--- title: 'Abstraction and schema' url: 'https://rethunk.englishup.me/abstraction-schema' markdown: 'https://rethunk.englishup.me/abstraction-schema.md' date: '2020-10-16' description: 'Abstraction and schema The following considers looking at schema as a conceptual operation rather than as a psychological operation after Brandom (2020). Bernard Andrews describes some objections to the notion of schema as advanced by Tom Sherrington. Andrews notes a popular view of schema that use…' --- # Abstraction and schema The following considers looking at schema as a conceptual operation rather than as a psychological operation after Brandom (2020). Bernard Andrews describes some objections to the notion of schema as advanced by Tom Sherrington. Andrews notes a popular view of schema that uses the notion of mental structure: > ["A schema is a mental structure that is involved in organising knowledge"](https://wordpress.com/read/blogs/128782444/posts/1505) (Andrews , 2020) A related notion is that of attention: > ["Schemata influence attention and the absorption of new knowledge"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schema_(psychology)) ("Schema (psychology)", 2020) If we think of schema as deriving from the idea of abstraction then for the British Empiricists (such as John Locke) the notions of mental structure and attention were used to describe the process of abstraction. Where abstraction is a mental process of not attending to or actively ignoring something. As Brandom (2020) recounts empiricists, for the concept of triangle, would look at an equlateral triangle, an isoceles triangle , a scalene triangle and ignore the relative lengths of the lines. Whereas Frege, as cited by Brandom (2020), says no look at what the equivalence relation is between these drawn figures, i.e. the equivalence relation of having the same number of sides as some index triangle. For Frege, abstraction is a process of introducing new terms (based on the use of old terms) that is a process of extending a vocabulary. His example is that of geometry and the abstraction of directions of lines. We have the old terms of straight line and the relational property of being parallel which are used for the new abstraction of directions of lines. The direction of line A is the same as the direction of line B just in case that A is parallel to B. Contra the empiricists abstraction is in fact a conceptual process, it asks one to define the equivalence class. It appeals to the notion of "being parallel to" in the old vocabulary - an equivalence relation, i.e. reflexive (every line is parallel to itself), symmetrical (if A is parallel to B then B is parallel to A), & transitive (if A is parallel to B and B is parallel to C then A is parallel to C). It is an equivalence relation like identity but not all equivalence relations are identities. Abstraction is the process of introducing new terms by treating an equivalance relation as identity. As identity of the new kind of thing. We can think of direction of lines as an equivalence class (the direction of the Earth's axis as the class of all the lines parallel to the Earth's axis). Frege is said to be cleaning up notions of concrete and abstract. The British empiricists thought of abstraction as a mental operation, what you actively ignore. If we accept schema as a derivate of abstraction in this sense maybe we should look at schema as a conceptual operation as suggested by Andrews - as logico-linguistic? **References:** Andrews, B. (2020 October 5). Schema re-conceptualised: A response to Tom Sherrington \[Blog post\]. Retrived from Brandom, R. (2020) [Audio of week 8](https://pitt.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx) 49:04 - 1:06.00. Anti-Representationalism as Neopragmatism and Global Expressivism. University of Pittsburgh delivered October 6, 2020. Schema (psychology). (2020, 22 September) in Wikipedia. Retrieved from [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schema\_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schema_)(psychology) --- ## Navigation - Previous: [Home](https://rethunk.englishup.me/index.md) - Next: [Acquisition and development](https://rethunk.englishup.me/acquisition-development.md)