ABSTRACT
The world is bewilderingly complicated. To understand anything, we need to overlook a lot and somehow organize the rest. What is most salient in everyday life is not always what is epistemically or practically important. Abstraction is a vehicle for distancing from detail. Through abstraction, science and art omit irrelevancies, streamline rough contours, judiciously simplify complexities. Using examples drawn from the sciences and the arts, I will argue that they do so by exemplifying significant, often occluded features and demonstrating their significance. These features may be at the outset semantically unmarked. If so, exemplification is the only avenue of access to them.
