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Often it is used to represent the whole of an abstract idea. Example: The phrase "The king's guns were aimed at the enemy," using 'guns' to represent infantry. Example: The word 'crown' may be used metonymically to refer to the king or queen, and at times to the law of the land.
A representation of the concept of a tree. The four upper images of trees can be roughly quantified into an overall generalization of the idea of a tree, pictured in the lower image. A concept is an abstract idea that serves as a foundation for more concrete principles, thoughts, and beliefs. [1]
Those abstract things are then said to be multiply instantiated, in the sense of picture 1, picture 2, etc., shown below. It is not sufficient, however, to define abstract ideas as those that can be instantiated and to define abstraction as the movement in the opposite direction to instantiation. Doing so would make the concepts "cat" and ...
Abstraction is the thought process in which ideas are distanced from objects. Abstraction uses a strategy of simplification of detail, wherein formerly concrete details are left ambiguous, vague, or undefined; thus speaking of things in the abstract demands that the listener have an intuitive or common experience with the speaker, if the speaker expects to be understood.
Abstract algebra is the subject area of mathematics that studies algebraic structures, such as groups, rings, fields, modules, vector spaces, and algebras.The phrase abstract algebra was coined at the turn of the 20th century to distinguish this area from what was normally referred to as algebra, the study of the rules for manipulating formulae and algebraic expressions involving unknowns and ...
Conceptual metaphors are useful for understanding complex ideas in simple terms and therefore are frequently used to give insight to abstract theories and models. For example, the conceptual metaphor of viewing communication as a conduit is one large theory explained with a metaphor. So not only is our everyday communication shaped by the ...
While within concrete concepts there is still a level of abstractness, concrete and abstract concepts can be seen on a scale. Some ideas like chair and dog are more cut and dry in their perceptions but concepts like cold and fantasy can be seen in a more obscure way. Examples of abstract concept learning are topics like religion and ethics.
That is, as in the example given above of the idea of a chair, a great many objects, differing materially in detail, all call a single idea. When a man, for example, has obtained an idea of chairs in general by comparison with which he can say "This is a chair, that is a stool", he has what is known as an "abstract idea" distinct from the ...