Specification / Abstraction
- How we identify and connect ideas through associations, for example, what we might choose as a specific and concrete example of an idea, or how we group and think about the experiences in our life, or how we define what we believe to be necessary or essential – any time we say or think “X is an example of Y” or we arrange a number of examples into an equivalent grouping or family – each of these involves how we “chunk” and sort the data that we call our experience.
- In other words, “the what and how” of connecting the concrete and sensory, to our conclusions, generalizations and thinkings/feelings-about. This also includes how we leave out information, data and aspects of our experience, in order to form a coherent view of whatever seems to be arising.
- These processes become habituated and, thus, patterned and they are crucial to how we choose which questions to ask and how to map the communications that others make. Just as importantly, these patterns reveal how we hold our view of the world together, how we sort what is important to us from what is not, how we judge whether we are on-course or off-course.
This is how you find out how their rules function on classes of experience… but also how
to change them
The ability to find the “edges” or “boundaries” of the rules under which someone’s
assertions about their life or how the world is; their asserted statements of what is
important and what is not; their expectations regarding ideals and much more, all live
under the spectrum of thinking and languaging relating to Specification and Abstraction
Rather than merely being right and attempting to pull someone else over to your right way thinking, when you learn to use the processes of Specification and Abstraction, you discover where else to look for resources, alternate pathways, choices not perceived, meanings unexplored – it’s how you can find the room for change from within their map or model of the world. You make change far more elegant and less potentially bloody this way
How aspects of experience are grouped / thinking
- How we identify what things are
- What we compare them to
- How we choose to sort them(good/bad/neutra/uncertain/etc)
- The mental groupings – the labels and descriptions we use and all of the “thinking about” is at a higher level of abstraction than events in the world
- Furthermore, when we think about doing or creating something that doesn’t exist in the world, that thinking is more abstract and less concrete than an object, say a table, which already exists in the world
- Our understandings and the maps we make of the world are at a higher level of abstraction than the world itself. But even though most often these subtler, non-concrete aspects of a person’s existence are “hidden inside”; clues are given through language and through non-verbal signs of what may be “behind” statements someone makes or the thoughts they think.
