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Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther: “Abstraction, the Abstract, and Abstractionism: Psychological and Philosophical Perspectives”
November 30, 2011 @ 12:30 pm - 2:00 pm | Social Sciences 2, Room 121

This talk explores a variety of analyses of abstraction, the abstract, and abstractionism from psychology (e.g., Barsalou’s “abstraction in perceptual symbol systems,” Gopnik’s and Murphy & Medin’s “theory theory,” and early Kurt Lewin, F. A. Hayek, and Ohlsson and Lehtinen’s “primacy of the abstract”) and from philosophy (e.g., the pragmatism of James and Dewey, the neo-Kantianism of Kuhn and Friedman, and the “kinds of people” analyses of Hacking, following Foucault). The talk also relates abstraction (and the abstract) to closely related—perhaps even co-constitutive—concepts and processes: (1) analogizing (and analogies), (2) mapping (and maps), and (3) distinction-making (and distinctions). In short, a philosophical and psychological anthropology of abstraction, the abstract, and abstractionism is the aim.
Reading: “The Knife and the One” (PDF)
Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther is Associate Professor of Philosophy at UC Santa Cruz.