ABSTRACT
We all try to give meaning to our. existence. Our common goal is to make the world understandable and familiar, thus rendering it amenable to reason and control. The most important way we achieve understanding is by generalizing beyond the singular, the unique and the particular. Whether we are participants or observers of the social scene, we understand largely by searching for the recurrent and uniform. Thus, through abstraction we are able to comprehend and grasp the world of concrete experience.
