Are all our everyday words an abstraction?
When I read the definition of abstraction, it seems that all our words are abstractions. A refrigerator is an abstraction over a set of internals. Apple – concealing malecular compounds and chemical processes. Do I understand that correctly?
Let's first understand the word “abstraction”, whether we understand it in the same way.
I tend to use this word in the Hegelian sense, which is set out in his short (well, Hegelian-style) text ” Who Thinks Abstractly.” In short, the judge thinks abstractly, considering the person who committed the murder only a murderer, and the mother of this person, for whom he is only a beloved son. A specific person is a set of roles and qualities, as well as experience, combined in a very specific way. It turns out that the abstract is something that splits the thing, cuts out one thing and does not take into account the rest. The concrete, on the contrary, covers the whole subject, in a combination of its qualities and properties.
In this sense, words are, of course, one of the world's greatest abstractions. Most, perhaps, only numbers and symbols. They tear out the individual qualities of a thing, and when we try to describe something in words, no matter how hard we try, it will only be an abstract, incomplete description. This is why we so often do not have enough words to express some complex or powerful phenomena and experiences. A good combination of words allows you to make the description better, more specific, but always not completely. That is why it is so difficult to translate poems into a foreign language. Poetry is an attempt to convey something very concrete, personal and complex in a limited number of abstract words. And here it is not even the words themselves that are important, but also the rhythm, melody, and most importantly-the context that the author and the reader must have in common to understand.
In general, yes, in fact, you can say that everything that surrounds us, more precisely, the words for designating objects and other things, are an abstraction, the same “color”, there are a lot of actions behind it to make it appear, but to make it easier, we came up with words that do not relate to various”smart words”.