Miguel P. Monteiro wrote: > From what I could learn, both abstraction and generalisation seem to be ways > to > "navigate" through hierarchical structures of concepts. These are useful to > compress > information in an efficient way: a concept at one level can subsume all > concepts at > lower levels (I suppose this is abstraction). In addition, different levels > of the > hierarchy support different inferences. An inference about a concept at one > level > does not necessarily apply to a concept at a more abstract level. This seems > to be > related to generalisation.
Perhaps I've misunderstood, but I think you have these the wrong way around. The way I think about abstraction and generalization is that they are two independent axes, one running from detailed to abstract, and one running from specific to general. So, going from talking about 'Frank Wales's anatomy' to talking about 'human anatomy' means you're talking more generally, but not necessarily in any less detail than before. Going from 'Frank Wales' to 'Frank Wales's blood pressure' means you're throwing away all the details irrelevant to the task at hand, and in doing so have become more abstract, but not necessarily any less specific than before. Does that accord with what you've learnt? (This is where I find out I'm the only person in the world who thinks this way about these things. As usual.) -- Frank Wales [EMAIL PROTECTED]
