When someone explains an idea or a concept to me and I don’t understand, I like to ask, can you give me an example? This often leads to a different, more concrete explanation that is easier to grasp.
It’s natural for scientists to aim for the highest possible level of abstraction. Here’s Albert Einstein:
The grand aim of all of science is to cover the greatest number of empirical facts by logical deduction from the smallest number of hypotheses or axioms .
In other words, the more abstract, the better. But how do we get to those abstractions? Paradoxically, it’s often by starting to move away from generalizations and into the specifics. Here’s molecular biologist François Jacob:
While asking general questions led to very limited answers, asking limited questions turned out to provide more and more general answers.
There is prestige associated with abstract thinking, both in science and outside. I believe that while in science, and according with Einstein’s quote above, such prestige has merit, it often doesn’t for other human endeavors. For example, some of the racist views I’ve heard people express are based entirely on abstraction rather than on real-world experience. Race itself is of course an abstraction. I’ve also touched on the problems with abstraction in some of my previous posts:
- If we orient homes and lives solely around conveniences, we risk living more and more abstractly (Simon Sarris)
- Most of us can’t relate, at an emotional level, to abstract sculpture
- It’s not just sculpture: The world we have built for ourselves – buildings, cars, consumer goods – lacks texture. Being away from it by going outside makes us see this more clearly
- As Barry Lopez observes in Arctic Dreams, the sparse conditions North of the Polar Circle discourage abstraction: [Eskimos], when they speak, make so few generalized or abstract statements, who focus instead on the practical, the specific, the concrete
- Managers should avoid feedback that’s abstract or a generalization. Instead, they should provide advice on how to do things better or provide facts that help reports to do their work
- Abstract wisdom is as evanescent as one of those five-second rainbows. Read a half hour’s worth of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, then segue to a chapter of Apollinaire’s pornographic novel, The Debauched Hospodar, and see which you remember better. We are earthlings indeed, as our vestigial tailbones indicate (A Really Big Lunch by Jim Harrison, master of the visceral)
Nehaveigur 