George, This is the kind of Subject the road of which is laden with semantic mines. Nature of the beast.
<Is not a human with no capability for abstraction simply an animal?> Dealing with generalizations, "no" will always create absurdities. As will "always".
<Unless we are talking about purely animal behavior, are not all human "values" abstract?>
Human values arise from somewhere. Headhunters have values from somewhere else than we.
All people have personality traits, an axis of more or less. Few have all or none. The axis I am presenting has abstractions on one end, and Concrete on the other. Concrete includes things-including people, actions, emotions, maybe more. Abstract includes symbols, ideas, patterns, relationships, organization. What this axis refers to is what the personality structure sees, values, pays attention to in all reality.
A person who sees garbage and crowds and dirty buildings because that is all there is in the reality he lives is going to abstract different values than someone who sees lakes, and trees, and clapboard houses in his reality. But both will abstract values different, but not by a different process, than the person who sees a way to cut down on packaging from all the garbage, or a sign of complacent mediocracy in the clapboard. [Odd values, that guy.]
Concrete doesn't mean low order thinking. It means that the things you prefer to think about are Concrete. Abstract doesn't mean intelligence or better thinking, it means what you see and therefore what you think about start with abstract stuff. Where either goes from there, values, is beyond this theory. |
