home / Business/ Characteristic for describing abstraction. What is abstraction and how to learn to abstract? Abstraction in everyday life

It is typical to describe abstraction. What is abstraction and how to learn to abstract? Abstraction in everyday life

Hello, dear readers of the blog site. Remember boring classes at school or university in which you wanted to sleep. What did they have in common? An abundance of scientific concepts and vague formulations.

The introductory theoretical lesson involves working with abstractions. Because of them, it is so generalized, as if divorced from the subject.

What is abstraction? Why is it needed? And how is it related to other complex concepts: abstraction, abstract thinking? In this article we will analyze all the questions in detail. Go!

Abstraction and abstraction are a simplification of reality

Abstraction is a thought that was born in the process of abstraction (the process of excluding and separating the inessential in this moment to see the main thing). The disappointed reader probably thought: “Well, again there is no clear definition, but only a vague phrase.” Be patient, there's only a little time left.

The word “abstractio” has three translation options from Latin:

abstraction;
exception;
department.

These are mental operations that the brain performs on objects in the real world in the process of abstraction. And abstractions appear.

Here are a few examples for understanding.

You went outside and looked up. What were you thinking? “A gas envelope of five layers of water vapor, containing 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, and so on.” Yes, you can go crazy!
To prevent this from happening, you are distracted from unimportant aspects, properties and connections of the object. Throw out the layers of atmosphere from your head, chemical composition and form a general thought - “sky”.
So, “sky” - this is an abstraction. You can go further and highlight other significant features of the object: color, weather, time of day. Then the following abstract concepts will arise: “blue sky”, “cloudy sky”, “night sky”.
At the end of the month, you withdrew your salary from your bank card. Now your general thought is “money”. This is also an abstraction. In the process of abstraction, you mentally excluded (separated) the unimportant connections of the object.
For example, connections with a banking institution and employer. Do you wonder how long the title units have traveled before ending up in your wallet? Hardly. The important thing is that it's money.

So you constantly abstracting and generate abstractions. Without this process, my head would simply burst with thoughts.

Then why is it so difficult to sit through boring lectures?

Abstract concepts are the highest form of abstraction

It is possible to generalize not only objects of the real world, but also the abstractions themselves. This is how they are formed high order abstractions– abstract concepts. They are used by fundamental and exact sciences to describe complex patterns.

Let's look at a simplified example of how abstract concept.

Precipitation of ice crystals fell to the ground. This is snow. The sky is completely covered with clouds. The sky and snow are white. It's white outside.

“Whiteness” is an abstract concept. Try to generalize it. Will not work. Other examples of abstract concepts: truth, justice, time, matter, information.

From simple abstraction to its highest form, sometimes there are so many mental stages that the abstract concept turns out to be very divorced from reality and difficult to perceive.

This is why it is so difficult to listen to the teacher’s theoretical lectures.

Types of abstractions

Abstraction is a mental process that pursues a specific goal. Isolate some essential feature, get a general picture of a phenomenon, or develop an ideal scheme.

Depending on the purpose of abstraction, three types of abstractions are distinguished.

Insulating.
The goal is to highlight an essential feature of an object and focus attention on it. There is an orange on the table. You notice that the fruit is orange or sweet and sour.
Generalizing.
The goal is to get a general picture of the phenomenon. To do this, you are distracted from private signs. An example of a generalizing abstraction is mathematical equations. They are decided according to certain rules. There is no point in mentally “splitting” mathematical equations into numbers, plus, minus, equal sign, variable.
You've probably noticed that success in solving any mathematical problem depends on the ability to look at the problem as if from above, to see the big picture.
Idealization.
The goal is to develop an idealized schema of the object, discarding unimportant real attributes. Idealization is a method of cognition, without which accurate and natural Sciences. Remember the notorious “spherical horse in a vacuum”.
In reality there are no isolated points, straight lines, or time. Separated from a specific object, they cannot be touched or measured. These are abstractions that are used in mathematics and physics to describe the patterns of real phenomena.

If abstraction is the process of developing abstractions, then abstract thinking is the operation of them.

A strict examiner criticizes a young man who answers too extensively: “Let’s get closer to the subject of the ticket.”

Why does a student throw out clever phrases like that? To hide gaps in knowledge, or even their complete absence. And this is the essence of abstract thinking.

A person's knowledge of the real world is not complete, exhaustive, or specific. But he needs to somehow navigate among unknown phenomena and things, so he thinks abstractly.

If there was no concept of time, how would people arrange meetings? How would scientists describe new galaxies without any idea of shape, distance, speed, or substances? How would science interact without common concepts?

Abstract thinking is a form of cognition that allows you to get out of an intellectual dead end, at least at a general level to describe unknown phenomena. With its help, they make guesses and see the problem from different angles.

You have witnessed a family quarrel. Your friend’s wife calls him on the phone, crying, screaming, swearing. What conclusions does the brain make?

Concrete thinking: a friend’s wife is hysterical;
Abstract thinking: perhaps a friend offended his wife, she endured it for a long time, but now she cannot restrain her emotions.

Brief summary

So, to put it bluntly in simple language, then the term in the title of this article represents a general thought that brings us closer to the essence of the object (phenomenon).

Abstraction is an intermediary between man and complex world with its secrets and laws.

It is stupid to contrast concrete concepts with abstract ones, because without the latter concepts are impossible.

Good luck to you! See you soon on the pages of the blog site

How does abstraction manifest itself in human life?

The term "abstraction" has Latin roots. Formed using the prefix ab - “from” and the word traho - translated as “pull”, “attract”. So it turns out that the conversation is about distraction. In encyclopedias and dictionaries one can find an explanation of a word as a method of research, scientific knowledge, a process of abstracting an object from its non-essential features. To clarify the situation, it is enough to turn to the origins.

With the birth of a person, the process of personality formation begins. One of the main factors in a child’s development is the gradual (from simple to complex forms) formation of mental operations (thinking). Thinking is the process of cognition of the surrounding world, presented in three main forms: concept, judgment and inference. There is a direct relationship between the development of thinking and language acquisition.

Thus, in infancy, a child is just mastering human speech, therefore, when perceiving and exploring the world around him, he relies on the most primitive type of thinking - concrete-effective or practical. Its essence is that a child learns about the objective world by collecting as much information as possible about it (color, shape, hardness, softness, can be broken or can be thrown on the floor without consequences, taste, edibility, etc.). This process is inherent in nature genetic level, therefore, young children often behave “risky”: they put everything in their mouth (except when teeth appear), throw, crush, shake almost everything that comes into their hands. However, cognition practical application things end around 2-3.5 years (with normal development), and the next stage of thinking development lasts until about 5-6.5 years.

By the age of three, the child’s vocabulary and intonation repertoire expand, and he diligently imitates the behavior of significant adults. This is good soil for the formation of a concrete-figurative (visually figurative) or artistic type of thinking. A sufficient amount of knowledge has been accumulated about the world around us in the form of images: the fox is red, lives in the forest, cunning; chicken is a bird that lives at home, a source of eggs, etc. The child confidently operates with images known to him, so speech becomes smoother, framed in sentences rather than in short phrases, but independent identification of the cause-and-effect relationships of the plot of a fairy tale will be available only at the next stage of development of thinking (sufficient evidence for this statement can be found in Korney Chukovsky’s book “From Three to Five”).

A five-year-old preschooler, relying on concrete-figurative thinking, successfully masters verbal-logical or abstract form. The child can independently identify and distinguish between types, genera, and categories. His speech is improving, including various kinds of explanations (“because”...), logical conclusions and conclusions. The structure of sentences used in speech becomes significantly more complicated, “distractions” and fantasies appear.

We can conclude that a person comes to abstraction before he learns the meaning of this term.

Does abstract thinking exist?

Many Internet resources describe abstract thinking as some kind of super-valuable education (while replacing concepts and misleading the reader). In fact, this is sometimes called, for shorthand, verbal-logical thinking, the features of which were described above. It is worth noting that the absence of verbal and logical operations in children of six years of age is interpreted during a diagnostic examination as developmental delay, and in some circumstances - intellectual disability. A complete absence of this type of thinking or its impaired formation is observed in all people with mental retardation.

Abstraction as a method and artistic technique

What is abstraction in history? In historical retrospect, it reveals itself for the first time among the Ancient Greeks. Naturally, this is manifested in the use of abstract categories when describing objects, for example: solid - in the subject-specific dictionary “like a stone”, round - “like the moon”. The art of oratory (revered in Greek policies) also contributed to the formation and development of the method of abstraction - the ability to formulate logical conclusions and convince listeners of their correctness.

What is abstraction in scientific knowledge? This is a distraction from the properties and connections of an object that are unimportant for the problems being solved at the moment. The result of the study is an abstraction or an abstract object.

What is abstraction among sculptors? IN fine arts abstraction resulted in abstractionism, which became a kind of continuation of impressionism. If the impressionists (from the French “impression”) conveyed their emotions and experiences, mainly preserving the recognizable form of objects, then the abstractionists sought to develop a universal visual language of shapes and colors that went beyond the physical and cultural boundaries of the viewer. Paintings by artists are a unique transmission of ideas and emotions through the interconnected rhythm of color, form, and texture. The origins of this art were Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian.

Classification of types of abstraction

What is abstraction in terms of scientific knowledge? Gradually abstracting from a number of properties of the object, you can get an abstract chain: honey badger - animal - Living being- material object - matter in which the highest form of abstraction is the categories of philosophy. According to the tasks being solved, the abstraction process can be divided into the following types:

idealizing abstraction - involves the isolation of an “ideal model of an object”, in everyday life it manifests itself in such concepts as “ideal teacher”, “ideal student, worker”. Often sought after as a role model;
abstraction generalization - there is a distraction from the individual characteristics of an object based on belonging to certain classes, for example: a saucepan, frying pan, ladle, stewpan become “kitchen utensils”;
isolating abstraction is the selection of one of the characteristics of an object and giving it independence in the form of a certain category, for example: “stability”, “solubility”, “magnetism”, “beauty”, etc.

In the above examples of abstraction, one can notice the basic principle - the exclusion of individual characteristics of objects and objects in order to derive any patterns, therefore this method is called eliminative (literal translation from Latin - to expel, exclude, remove).

Theories of abstraction

There are two theories of abstraction:

eliminative;
productive.

Productive abstraction is based on the postulates:

Abstraction is a new object, and “universal abstractions” exist independently of our consciousness in the so-called “world of ideas.”

Formal logic has no power over productive abstractions, which tend more towards the “logic of the whole” (this statement is based on the concept of an idea in a productive abstraction, as a set of smaller ideas, in relation to which the main one is more of a “whole” than a “general”). Ernst Cassirer calls this idea a “function.” However, it is worth noting that the logic of productive abstractions has not been studied enough, so a comparison of eliminative and productive abstractions is temporarily not possible.

Areas of application of abstraction

It is easy to see that basically conceptual apparatus the phenomenon described is scientific language. Therefore, abstraction is leading scientific method(both in the humanities and in the natural sciences).

This happens in connection with the possibility of constructing abstract diagrams and scenarios of real processes that reveal implicit patterns.

Hello, dear readers! Have you ever wanted to be somewhere in parallel universe– away from the bustle, problems and disagreements? In the endless flow of life, the human psyche becomes so tired that it cannot cope with the processing and restoration of energy. In this case, the ability to abstraction helps. You may ask: “abstract – what does that mean?”

From the word abstraction - mental distraction, detachment. Simply put, this is the ability to separate from something (situation, emotions, feelings, etc.) in order to look at it from the outside or temporarily interrupt direct contact.

This is done in order to put thoughts in order and make an informed decision. The ability to abstract is of great importance in a person’s life, as it helps to cope with life’s difficulties, stress and objectively assess any problem. To find out in what situations you can use abstraction techniques and how to learn it, read on.

When should you abstract yourself? Abstraction Methods

For ease of mastering the method, consider individual examples suspension. You will have the opportunity to start training these techniques today.

Abstraction from the situation and problems

If the situation has reached a dead end, or you are experiencing too much negative emotions, the easiest way is to abstract yourself and look at it from the outside. Then you will be able to see other possible solutions. How to do it?

Methodology: close your eyes and imagine that you are a completely different person, he does not experience what you feel, he does not know what you know. Ask this person what he thinks about this situation, how he sees you and other participants in it, how he sees and understands its cause, what prevents its resolution? You will literally hear the answer in your head. This technique also works when abstracting from problems.

Abstraction from a person

It can be physical or emotional. Temporary or complete abstraction from a person can be useful in several cases:

when you need to figure it out own feelings and emotions;
when your personal boundaries are violated;
when a person tries to cause physical or psychological harm to you (in this case, complete abstraction is recommended, i.e. forever);
when you are torn between several decisions.

Methodology: physical abstraction – moving to another place or room; you can also go outside in the midst of a quarrel, for example, this will also be a physical abstraction.

If you strive for emotional abstraction, then Firstly, it is necessary to stop direct contact with the person (stop arguing, proving your point of view and listening to him).

Secondly, calm down, because while you are emotional, no sensible thoughts can come to your mind.

Third, try to take the place of this person (ask yourself why he behaves this way, why he did this, what he wanted, etc.).

Fourth, imagine what other developments of events/relationships there might be, analyze every possibility. And only after these stages, make a final decision.

Abstraction from work

When can this be used? During a period of emotional burnout, when you feel disgusted with work. Also when you are very tired and overworked. Abstraction in such situations helps you avoid exhausting yourself and completely losing interest. In addition, when you are very tired, you can harm other people and yourself.

Methodology: do something distracting. For example, if you work on the computer a lot, sign up for fitness or capoeira. If your main activity is physical, on the contrary, spend time on spiritual development and art. When there is a lot of work, take a few minutes to listen to beautiful music (preferably with headphones) and contemplate the beauty. You just haven’t yet asked yourself to study the question and what medicinal properties it has on health, development and life in general. I advise you to study it.

Abstraction from bustle and noise

Music and meditation also help in this situation. The solitude technique works well. To do this, just choose a deserted or sparsely populated place where you need to come at least for 30 minutes every evening.

It is desirable that it satisfies your aesthetic needs (nature, beautiful view). It was not for nothing that our ancestors turned to the forces of nature to restore vitality and harmony.

Abstraction from the world and society

This implies abstraction from some social norms, foundations, rules, which in modern society an unimaginable number, and it often happens that these rules severely restrict individual freedom. Boundaries are necessary to prevent lawlessness and anarchy, but when there are too many or they are excessive, the individual cannot realize his full potential, which is why he suffers.

It happens that a person himself binds himself to certain canons that are formed in the process of his upbringing and formation in society. And so it turns out that he wants one thing, but the attitudes say something else. To understand your true values and needs, it is important to learn to take yourself beyond the boundaries of a social unit, imagine yourself not only as part of the system, but also as a unique being, which has no analogues.

Methodology: associate yourself with an element or phenomenon. For example, imagine that you are the wind ( It’s better to do this outdoors, feeling at least a light breeze), you soar above the ground and there are no barriers for you. You penetrate through the cracks of houses, touch leaves, stir the sea. You can see any corner of the planet, any person. What do you see? How do you feel? Looking at what moments do you feel happy?

Abstraction from negativity, negative emotions

To do this, you can start developing positive thinking. Most often, getting stuck in negative experiences is associated with the inability to see the other side of the coin and endure useful information from negative experience, as well as the inability to rest.

Methodology: if it is not possible to abstract yourself from the source of stress, then you need to allow yourself emotional abstraction for certain periods of time. At the end of each hour, give yourself 10 minutes of relaxation. Completely immerse yourself in activities that bring you pleasure - drawing, singing, doing a crossword puzzle, reading, socializing.

Abstraction from time

Time flies, and people are trying to keep up with it, to do everything. As a result, they miss out on their lives. Sometimes it’s useful to turn off all the equipment, put the clock away and spend the whole weekend with loved ones, doing what you love.

For most people, not thinking about time is a problem. Therefore, you need to give yourself such breaks at least once a week. Let life simply flow, without frames or restrictions.

In custody

Learn to abstract yourself from various situations and problems, and you will be able to see yourself and your life from a completely different angle. This will help you not to panic again, not to worry about trifles, to improve the quality of life and work, to establish communication with other people, to understand yourself and your true desires. To quickly learn abstraction methods, read the article on abstract thinking; searching the site will help you.

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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 should look at things around you a little differently. How exactly - “otherwise”? What is meant by this and what abstraction is, let’s try to figure it out further.

General overview

This concept has its roots in Latin and is literally translated as “distraction.” More often what is meant is not a change or activity, but a change of thinking, the opportunity to look at things from a different perspective, from a different angle, including when the object being analyzed seems unusual. In this way, our mind combines all existing ideas about this object and considers it as if it did not possess individual properties, connections, and phenomena. Ultimately, there is a selection of natural, understandable and essential features of abstraction? This is the distancing or separation of one from the other. Subsequent recognition is optional. Abstraction can be used temporarily, at a certain moment, returning ideas about an object to the original level or, conversely, discovering its new properties. In a narrower sense, the result of abstraction, that is, any distraction, is a generalization of the obtained (studied) theoretical features.

A different look at one object

Every person comprehends something in his life. His consciousness analyzes many factors, looking for individual elements that can have an impact, for example, in making a decision or developing an opinion about a particular object. In such comprehension, the method of abstraction plays an important role. Its goal is the study of objects, as a rule, which have 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. When comprehending an object, a person has the right to simplify it, pay attention to 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 are largely 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 the cognitive function is formed. In other words, having several parts, synthesis serves to collect them.

On the contrary, analysis seeks to disassemble the existing whole into its component parts. Together, both concepts give rise to ideas about the connections occurring between individual elements

Studying reality

Day after day, human consciousness searches for new components, objects and concepts that have not been explored before, in which abstraction indirectly helps. in this case, it is a set of methods by which new knowledge is discovered, methods of solution and research, as well as systematization and correction of data. This should include conclusions, principles of reasoning, and forecast. Thus, observing an object, a person puts forward hypotheses and theories that serve as a form of assumption. These can later be supported by scientific evidence, experiments, or by collecting additional facts.

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

The cogs 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 individual elements from the multitude. This could be a chain of events, a series of processes, a group of objects. Thus, turning 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

Abstraction is used in many areas: politics, mathematics, logic. We have already learned that under the general concept of abstraction lies a distraction from external phenomena in order to highlight unimportant details or the essence of the object itself. Thanks to such an “outside view,” scientific concepts, forming, in turn, unified properties and connections that are combined into categories.

Thus, scientific abstraction can be traced in economics. In the world there are millions of different consumption and non-food groups that people need every day. They all differ in many characteristics and properties. But, moving away from their endless comparisons, man involuntarily united them into a single category - goods as products intended for sale.

Scientific abstraction is noticeable in construction. Every construction includes a detailed calculation that takes 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 - this is either theoretically impossible or practically unacceptable due to excessive complexity. Because of this, using the method of scientific abstraction, the structure is schematized. Alleged minor factors are excluded, which, in turn, does not affect the accuracy and reliability of the calculations performed.

Thinking abstractly is the ability of every person

To summarize the topic discussed, we now definitely know what abstraction is - a mental, conscious distraction 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 big role Language skills and the development of the language itself play a role here. Thus, 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, the boundaries of understanding, looking for additional properties (not just “fruit”, but “orange” or “sweet and sour apple”).