Abstraction

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(iloveronjasomuch)

Abstraction is a conceptual process by which higher, more abstract concepts are derived from the usage and classification of literal, "real," or "concrete" concepts.

An "abstraction" (noun) is a concept that acts as super-categorical noun for all subordinate concepts, and connects any related concepts as a group, field, or category.

Abstractions may be formed by reducing the information content of a concept or an observable phenomenon, typically to retain only information which is relevant for a particular purpose. For example, abstracting a leather soccer ball to the more general idea of a ball retains only the information on general ball attributes and behavior, eliminating the characteristics of that particular ball.

The first symbols of abstract thinking in humans can be traced to fossils dating between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago in Africa.^[1][2]

In philosophical terminology, abstraction is the thought process wherein ideas^[3] 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. This is true for all verbal/abstract communication.

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.