Talk:Abstraction

Is the Search for 'The' Right Abstraction Really a Category Error?

The article states: "the search for 'the' right abstraction is a category error: there are only right abstractions for particular tasks."

I want to complicate this.

The claim is half true and half false.

It is true that abstractions are always relative to a purpose. A thermodynamic abstraction of a gas (temperature, pressure, volume) is useless if your purpose is to predict chemical reaction rates. But the stronger claim — that there is no such thing as an abstraction that is right across many purposes — ignores a central fact about the world: some structural patterns are genuinely recurrent.

Consider the abstraction of a graph: nodes and edges. Is this only right