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Epistemic Groundings of Abstraction and Their Cognitive Dimension

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Sergio F. Martínez  and
Xiang Huang
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Abstract

In the philosophy of science, abstraction has usually been analyzed in terms of the interface between our experience and the design of our concepts. The often implicit assumption here is that such interface has a definite identifiable and universalizable structure, determining the epistemic correctness of any abstraction. Our claim is that, on the contrary, the epistemic grounding of abstraction should not be reduced to the structural norms of such interface but is also related to the constraints on the cognitive processes of specific abstractions. This suggests that we should understand abstraction as embodied in different kinds of abstraction practices.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 78 , Issue 3 , July 2011 , pp. 490 - 511
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

Previous versions of this article were presented at the University of Chicago and the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana. Thanks to the members of those audiences. In particular, we thank Axel Barcelo, Bill Wimsatt, and Rasmus Winther for their comments and discussions of the ideas presented here. We thank two anonymous referees for helpful comments on this article.

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