ABSTRACT
Forty years ago, in ‘Abstraction: A Realist Interpretation’ (1981) Andrew Sayer set about doing some of the groundwork needed to clarify the meaning of the terms ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’. He continued this task in his later work, in one place referring to abstraction as ‘an important but under-analysed way of conceptualising objects’ (1992: 85). Little has been done to correct this under-analysis since then, largely because of the widespread belief that we all know what the terms ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’ mean, so why bother re-inventing the wheel? The aim of this chapter is, therefore, to do some (more) groundwork. After some preparatory work, the chapter investigates the ways the terms ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’ are used in social science; explains how abstraction can be understood as extraction and as exclusion; considers the process–product distinction, where ‘abstraction’ can be used as a verb to refer to the process of abstracting, and as a noun to refer to the output or product – i.e. an abstraction; distinguishes between internal and external abstraction; deals with unsatisfactory abstractions; and concludes by suggesting two potential areas for future exploration: (i) the relation between abstraction and isolation and (ii) Systematic Dialectics.
