Is abstraction necessarily purposeful behavior?
Alfred Korzybski (General Semantics) takes the view that the process by which any organism's nervous system produces a sense perception of the "outside world" is abstraction. The abstraction is a neurological consequence of the limiting physiological structure of the organism's sense receptors.
It seems to me that in this sense a radio receiver (not the receiver's designer) abstracts particular frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum, and a planet's atmosphere abstracts part of the energy that impinges on it. Does this concept of abstraction have some accepetance in science and philosophy?
jpg
Is this an attempted conflation of filtering with abstraction? Abstraction consists in the ommission of irrelevant, particular details to derive a general notion of something (this is so-called non-precisive abstraction.)
-Jon
I cannot be caged. I cannot be controlled. Understand this as you die, ever pathetic, ever fools. Irenicus' Diaries.
Jon,
It looks to me like filtering.
Your definition of abstraction implies choice and purpose. Do you take the position that abstraction is necessarily a human action (by Mises’s definition)?
I don’t see anything in the physiological process Korzybski describes that could be called abstraction, except by analogy. I don’t see any grounds to say that the details omitted are irrelevant, that they are omitted for a reason, or that the result is a “notion”.
Does an automatic, mechanistic, deterministic abstraction (whether mere filtering or something else) have currency, or is Korzybski pretty much alone in this?
Well it's really straining the definition of the term. Abstraction (to abstract from the particulars/concrete the general/essential) as made use of by humans is for the purpose of cognitive economy - it helps link together a massive number of disparate facts. It is thus a cognitive activity. In the case of the planet or the radio, what cognition is taking place?
That’s what I think, too.
Korzybski also calls the assigning of names to objects and properties abstraction, though of a higher order. I don’t see that, either. Naming is not even remotely analogous to abstraction as I understand it.
Ludwig von Mises Institute | 518 West Magnolia Avenue | Auburn, Alabama 36832-4528
Phone: 334.321.2100 · Fax: 334.321.2119
contact@Mises.org | webmaster | AOL-IM MainMises
Mises.org sitemap