Every word you know began as an act of throwing detail away
Calling a scuffed leather football simply a ball means ignoring nearly everything about it. That deliberate forgetting is abstraction, and researchers think humans began doing it seriously somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago, probably alongside language itself. Money, the state and even counting all depend on the same trick.
Abstraction pulls a general concept out of particular cases, keeping only the features that matter for some purpose. The type 'ball' is more abstract than any single token of it. Alfred Korzybski built his general semantics around levels of this process, and Anatol Rapoport described it as mapping endless experience onto short noises we call words. One way to picture it is as compression: countless individual cats collapse into the single idea CAT, and chains can climb further, from raw sensory impulses to colour and shape, to one particular animal, to mammals, to the bare category of object.
The move has a famous history in science. Thales, around the sixth century BCE, worked the other way, reasoning down from the grand claim that everything is water to ice, fog and rivers. Francis Bacon's Novum Organum of 1620 urged thinkers to gather facts first and generalise afterwards. Kepler squeezed thousands of measurements into the conclusion that Mars follows an ellipse, and Galileo condensed a hundred experiments into his law of falling bodies. John Locke later argued that general words such as 'man' arise by abstracting from particular ideas.
Abstraction can also be physical. Record keepers across the Fertile Crescent sealed clay tokens inside containers to stand for goods, probably livestock or grain, being transferred. According to Denise Schmandt-Besserat's 1981 account, marks were pressed onto the outside so the count could be read without breaking the seal, turning numbers into material objects. Money works similarly, stripping away the particular worth of things so that wildly different objects can be compared.
The idea resists tidy definition. Treating abstract things as those that are not real simply shifts the problem to deciding what is real, and people disagree over whether God, the number three or goodness belong in that category. Words like 'happiness' and 'architecture' stretch across several meanings at once. Some philosophers even call the redness of one particular apple an abstract particular, which shows how slippery the boundary between concrete and abstract becomes.
Source: Abstraction
