The selection and conceptualization of a phenomenon, or some aspect of it. Abstraction is an essential part of model building where some aspect or part of the real world is extracted and simplified. Unfortunately, during the process of simplification, so much information has to be jettisoned that the resulting model may have very limited success.
Other abstractions are based on idealism; models are made of an ‘ideal type’ such as the Latin American city model. The problem is that it is quite possible to construct very different ideal types of the same phenomenon.
Friday, September 11, 2009
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