Our Knowledge of the Concrete Comes First...

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and generalized abstractions only later.

In fact, without first understanding concrete situations, we would be unable to generalize, since we would have no idea what we were generalizing from. Our knowledge of generalizations is secondary and derivative of our knowledge of particulars. But scientific training often leads people to believe just the opposite of the truth here.

Comments

  1. Avram4:43 PM

    That is mostly correct.

    I thought about it for a second and whenever I was taught or taught myself something "general" I always had to imagine something "concrete" to "get it".

    But once the general thing is there, it's there.

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