Abstract/Concrete

The connotation here is that this is a physical thing. Something that is concrete is physical. Abstract, on the other hand, means to draw something away. So something that is abstract is drawn away from the real, from the concrete, from the physical.

Concrete and abstract nouns

So this is not physical. And we make this distinction in English when we're talking about nouns. Is it something that is concrete, is it something you can look at or pick up or smell or sense or something that is abstract, something that isn't physical, but can still be talked about. So for example, the word sadness Is a noun, right? This is definitely a noun. It's got this noun-making ending, this noun-forming suffix, ness.

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• Abstract and concrete.

You know, we take the adjective sad and we toss this ness part onto it, we've got a noun. But can you see sadness? Is it something you can pick up? Sure, you can tell by being, you know observant and empathetic that your friend is sad, but it's not something you can pick up.

You can't be like a measurable degree of sad. You couldn't take someone's sadness, put it under a microscope and say "Oh, Roberta, you are 32 degrees microsad. Concrete things, on the other hand, are things that we can see or count or measure. Just parts of the physical world. So anything you look at, like a dog is concrete, a ball is concrete, a cliff is concrete. The idea of freedom It is hard to say how they can affect our sensory experiences, and yet we seem to agree on a wide range of claims about them.

Abstract Nouns

Some, such as Edward Zalta and arguably, Plato in his Theory of Forms , have held that abstract objects constitute the defining subject matter of metaphysics or philosophical inquiry more broadly. To the extent that philosophy is independent of empirical research, and to the extent that empirical questions do not inform questions about abstracta, philosophy would seem especially suited to answering these latter questions. In modern philosophy, the distinction between abstract and concrete was explored by Immanuel Kant [4] and G. Gottlob Frege said that abstract objects, such as numbers, were members of a third realm , [6] [7] different from the external world or from internal consciousness.

Another popular proposal for drawing the abstract-concrete distinction contends that an object is abstract if it lacks any causal powers.

A causal power has the ability to affect something causally. Thus, the empty set is abstract because it cannot act on other objects.

Abstract, Concrete, General and Specific Terms

One problem for this view is that it is not clear exactly what it is to have a causal power. For a more detailed exploration of the abstract-concrete distinction, follow the link below to the Stanford Encyclopedia article. Jean Piaget uses the terms "concrete" and "formal" to describe the different types of learning. Concrete thinking involves facts and descriptions about everyday, tangible objects, while abstract formal operational thinking involves a mental process.

Recently, there has been some philosophical interest in the development of a third category of objects known as the quasi-abstract.

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Quasi-abstract objects have drawn particular attention in the area of social ontology and documentality. Some argue that the over-adherence to the platonist duality of the concrete and the abstract has led to a large category of social objects having been overlooked or rejected as nonexisting because they exhibit characteristics that the traditional duality between concrete and abstract regards as incompatible.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The ladder of abstraction

For the album by Kiana, see Abstract Entity. Abstraction Abstract object theory Abstract particulars Abstract structure Conceptual framework Nominalism Non-physical entity Object philosophy Object of the mind Incorporeality Philosophy of mathematics Platonic realm Platonism Universal metaphysics. A Glossary of Literary Terms.

Retrieved 18 September Sketch for a systematic metaphysics. Kemp, Fernando, Asher , Elsevier, p. Eine logische Untersuchung," in: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.