Empirical and Reflective Abstraction

Since the time of Aristotle, philosophers and empiricists have relied on the construct of abstraction to characterize the development of knowledge. However, few have articulated the processes of abstraction as thoroughly as did Piaget. Piaget distinguished abstraction into two major types: empirical, which concerns the properties of objects, and reflective, which concerns a learner’s coordinations. Over the course of his career, Piaget further distinguished three types of reflective abstraction, which he called pseudo-empirical, reflecting, and reflected. We describe each of these four types of abstraction and then provide three episodes that draw on data from a young child, two middle-school students, and an undergraduate student. In these episodes, we exemplify the processes of empirical, pseudo-empirical, reflective, and reflected abstractions. We close with a discussion of the cyclical nature of abstraction and a consideration of the standards of evidence one can use for identifying types of abstraction.