I understand the process of ascending to the concrete as one of filling abstractions with living content. One model of me is Sayeki's work on mental rotation
of figures. Sayeki compared the classic "lego-like" figures to figures which had
a circle attached to them in various places. One of those places was where the
addition of the circle made the figure appear immediately human like, with head,
arms, torso, legs-- a human figure. When Sayeki compared the amount of time it
took people to match these different figures when they had been trasformed in
place he found that for the "nonsense" figures, there was a linerarly increasing
amount of time to be able to identify the figure as a function of how big a
transformation from the target was presented. But for the figure that "looked
human" there was perfectly flat function -- amount of rotation didn't matter.
I believe that the amount of difference between the two functions provides a
kind of "metric" of the rapidity with which persons "raise" their initial unformed perceptions to a particular concrete entity.
Concretely speaking
mike