fadedbison17 said:Let me break down how abstractions actually work, then you can draw your own conclusions about what they are.
If humans (like me) didn't have minds, nothing would matter—the word everything and something would mean the exact same thing. There wouldn't be any distinction between, say, a wall, a cabinet, or the sky. You couldn't tell anything apart.
Luckily, my brain "slices" reality into objects. When I look at a cabinet, I see the edge separating it from the wall and the floor—my mind creates that distinction, allowing me to view that object (the cabinet) as something separate from everything else.
Once I mastered those boundaries (the edges), all I have left are objects. A cabinet is an object, a wall is an object, the sky is an object, a table is an object, a chair is an object... but that doesn't tell me much, so I give each one a different label. That’s where abstraction kicks in.
To exaggerate: when I was a kid, I saw something that had a flat surface where people sit. I asked my mom, "What's that?" and she gave me a name for it—a chair. Way to go, me—I made an abstraction! 🙂
What really happened was that I spotted a new object that looked different from anything I'd seen before.
But abstraction isn't just a name. When I saw the chair and Mom told me what it was, I had to link that info together. Basically, I took the most similar trait shared by other objects (a flat surface) and found the biggest difference compared to other flat things (people sit on this). So, I tied the name (the abstraction) to the physical object (the chair).
Hopefully, that clears up what an abstraction is and how it functions.
If that makes sense—which I hope it does—then it's also clear that "chair" is just a word describing the basic traits of an object. The word itself doesn't exist in the wild; it's just an explanation or a label for what I'm seeing.
I suspect there is a fundamental error in that reasoning. You suggest that the mind "dissects" reality itself, but it strikes me that you might be conflating our subjective experience with objective reality (please, do correct me if my logic falters here). A human being dissects their *experience*. To conclude that by doing so, we are somehow penetrating the core of reality without any pre-existing conceptual framework seems, to my mind, an entirely unjustified leap.
No, abstraction isn't merely a label. When I see a chair and my mother tells me, "That is a chair," I am forced to synthesize those data points in some way. What actually occurs is that I identify the most salient characteristic shared with other objects—in this case, a flat surface—and then isolate the primary difference between it and other flat surfaces (namely, that people sit on it). In this manner, I bridge the gap between the abstraction (the name) and the concrete object (the chair).
That’s fine, but does it not follow that when you employ such an abstraction in speech, you are attempting to refer to something else? If that is the case, are you referring to the abstraction itself when you speak, or are you referring to the actual chair? If it’s the latter, where do these abstractions reside, and what exactly are they? You’ve provided a relatively straightforward example to illustrate abstraction, but I suspect that once we peel back the layers, your position becomes rather precarious. Consider, for instance, a scenario where someone commits a murder—an anonymous perpetrator—and you declare that the individual was "insane." You have provided a description of the person, but what precisely are you referring to? Is that judgment itself inherently untrue?
If this makes sense (which I hope it does), then it should also be clear that "chair" is simply a word used to describe the fundamental characteristics of a particular object. The word itself doesn't exist in a vacuum; it functions merely as a descriptor or a tag for what I am observing.
Perhaps, though it remains somewhat unclear how you actually manage to refer to things; you've largely just explained the mechanism by which we might grasp the meaning of a word.