Abstraction vs Theory - What's the difference?
abstraction | theory |
The act of abstracting, separating, withdrawing, or taking away; withdrawal; the state of being taken away.
* 1848 , , Principles of Political Economy with some of their Applications to Social Philosophy :
# (euphemistic) The taking surreptitiously for one's own use part of the property of another; purloining.
# (engineering) Removal of water from a river, lake, or aquifer.
A separation from worldly objects; a recluse life, as a hermit's abstraction ; the withdrawal from one's senses.
The act of focusing on one characteristic of an object rather than the object as a whole group of characteristics; the act of separating said qualities from the object or ideas.
* W. Hamilton, in Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic (1860), Lecture XXXV,
The act of comparing commonality between distinct objects and organizing using those similarities; the act of generalizing characteristics; the product of said generalization.
An idea or notion of an abstract or theoretical nature.
Absence or absorption of mind; inattention to present objects; preoccupation.
(art) An abstract creation, or piece of art; qualities of artwork that are free from representational aspects.
(chemistry) A separation of volatile parts by the act of distillation.
An idea of an unrealistic or visionary nature.
The result of mentally abstracting an idea; the results of said process.
(geology) The merging of two river valleys by the larger of the two deepening and widening so much so, as to assimilate the smaller.
(computing) Any generalization technique that ignores or hides details to capture some kind of commonality between different instances for the purpose of controlling the intellectual complexity of engineered systems, particularly software systems.
(computing) Any intellectual construct produced through the technique of abstraction.
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(obsolete) Mental conception; reflection, consideration.
* 1646 , (Thomas Browne), Pseudodoxia Epidemica , VII.19:
(sciences) A coherent statement or set of ideas that explains observed facts or phenomena, or which sets out the laws and principles of something known or observed; a hypothesis confirmed by observation, experiment etc.
* 2002 , Duncan Steel, The Guardian , 23 May 2002:
* 2003 , (Bill Bryson), A Short History of Nearly Everything , BCA, p. 118:
* 2009 , (Richard Dawkins), The Greatest Show On Earth: The Evidence for Evolution , Bantam, p. 10:
* {{quote-magazine, date=2012-01
, author=Michael Riordan
, title=Tackling Infinity
, volume=100, issue=1, page=86
, magazine=
(uncountable) The underlying principles or methods of a given technical skill, art etc., as opposed to its practice.
* 1990 , Tony Bennett, Outside Literature , p. 139:
* 1998 , Elizabeth Souritz, The Great History of Russian Ballet :
(mathematics) A field of study attempting to exhaustively describe a particular class of constructs.
A hypothesis or conjecture.
* 1999 , Wes DeMott, Vapors :
* 2003 , Sean Coughlan, The Guardian , 21 Jun 2003:
(countable, logic) A set of axioms together with all statements derivable from them. Equivalently, a formal language plus a set of axioms (from which can then be derived theorems).
As nouns the difference between abstraction and theory
is that abstraction is the act of abstracting, separating, withdrawing, or taking away; withdrawal; the state of being taken away while theory is (obsolete) mental conception; reflection, consideration.abstraction
English
Noun
- The cancelling of the debt would be no destruction of wealth, but a transfer of it: a wrongful abstraction of wealth from certain members of the community, for the profit of the government, or of the tax-payers.
page 474:
- Abstraction is no positive act: it is simply the negative of attention.
- Abstraction is necessary for the classification of things into genera and species.
- to fight for mere abstractions .
Antonyms
* (the act of generalization) specialization * (mentally abstracting) concretizationDerived terms
* abstractional * abstractionism * abstractionist * abstractiveExternal links
* * * *Glossary of Water Terms, American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
References
theory
English
Noun
- As they encrease the hatred of vice in some, so doe they enlarge the theory of wickednesse in all.
- It was only when Einstein's theory' of relativity was published in 1915 that physicists could show that Mercury's "anomaly" was actually because Newton's gravitational ' theory was incomplete.
- The world would need additional decades [...] before the Big Bang would begin to move from interesting idea to established theory .
- Scientists and creationists are understanding the word "theory'" in two very different senses. Evolution is a '''theory''' in the same sense as the heliocentric '''theory'''. In neither case should the word "only" be used, as in "only a ' theory ".
citation, passage=Some of the most beautiful and thus appealing physical theories', including quantum electrodynamics and quantum gravity, have been dogged for decades by infinities that erupt when theorists try to prod their calculations into new domains. Getting rid of these nagging infinities has probably occupied far more effort than was spent in originating the ' theories .}}
- Does this mean, then, that there can be no such thing as a theory of literature?
- Lopukhov wrote a number of books and articles on ballet theory , as well as his memoirs.
- Knot theory classifies the mappings of a circle into 3-space.
- It's just a theory I have, and I wonder if women would agree. But don't men say a lot about themselves when a short-skirted woman slides out of a car or chair?
- The theory is that by stripping costs to the bone, they are able to offer ludicrously low fares.
- A theory is consistent if it has a model.