputable argument that each person, like his mind and consciousness, is unique.

Application - in everything

The method of scientific abstraction is used in many areas: politics, mathematics, logic. We have already learned that under the general concept of abstraction there is a distraction from external phenomena in order to highlight the insignificant details or essence of the object itself. Thanks to such a “view from the outside”, scientific concepts are born, which, in turn, form common properties and relationships that are combined into categories.

So, scientific abstraction can be traced back to economics. In the world there are millions of various food consumption and non-food groups that people need every day. All of them differ in many features and properties. But, moving away from their endless comparisons, a person involuntarily combined them into a single category - a product as a product intended for sale.

Scientific abstraction is noticeable in construction. Any construction includes a detailed calculation, taking into account the features of the future building. But exact geometric correspondences, as well as the strict interaction of all its individual components, are not always 100% feasible - it is either impossibletheoretically, or unacceptable in practice due to excessive complexity. Because of this, with the help of the method of scientific abstraction, the structure is schematized. Supposed secondary factors are excluded, which, in turn, does not affect the accuracy and reliability of the calculations.

Thinking abstractly is the ability of every person

Summing up the topic, now we definitely know what abstraction is - a mental, conscious abstraction from the properties of an object, due to which a new idea about it appears or a logical concept is formed.

The ability to apply abstraction in everyday life is inherent in a person from birth. In many ways, language skills and the development of the language itself play a big role here. So, when thoughts “flow” in an abstract order, consciousness does not focus on individual features of the object, characterizing it according to general indicators (for example, “fruit”). In contrast to the abstract, science argues for the concrete - in this case, consciousness expands the boundaries of understanding, looking for additional properties (not just “fruit”, but “orange” or “sweet-sour apple”).