Today, I was thinking about empiricism, and how abstraction works. It was only after researching Edmund Husserl and his claim that logic is separate from psychology that I realized something. Let’s assume that we gain our understanding of logical objects from concrete objects in reality through abstraction. Wouldn’t that mean our understanding of those logical objects is now dependent on the concrete object?
If I got the number two from concrete objects, without those concrete objects how would I be able to perform abstraction on the concept? Doesn’t that mean I would not be able to perform logic dependent on the number two?
I tried researching this, and the answer I got was that not all logic comes from abstractions. For example, logical relations do not come from abstraction. Sure, we get color and maybe math from abstraction, but we don’t get the idea of causality or correlation from abstraction.
But who said that we can’t do that? Why can’t we get logical relations from abstraction? This is where I ran into Jean Piaget, a Swiss philosopher that made a theory of abstraction I personally agree very much with. It all relies on splitting abstraction into types.
The first type of abstraction is empirical abstraction. This is abstracting properties from objects or sensory experience. This is your abstraction of color or math, for example. However, there is also reflective abstraction, in which you abstract from your own actions or interactions between objects. To put it in the way that I understood it, you are abstracting from abstraction. This relies on pre-logical thinking. For example, recognizing similarities and grouping/differentiating structures. This doesn’t necessarily require logic in order to be done. After you have done this reasoning, you can use the interactions between objects to abstract logical relations. For example, causality. When two events happen very close spatially or temporally to one another, and one comes before the other, you can abstract from this causality.
The reason this sort of idea that logic might come from abstraction randomly popped into my head is because some theories on human thought can be somewhat complex to wrap your head around. For example, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. Maybe our world does in fact exist separately from the real world, but it seems almost like an unsatisfactory answer, because it doesn’t seem to be grounded. Of course, the more grounded an idea does not mean it is true; however, you can often perform more deductive reasoning and scientific principles on grounded theories.
How? Well, Jean Piaget was not really a philosopher when talking about reflective abstraction. He was actually talking about it from a psychological point of view. However, because epistemology and psychology are closely related, we can also treat this like an epistemological principle. Even if it is not a true epistemological principle, we can investigate it as a psychological principle, which holds much more value to us.
I do not think all philosophical ideas should conform to an observation-based or useful view on the world, but I think that we should equally look into philosophical ideas that border this line. Not all philosophical ideas have to be disconnected from reality, and we can prove it through ideas like this.