>Both deliberate abstraction and expanding the range of concreteness
>are skills worth developing, I'd say.
Very true, I'd say as well. Not just worthwhile, but necessary.
>
>Here's another way to think about it: "abstract" and "familiar"
>aren't opposites at all. For instance I'm always telling my
>students about the computer science abstraction levels:
>
>application program
>high level programming language
>low level programming language
>machine language
>architecture
>circuitry
>transistors
>quantum physics
>
>The top of the chart is the most abstract, but it's also the
>area I know best; the bottom half is all a mystery to me even
>though it's more concrete.
>
>
I see the hierarchy and I'm comfortable with the abstraction, until I get to
quantum physics because the rules seem to change. It's not the mystery of
quarks, spins, flavors, and subatomic particles that bothers me, but the
idea that they are mental constructions to help make a theory fit with what
we observe. This seems pretty abstract to me. Maybe it is a mistake to
assume we can order things into levels of abstraction because we sometimes
say that one thing is "more abstract" than another. We may not even be able
to say THAT.
I don't mean to suggest that you can order things, only that ordering them
by levels of abstraction is risky. It only takes you so far before you run
into trouble when things seem to come full circle.
My dictionary hints that abstraction has something to do with specificity
and generality. Perhaps it would be possible to think of each item in your
list and consider the concrete and abstract aspects without attempting to
rank them by level of abstraction. For example:
ITEM CONCRETE QUALITIES ABSTRACT QUALITIES
Application Program word processor versatility
High Level Language FD 50 motion
Transistors logic gate address decoding
quantum physics photon diffraction
Tom
---------------------------------------------------------------
Please post messages to the Logo forum to logo-l@gsn.org. Mail
questions about the list administration to logofdn@gsn.org. To
unsubscribe send unsubscribe logo-l to majordomo@gsn.org.