Book Section
Julia Sánchez-Dorado
Abstraction as Strategy for Worldmaking
Generalization in Freud’s Rat Man
One of the cognitive strategies scientists use in their modelling practices is abstraction. In recent philosophy of science, abstraction is commonly understood as the ‘omission’ of the irrelevant features of a represented phenomenon. This essay criticizes this characterization, with the help of an example from oceanography and insights drawn from abstract art. In contrast, I propose to highlight the worldmaking potential of abstraction, insofar as it involves a creative act of ordering and establishing previously unseen connections between relevant features of the world.
| Title |
Abstraction as Strategy for Worldmaking
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| Subtitle |
Generalization in Freud’s Rat Man
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| Author(s) |
Julia Sánchez-Dorado
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| Identifier | |
| Description |
One of the cognitive strategies scientists use in their modelling practices is abstraction. In recent philosophy of science, abstraction is commonly understood as the ‘omission’ of the irrelevant features of a represented phenomenon. This essay criticizes this characterization, with the help of an example from oceanography and insights drawn from abstract art. In contrast, I propose to highlight the worldmaking potential of abstraction, insofar as it involves a creative act of ordering and establishing previously unseen connections between relevant features of the world.
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| Is Part Of | |
| Place |
Berlin
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| Publisher |
ICI Berlin Press
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| Date |
20 May 2025
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| Subject |
abstraction
representation
scientific modelling
art practice
idealization
Marie Tharp
physiographic diagrams
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| Rights |
© by the author(s)
Except for images or otherwise noted, this publication is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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| Language |
en-GB
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| page start |
47
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| page end |
77
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| Source |
Breaking and Making Models, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey, Marietta Kesting, and Claudia Peppel, Cultural Inquiry, 33 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2025), pp. 47–77
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