Selecting the required levels of abstraction
How specific should the description be? Should we talk about a specific phenomenon or thing (for example, a specific conversation between Vasya and Petya, a specific project that started and finished, etc.), or about a class of phenomena similar to this? About a broad class or a narrow one?
Usually, this can be guessed by asking yourself what the addressee (or addressees) of this group of roles might want to do with our description: use it once for a specific action or, for example, constantly use it in certain cases.
When observing the same events, people in different roles can describe them completely differently. For someone, what is happening now is the process of development and debugging, and for someone else, it's about fixing this specific bug. This is not good or bad: in some situations, the addressee wants to know how to fix this specific bug. And in some other situations, how the development and debugging process is structured.
Abstractions and Blurriness
Spoiler: abstractions and blurriness are not the same.
You are already familiar with the specialization relationship (class-subclass). Moving through this hierarchy involves the operation of abstraction --- when we move from a narrower class to a broader one. We do this by eliminating some specifying feature: there is a class of "wooden tables," we get rid of the wooden feature and get a broader class of "all tables." We can consider different features as insignificant and abstract along different lines: resulting in different, broader classes. We can move from "wooden tables" to "all tables," or to "wooden chairs" --- a neighboring class, or to "wooden objects" --- a broader class without the "table-ness" feature.
The reference of a more abstract concept compared to a less abstract one does not fundamentally change --- they simply refer to classes of different breadth.
However, let's define blurriness as a concept that initially had an unclear reference. There was probably a broad class, but it was unclear what exactly, and it was unclear which objects belonged there. This is why it can be difficult to establish the relationships between blurry concepts, which includes which, and so on.
As you understand, in different situations, the same word can be both an abstraction and blur for different people. It depends on how individuals came to discuss what they are currently discussing and whether they defined all intermediate terms before that.
But there are common representatives, and you may have expectations of where you are more or less likely to encounter blurry concepts.
For example:
- Abstraction. "Wooden table" --- and we can easily imagine a wooden table. Remove the feature, and it remains just a "table"[1], and there are no difficulties. We talk about "furniture" in general, and there are still no questions. In the abstraction operation, we move from a narrow class to a broader one (still defined, but including more instances, concrete things).
- Blurriness. "Justice" --- and we initially take it as blurry. We can hardly just imagine justice like that (and that's okay!). And if we can, the meaning in our head is not synchronized with any interlocutor. Thus, we start with a wide fuzzy concept and begin to consider which narrower things it could refer to. Words with fuzzy conceptual spaces often refer to blurry concepts.
If you are writing a description for an addressee who, in your opinion, needs some useful abstractions (for example: a boss, an investor, etc. --- for those who are not particularly interested in watching a specific process but are more concerned with classes of objects or processes to make decisions or draw conclusions based on them), keep in mind that they do not need blurriness.
In descriptions, people may want blur in a specific case --- when you start describing new phenomena, and the essence of the description is precisely to reduce this blurriness.
If we want to keep "table" in the context of professional communities where the material is important, we say "table made of any material," leaving the material feature while removing its value. ↩︎