The Psychological Record, 2012, 62, 337–350

Does Abstracting Threaten a Sustainable Future?

Lyle K. Grant
Athabasca University

In abstraction, or conceptual behavior, people discriminate features or

properties of their surroundings. This permits people to respond selectively
and precisely to specialized features of their environment, which has had
many benefits, including steady advances in science and technology. Within
psychology, J. R. Kantor and B. F. Skinner maintained that using certain types
of abstract constructs leads to oversights and errors when the abstractions
become separated from event instances. Alfred North Whitehead had similar
concerns about the misuse of abstractions, leading Herman Daly to call at-
tention to this problem in contemporary growth economics, where economic
abstractions promote errors of overgeneralization, undergeneralization, and
misconception and impede development of a sustainable society. Inappropriate
abstracting has produced conceptual confusion in psychology, but in econom-
ics, the stakes are increasingly higher and include the preservation of the natu-
ral environment as we know it and the existence of its inhabitants. Solutions to
the problem are reviewed.
Key words: concepts, categorization, abstraction, sustainability, overgeneralization,
undergeneralization, misconception, concept teaching, nominalism
Abstracting is a process in which we respond to properties or features of the
environment rather than to individual concrete stimuli. Beauty, acceleration, and
sustainability are all examples of abstract concepts that pertain to properties of classes
of stimuli rather than to individual stimuli or objects. In this article, I treat abstraction
in a particular way, as a behavioral process in which properties or features of the natu-
ral world come to function as discriminative stimuli for corresponding verbal
responses.
Since the time of Plato and Aristotle, questions and controversy have surrounded
abstract concepts, particularly regarding their relationship to the concrete. During the
modern era, J. R. Kantor and B. F. Skinner have called attention to the logical problems
and practical disadvantages of constructing abstract entities (e.g., intelligence, creativ-
ity) inferred from behavior–environment interactions and housing them in a mind or
brain, where they become separated from their constituent event instances, the behavior–­
environment interactions. Herman Daly (1980), informed by Whitehead’s (1925/1967,
1929) cautions regarding abstractions, has been concerned with the same issues in eco-
nomics. Daly and other ecological economists regard economic abstractions that per-
petuate policies of economic growth as inappropriately separated from concrete aspects

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Lyle K. Grant, Centre for
Psychology, Athabasca University, 1 University Drive, Athabasca, Alberta, Canada T9S 3A3. E-mail:
lyle@athabascau.ca
338 Grant

of the physical environment, including limits in natural resources and the capacity of the
environment to absorb waste products. For Daly, economic behavior governed by certain
abstract concepts can lead to a future in which economic growth results in climate
change because of excessive carbon dioxide emissions (McKibben, 2010) and a condi-
tion of overshoot, in which the demand for fossil fuels and other vital natural resources
greatly exceeds their supply (Catton, 1982; Grant, 2007).
The purpose of the present paper is to examine some selected aspects of abstract con-
ceptual behavior that are impeding the pursuit of sustainability, defined as rates of use of
natural resources and rates of emissions of waste products that can be successfully main-
tained over time and across generations (Grant, 2010). The nature of conceptual behavior,
or abstraction, is reviewed as a behavioral process of discriminative responding to features
of the environment. The relationship between abstractions and their specific instantiations
is discussed. J. R. Kantor and B. F. Skinner’s views regarding misleading and inappropri-
ate abstractive practices in psychology are summarized. Abstractions in economics are
considered, with particular attention given to Whitehead’s concept of the fallacy of mis-
placed concreteness and Daly’s examples of the operation of the fallacy that serve to sup-
port policies of economic growth through errors of overgeneralization, undergeneralization,
and misconception. Psychological and economic abstractions are compared and contrasted:
It is suggested that psychological abstractions become separated from specific event
instances by locating the abstractions inside people, whereas economic abstractions are
separated from their event instances by the large scale of modern economies. Solutions to
the problem of inappropriate abstractions include a wider general recognition of the prob-
lem, adherence to Kantor’s guidelines for avoiding the problem, and use of concept teach-
ing procedures that foster attention to the correspondences between abstract constructs and
their instances.

The Nature of Conceptual Behavior

In abstraction, or conceptual behavior, people respond to a set of stimulus features or
properties rather than to individual stimuli (Skinner, 1957). Learning to respond in this
way is called concept formation, or concept learning. In behavioral terms, abstraction
occurs when a stimulus feature or set of stimulus features become discriminative stimuli
for behavior. In everyday language, features of the environment become cues for our
behavior. Learning the concept of more is a simple example. A child can learn the abstract
concept of more by discrimination training in which labeling the larger quantity from
among a selection of different quantities as more is reinforced, making sure that the label
more occurs only in response to the stimulus feature of greater quantity, moreness, rather
than to extraneous features of the training stimuli, such as the color or shape of the objects
compared.
In conceptual behavior, we come to discriminate stimulus features shared by a class
of stimuli. A stimulus feature or set of stimulus features comes to function as discrimi-
native stimuli, which enables the learner to respond to previously unencountered stimuli
that share the defining features of the concept. Once the conceptual discrimination of
more is learned, a child can tell which of two or more quantities is more, even if those
quantities consist of things never previously encountered. A major achievement of con-
ceptual discrimination is that it becomes possible to act successfully in partially and
wholly new environments, as long as they contain previously discriminated stimulus
features. Ascertaining the occurrence of the stimulus-feature discrimination character-
istic of conceptual behavior requires the learner to classify both novel concept instances
that contain all the defining concept features and concept noninstances in which a single
defining feature is missing (Tiemann & Markle, 1990). Only in this way can particular
stimulus features be isolated and identified as the basis for the discrimination.
Abstract stimulus discrimination is indispensable for basic reasoning and is responsi-
ble for advances in science and technology, philosophy, the visual and performing arts,
 Does Abstracting Threaten a Sustainable Future? 339

ethics, and so forth. Whitehead (1925/1967) summarized some key advantages of abstract
concepts:
The advantage of confining attention to a definite group of abstractions, is
that you confine your thoughts to clear-cut definite things, with clear-cut
definite relations. Accordingly, if you have a logical head, you can deduce a
variety of conclusions respecting the relationships between these abstract
entities. Furthermore, if the abstractions are well-founded, that is to say, if
they do not abstract from everything that is important in experience, the
scientific thought which confines itself to these abstractions will arrive at a
variety of important truths relating to our experience of nature. (p. 58)
Basic concepts in physics, such as force, acceleration, and power, are all precisely defined
mathematical abstractions that have been essential to the development of modern science
and technology. Educational curricula generally consist of a progression in which students
learn more and more specialized abstractions and relations among them (e.g., Stein,
Silbert, & Carnine, 1997). It is difficult to underestimate the value of abstractions and
abstract thinking in human cultural advancement. Even identifying problems associated
with particular abstractions requires the use of other abstractions.

Correspondences Between the Abstract and the Concrete

The idea that concepts are things that exist independently of the stimuli used to learn
the discrimination gains appeal because stimulus features are discriminated rather than
specific stimuli. More seems to exist everywhere and yet nowhere: everywhere because
individual stimulus instances of more are ubiquitous, and nowhere because we are able to
conceive of moreness independently of any specific context. The idea that more exists as a
mental or cognitive entity divorced from specific concept instances is appealing because
the critical features of more by themselves have no pure concrete instantiation. Instances
of conceptual behavior appear “to be relatively free of the exigencies of the physical world
and to deal with a single dimension abstracted from it” (Skinner, 1953, p. 277). Conceptual
behavior “appears to generate a world composed of general properties, rather than of par-
ticular events” (p. 277). A stimulus-feature discrimination becomes independent of any
specific stimuli, even those stimuli used to establish the discrimination, separating the
discrimination from links to specific instances in the concrete world. Once acquired, con-
ceptual behavior becomes increasingly remote in time from the specific stimulus instances
and noninstances that participated in the original discrimination. Few of us remember
what objects or materials we encountered when we learned more. After concept learning,
people can falsely recognize novel concept instances as having been previously encoun-
tered (Koutstaal, Schacter, Galluccio, & Stofer, 1999; Posner & Keele, 1968). Conceptual
behavior becomes easily decoupled from the specific stimulus events that participated in
the acquisition of the behavior. This decoupling allows people to respond to and speak of
the stimulus features independently of any specific context but at the expense of a loss of
the connection to the specific instances responsible for acquisition of the discrimination.
The separation of conceptual behavior from specific environmental events is also fur-
thered because we learn, remember, recall, and use words or labels that form a part of
conceptual discriminations (Carroll, 1964). The labels have substance, unlike the stimulus
features and stimulus-control relationship between the stimulus features and behavior. The
substance and relative salience of concept labels gave rise to the philosophy of nominal-
ism, which identifies concepts mainly with their labels.1 Descartes, in concluding that he
was because he thought, found thinking in terms of abstracted word labels to be the firmest

1  Although nominalism dispenses with the notion that abstractions are innate mental entities, it identifies
concepts with words and neglects the stimulus-­feature discriminations established through environmental interactions,
leading both Kantor (1940, p. 40) and Skinner (1974, p. 94) to reject nominalism in favor of alternative accounts invoking
behavior–environment interactions.
340 Grant

evidence for his existence. The substance of a label, whether printed or spoken,2 makes it
possible to regard the learned label as the concept rather than as a verbal response that
participates on the response side of the conceptual discrimination. This substance leads to
the notion that the labeled abstractions are things we possess rather than instances of a
behavior–environment relationship in the form of discriminative responding to stimulus
features. When it is said that “Renaissance humanism revived classical Greek intellectual-
ism and provided avenues of thought other than the fixed stepping stones of Scholastic
traditions,” it appears as though disembodied abstract concepts function as autonomous
forces, propelling themselves through time and space independently of anyone’s behavior.
Historical references of this type to common features of many individuals’ behavior can be
useful in summarizing broad trends, but at the same time, they risk treating concepts as
things, missing the variety inherent in the actions of specific individuals who played a part
in shaping overall trends, artificially smoothing out real events that took place, and omit-
ting important nuances in individual events at odds with the abstractions. Concept labels
can occur in writing, conversation, interior monologues, and so forth, and in this way, they
remain closer to us than the specific stimulus instances in the environment from which
they originated.
Errors occur when there are faulty correspondences between a concept and its
instances, when abstractions become detached from concrete instances. Three of these
errors, representing different types of faulty correspondences are (a) overgeneralization,
(b) undergeneralization, and (c) misconception (Tiemann & Markle, 1990). In overgeneral-
ization, concept noninstances are incorrectly classified as instances. When Piaget (1961)
showed children equal amounts of liquid in two identical short, broad beakers, the children
correctly classified the amounts as equal. However, when he poured liquid from one of the
beakers into a tall, thin beaker, raising the relative height of the liquid, the children classi-
fied the amount of liquid in the tall, thin beaker as more than the amount in the short, broad
beaker, an instance of overgeneralization because a nonexample of more was classified as
an example. This kind of faulty discrimination is sometimes regarded as a stage in child
development, but overgeneralization errors of this type also occur among adults because
the stimulus feature of elongated object height exerts undue influence over the discrimina-
tion of more (e.g., Wansink & Van Ittersum, 2003). Related discrimination failures have
been related to diverse effects, including product overpackaging and overconsumption
(Wansink, 2006).
In undergeneralization, the opposite of overgeneralization, concept instances are
incorrectly classified as noninstances. For example, much of the North American public
classify spending on rail transit as a concept instance of a government subsidy but fail to
classify spending on streets, highways, and other private motor vehicle infrastructure as
such (Kay, 1997). This undergeneralization leads to differential subsidization of the auto-
mobile, a choice that results in more fossil fuel use, CO2 emissions, accident injuries and
deaths, and respiratory diseases (Myers & Kent, 2001).
In misconception, an inessential or variable feature of a concept is mistakenly
regarded as an essential or defining feature, as might occur if a child mistook blueness as
an essential feature of more, leading to both the classification of unblue examples of more
as nonexamples and blue nonexamples of more as examples. As discussed later, miscon-
ception underlies the error of classifying instances of individual and societal well-­being
based on increases in spending.

Kantor and Skinner’s Views

Behavioral psychologists have historically been concerned with inappropriate abstrac-
tions because they shift the focus of our attention and analysis from interactions between

2  Goody (1977) suggested that abstractions become more prolific once a written language is developed:
Preliterate cultures “are marked not so much by the absence of reflective thinking as by the absence of the proper tools
for constructive rumination” (p. 44).
 Does Abstracting Threaten a Sustainable Future? 341

behavior and the environment to abstracted mental or brain entities. They see the attention-­
confining feature of abstractions as helpful if our focus is directed toward behavior–­
environment interactions and unhelpful if it is directed toward invented mental or brain
constructs. Kantor “repeatedly stressed the distinction between facts and their formula-
tions, between abstractions and the full flood of the world as we observe it” (Schoenfeld,
1969, p. 347). He was particularly concerned with the problem in which abstract scientific
constructs diverge from observable events and highlighted the importance of maintaining
close correspondences between abstract constructs and real-­world events (Kantor, 1981;
Smith, 2007). In the following excerpt, he referred to abstractions as “propositions” and
interrelated abstractions as “propositional structures”:
Specifically valid psychology will dictate a strict differentiation between
stimuli, that is, objects and events confronted with, and the responses toward
those things. Furthermore, the attempt to describe psychological actions or
processes with accuracy will serve to keep propositions within the bounds of
actual observations and serve to control the influences upon the thinker with
respect to the sources of his propositional structures. (Kantor, 1981, p. 98)
Examples of the sort of practices Kantor objected to are often seen today. A neuroscientist
recently observed that “our brain exaggerates reality—when the glass is half full—the
brain adds a little more for zest—when the glass is half empty, the brain subtracts some
and things seem worse than they really are” (Hagens, 2009, ¶27). In citing a similar exam-
ple, Smith (2007) noted that the brain is a physiological structure that plays an important
role in nearly all behavioral processes, but when identified as the sole cause of responding
to environmental events, the abstraction inappropriately takes over environmental func-
tions. Using the brain as an abstraction in this way only superficially explains optimistic
and pessimistic behavior, masking environmental and learning histories that lead people to
interpret events optimistically or pessimistically, effectively or ineffectively. Confining
our attention to an abstracted brain construct does not lead to procedures to alter optimistic
and pessimistic behavior, such as teaching people to discriminate the causes of behavior
(e.g., Seligman, 1998). Palmer and Donahoe (1992) have similarly delineated how abstrac-
tions, such as a language faculty, memory storage, and cognitive representations, take on
characteristics and qualities distinct from the specific events involved in instances of
speaking and remembering.
Skinner’s (1961, 1969, 1977) sustained criticisms of inappropriate abstracting were
the crux of his opposition to theoretical terms, which he defined as “any explanation of an
observed fact which appeals to events taking place somewhere else, at some other level of
observation, described in different terms and measured, if at all, in different dimensions”
(Skinner, 1961, p. 39). Skinner’s (1989, 1990) concern with abstractions extended to famil-
iar concepts, to colloquial references to apparent mental states, leading him to trace the
etymological origin of these references (e.g., experience, feelings, inclinations, expectan-
cies) to their original specific concrete referents. Like Kantor, Skinner recognized the
necessity of abstractions in a science of behavior: The behavioral concepts of reinforce-
ment, extinction, discriminative responding, and so forth, are all abstractions, but ones in
which the abstract terms are closely and unambiguously linked to specific concrete events.3
Skinner’s objections were centered on those abstractions, not grounded and defined in

3  Although behavior-­a nalysis abstractions are clearly defined in terms of observable criteria, problems sometimes
arise with them with regard to the correspondence between the abstractions and specific examples. Students learning
the concept of reinforcement often regress to the ordinary language abstraction of reward and must be taught using
specific counter-­r eward examples that illustrate that unpleasant stimuli can function as reinforcers, that reinforcers
must function to elevate some measure of responding, and that a dependency must exist between the response and a
consequence (Grant, 2004). Similarly, Palmer and Donahoe (1992) pointed out that behavioral abstractions, including
operant behavior, respondent behavior, rule-­governed behavior, and contingency-­shaped behavior, are susceptible to
acquiring essentialist qualities (e.g., operantness) that diverge from or inappropriately augment the specific criteria that
define these terms.
342 Grant

concrete terms. His objection to the use of abstractions such as mental states was in part
practical: Explaining behavior in terms of mental states, such as an expectancy, sets up a
way station (Skinner, 1969) that seems to explain behavior but then leaves open the prob-
lem of what caused the mental state, the expectancy. Skinner advocated tracing functional
sequences back to behavior–environment interactions in part because at that level, the
environment can be changed in order to alter behavior. The issue is far from a matter of
semantics. Schlinger (2003) has discussed how the abstraction “intelligence,” inferred
from certain types of behavior, is regarded as an immutable internal entity, a reification
that has impeded active efforts to teach intelligent behavior. Ebel (1974) similarly
described how this process leads to passivity rather than to active efforts to teach the
behaviors that are the basis of intelligence.

Abstractions in Economics
Whitehead’s (1925/1967) concerns with abstractive practices in science paralleled
those of Kantor and Skinner:
Its [modern science’s] methodological procedure is exclusive and intolerant,
and rightly so. It fixes attention on a definite group of abstractions, neglects
everything else, and elicits every scrap of information and theory which is
relevant to what it has retained. This method is triumphant, provided that the
abstractions are judicious. But, however triumphant, the triumph is within
limits. The neglect of these limits leads to disastrous oversights. (p. 200)
Whitehead identified economics as a discipline in which inappropriate abstractions had
been a problem. This led him to question the foundations of modern economics:
It is very arguable that the science of political economy, as studied in its first
period after the death of Adam Smith (1790), did more harm than good. It
destroyed many economic fallacies, and taught how to think about the eco-
nomic revolution then in progress. But it riveted on men a certain set of
abstractions which were disastrous in their influence on modern mentality.
(p. 200)
Whitehead’s concern with abstractions was centered on what he called the fallacy of mis-
placed concreteness: “neglecting the degree of abstraction involved when an actual entity
is considered merely so far as it exemplifies certain categories of thought”4 (Whitehead,
1929, p. 11). Whitehead objected to cases in which specific events are not taken for what
they are but merely as presumed instances of abstractions. Daly (1980), referencing
Whitehead’s definition, gave a hypothetical example of the fallacy, which is also an exam-
ple of overgeneralization due to a concept definition that incorporates only some of the
critical features of the concept:
Suppose, for example, we take the actual entity “a schoolbus” and consider it
only in terms of the preselected categories of yellowness and four-­
wheeledness, abstracting from everything else such as seating capacity, size
of motor, and so forth. Then we paint a tricycle yellow, put an extra wheel on
it, and claim that it is a schoolbus. In so doing we would commit the fallacy
4  The fallacy of misplaced concreteness is sometimes identified with reification. The verb reify is defined as “to
regard or treat (an abstraction) as if it had concrete or material existence” (American Heritage Dictionary of the English
Language, 2000, p. 1471). Daly’s examples of the fallacy are, however, ones in which the abstractions unduly confine our
attention, neglecting important features, such as the finiteness of natural resources and aspects of the environment that
contribute to people’s well-­being. The abstractions Daly cites, such as gross national product, pose problems not because
they are regarded as concrete entities but because they exclude features of the natural world essential for both well-­being
and creation of a sustainable society, leaving our “modes of thought” unable to address those features of the natural
world and our behavior insufficiently controlled by those features. Whitehead maintained that all abstractions confine
our attention and, in doing so, some abstractions displace our attention from important features of the environment, as
Skinner has emphasized in the case of the cognitive abstractions.
 Does Abstracting Threaten a Sustainable Future? 343

of misplaced concreteness. In plainer English, the fallacy of misplaced con-

creteness is to confuse the model with the real world, to mistake the map for
the territory. (p. 79)
Other economists also recognize the general problem of the mismatch between
abstractions and specific event instances. Lawson (1989), for example, pointed out that
abstractions can mislead by neglecting context-­specific instances:
Through a process of seeking merely wide generalisations, economic struc-
tures can easily be emptied of their context-­related, but often essential con-
tent. The employer-­worker relationship, for example, may be identified as a
transhistorical, pancultural feature of human society. But this observation, in
itself, abstracts from the numerous variations in the nature of this relation-
ship across time and space, and it is certainly insufficient, for example, to
any understanding or explanation of work practices and activities that exist
at a specific stage of human evolution in any particular region or place.
Similarly, to note such generalities as that humans have preferences, or
beliefs, or the ability to make choices, is to provide insufficient detail of
these generative structures or causal powers for explaining any form of
human activity they govern. (p. 72)
Overgeneralized constructs can fail to take into account situation-­specific factors impor-
tant in applying constructs, something Watkins (1990) has described in memory research.
In addition, citing preferences and beliefs as inadequate explanatory constructs is consis-
tent with long-­standing behavioral objections to mental way stations as constructs, that
they provide no information regarding their origins in behavior–environment interactions.
Economics makes frequent use of psychological concepts, for example, to explain motiva-
tion and choice, and in doing so becomes vulnerable to the problems of abstracted psycho-
logical constructs.
As a discipline, economics works with verbal and mathematical abstractions for the
general purpose of predicting, manipulating, and understanding real-­world economic
activity. A central concern in Daly’s work is that oversights in the form of the fallacy of
misplaced concreteness have artificially separated the abstractions used in economic
models, particularly growth economics, from actual instances of economic activity (Daly,
1980, 1996; Daly & Cobb, 1994; Daly & Farley, 2004). Using Daly’s metaphor, the school
buses of economic abstractions turn out to have specific exemplars, like oddly modified
tricycles, that mismatch the abstractions they are presumed to exemplify.
Daly (1980) concisely described eight examples of the fallacy in economics. In each of
these, an economic abstraction that functions to support a culture of economic growth is
mismatched with a real-­world concept instance. These eight mismatches between abstrac-
tions and presumed exemplars in the economic literature include (a) money debt versus
real wealth; (b) gross national product as an abstraction of collective good equivalent to
well-­being in people’s lives; (c) Domar’s dilemma, in which increasing productive capacity
boosts immediate employment yet constrains future employment without additional and
perpetual increases in productive capacity; (d) advances in science and technology as an
abstraction that eliminates any problems of resource scarcity; (e) increasing consumption
in wealthy nations as an abstracted benefit to people in poorer countries; (f) the consump-
tion levels in wealthy nations as an abstraction that is exportable to poorer nations irre-
spective of key physical resource limits; (g) the historically poor market gain from
resource conservation as an abstraction that signifies a perpetual future invariance in that
relationship; and (h) that the abstractions of capital, labor, and resources are completely
substitutable for one another. In citing these specific examples, Daly mainly illustrates how
economists’ behavior, when governed by economic abstractions, leads to oversights in
which fundamental physical limits in the absolute quantity of natural resources are hidden,
masked, defined out of existence, or quantitatively minimized or zeroed as a variable in
abstract formulas. This inattention to physical resource limits in turn poses major problems
344 Grant

for the creation of a sustainable society that must manage the rate of use of resources to
provide a habitable environment for future generations.
One of Daly’s examples of misguided abstractions pertains to money. Money is decep-
tive as an abstraction because, as Kantor (1981) pointed out, economic transactions involving
money are a familiar part of everyday life that give it apparent concreteness. Yet, money has
value only as it is exchangeable for material goods and services that have both substance and,
in most cases, fixed limits. When money is considered independently of the material goods it
can be exchanged for, there is a risk that the abstraction will lose contact with real-­world
events. For example, generating income by converting money into debt and collecting com-
pound interest is sometimes cited as a means of perpetually increasing limitless wealth.
When money is represented as an abstraction in a compound-­interest formula, it appears as
though both money and wealth can increase without limits over time. Yet, physical con-
straints on the world’s supply of resources ultimately limit what money can buy (Hardin,
1993). Daly and Cobb (1994) identified this variety of the fallacy as money fetishism:
Perhaps the classic instance of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness in eco-
nomics is “money fetishism.” It consists in taking the characteristics of the
abstract symbol and measure of exchange value, money, and applying them
to the concrete use value, the commodity itself. Thus, if money flows in an
isolated circle, then so do commodities; if money balances can grow forever
at compound interest, then so can real GNP, and so can pigs and cars and
haircuts. (p. 37)
Money fetishism is an important problem because modern growth economies are
based on perpetually increasing the money supply though debt, as a means of spurring
economic activity and prosperity. Material limits on the things money can be exchanged
for eventually pose serious problems for growth economics, but treating money as a math-
ematical abstraction artificially separates the abstraction from physical resources and
goods, obscuring the relationship between money and its real long-­term exchange value.
Regarding money as an isolated quantitative abstraction leads to errors of overgeneraliza-
tion to instances in which money participates in real transactions in a world where
resources are limited. Creating a sustainable society demands that we pay close attention
to physical resources to ensure they will be available to future generations, but abstraction-­
governed behavior can deter us from conservation.
Another example of the fallacy is to treat gross national product (GNP) and gross
domestic product (GDP), omnibus abstracted measures of economic activity, as effectively
equivalent to concrete events in people’s day-­to-­day lives that are responsible for their
well-­being. This widely perceived correspondence between GNP and well-­being has sup-
ported policies of economic growth, based on the idea that perpetually higher GNP pro-
duces perpetually improved well-­being. As Daly and Cobb (1994) reflected,
The tendency to forget that the GNP measures only some aspects of welfare
and to treat it as a general index of national well-­being is, of course, a typical
instance of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness....It can be countered by
giving increasing visibility to social indicators, such as the Physical Quality
of Life Index, which measures literacy, infant mortality, and life expectancy
at age one. (p. 63)
Anielski (1999) illustrated how mismatched GDP is to well-­being by considering specific
event instances:
The GDP is simply a gross tally of the monetary transactions in the nation. The
more people spend, the more the GDP goes up. If the result is greater than the
year before then we say the economy has “grown” and that we are better off.
The word “growth,” which pervades economic reportage and debate, means
simply this: Americans and Canadians spent more money than they did the
year before. The ideal economic or GDP hero is a chain-­smoking terminal
 Does Abstracting Threaten a Sustainable Future? 345

cancer patient going through an expensive divorce whose car is totalled in a

20-car pileup, while munching on fast-­take-­out-­food and chatting on a cell
phone. All add to GDP growth. The GDP villain is non-­smoking, eats home-­
cooked wholesome meals and cycles to work. (p. 2)
As it stands, reliance on the isolated abstraction of GDP/GNP has helped drive
increased consumption of resources, including fossil fuels, and increased outflows of waste
products, including carbon emissions. As Daly and Cobb (1994) described, some econo-
mists have recognized and addressed this issue through the development of alternative
constructs, such as the Physical Quality of Life Index (PQLI; Morris, 1978) and the more
recent Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI; Anielski, 2007), that use broader and more direct
measures of well-­being. Anielski (2007) identified what the GPI measures as real wealth,
contrasting it with the superficial apparent wealth of the GDP/GNP.
The GPI is an abstraction, but it is one explicitly designed to more closely sample the
concrete events in people’s lives responsible for their well-­being, such as clean air, access
to health care, availability of recreational activities, freedom from crime, and so forth, in
addition to income and spending. In this respect, the GPI is consistent with Kantor’s guide-
lines (Smith, 2007) for useful abstracted constructs that are appropriately linked to con-
crete events. As Delprato (2003) noted, Kantor’s insistence upon attention to the human
roots of constructs is one factor that places Kantor’s interbehaviorism within the tradition
of humanism, exemplified here in the prescribed attention to the correspondence between
constructs like GNP/GPI and actual events in people’s lives.
In misconception, an inessential or variable feature of a concept or construct is mis-
takenly identified as a critical feature. Classifying instances of GNP or GDP growth as
instances of growth in real wealth (Anielski, 2007) is an error of misconception because
neither spending nor spending growth are critical factors responsible for well-­being.
Spending and spending growth may have a positive, neutral, or harmful effect on well-­
being, as illustrated in Anielski’s (2007) examples. The abstractions of GNP and GDP,
taken as measures of real wealth, lead to errors of misconception in part because they
mobilize efforts in pursuit of only those features of real wealth and genuine well-­being that
money can buy. Using the GPI contributes to sustainability because it encourages the use
of resources only insofar as it improves real wealth while minimizing the use of natural
resources and waste emissions.

Abstraction in Psychology and Economics

Psychology and economics have special characteristics that have influenced their
abstractive practices. Within psychology, there is a long history of placing abstract con-
structs inside people, where they are neither easily traced to origins in interactions with the
environment nor directly accessible to alteration (Kantor & Smith, 1975; Skinner, 1974).
Within macroeconomics, which deals mainly with public transactions, there is a tradition
of working with broadly aggregated abstractions that are disconnected from specific event
instances in part by the large scale of modern economies. As Daly (1980) has exemplified,
it becomes easy to speak of money, GNP, and other economic concepts as broad abstrac-
tions that have lost their connection to the real world of particulars, which is constrained
by physical resource limits. Whereas psychological abstractions hide unexamined beneath
the skin, many economic abstractions are concealed by the scale of macroeconomic phe-
nomena, which makes the constructs and those who work with them remote from their
event instances.5 Within psychology, abstractions are liable to regress to internal entities
(e.g., intelligence, memory, creativity) disconnected from interactions between behavior
5  The role of scale in developing inappropriate economic abstractions is illustrated in small-­scale household,
barter, or token economies, where any matches and mismatches among factors like the medium of exchange, physical
goods or resources, and personal well-­being and specific events become directly and easily observable. For example,
within a small-­scale token economy, Winkler (1973) was on site and able to observe and correlate variations in savings
rate, an abstraction, with specific events, such as the purchase of dresses.
346 Grant

and the environment, whereas in economics, abstractions take the form of highly scaled
generalizations (e.g., money, GNP/GDP) disconnected from important specific events in
the real economy and in people’s lives. Although internalization and scale are very differ-
ent factors, they both function to divorce abstractions from the observations of specific
event instances, the proper basis for the abstractions.

Solutions
Addressing the issue of inappropriate abstractions requires a broader recognition of it
as an interdisciplinary problem. Kantor (1981) cited the problem’s generality across many
different fields. Kantor and Skinner’s work has had only limited success within psychol-
ogy, where in theory construction, model building, and other discourse, constructs con-
tinue to take on essential qualities (Palmer & Donahoe, 1992) or otherwise depart from
events as they occur in their actual contexts (e.g., Watkins, 1990). The independent recog-
nition of the same issue in ecological economics offers the promise of a broader identifica-
tion of a general problem.
Economists other than ecological economists have recognized the problem of mis-
leading abstractions to a limited degree. Kantor (1981) cited Frank H. Knight, founder of
the influential Chicago School of Economics, as an opponent of inappropriate abstractions,
though Kantor generally characterized the field as rife with “verbal abstractions which
form barriers between events and valid propositions” (p. 194). As Lawson (2007) pointed
out, three Nobel Prize winners in economics (Leontief, Friedman, and Coase) have each
objected to highly abstract mathematical models that bear little relationship to events in
real economies, while at the same time recognizing that such models remain popular.
Although there is no current unified perspective regarding the uses and misuses of abstrac-
tions in either psychology or economics, there is at least a baseline of recognition of the
issue, though largely confined to enclaves within behavioral psychology and ecological
economics. Whitehead, Kantor, and Skinner’s prescribed solutions to the misuse of
abstractions converged in some agreement. Whitehead (1925/1967) wrote,
The disadvantage of exclusive attention to a group of abstractions, however
well-­founded, is that, by the nature of the case, you have abstracted from the
remainder of things. In so far as the excluded things are important in your
experience, your modes of though are not fitted to deal with them. You
cannot think without abstractions; accordingly, it is of the utmost importance
to be vigilant in critically revising your modes of abstraction. A civilization
which cannot burst through its current abstractions is doomed to sterility
after a very limited period of progress. (p. 59)
Smith (2007), in summarizing Kantor’s solutions to the problem of misleading
abstractions, arrived at a number of specific recommendations consistent with Whitehead’s.
These include ensuring that constructs and events are explicitly recognized for what they
are—differentiated from one another and yet linked to one another. Echoing Whitehead’s
call for vigilance, Smith insisted that it is necessary to “question all constructs derived
from traditional cultural and philosophical sources” (p. 179). In the absence of adequate
data, Smith cautioned us to “keep constructs extremely tentative and make sure they have
the potential to be observed” (p. 180). This adaptive flexibility in selecting useful abstrac-
tions and revising them as necessary is perhaps nowhere better illustrated than when
Kantor (1981) turned anti-­abstractionism on itself: “Any onslaught upon abstractions must
itself not be irresponsibly abstractive” (p. 201). Even anti-­abstractionism, when trans-
formed into a polemical avoidance of abstractions, risks losing the concrete benefits of
useful abstractions. As Whitehead reminded us, abstractions are necessary for any thought
to occur at all.
Another largely unrecognized potential source of solutions to the problem of inap-
propriate abstractions is the literature of concept teaching (e.g., Chase, Johnson, &
 Does Abstracting Threaten a Sustainable Future? 347

Sulzer-­A zaroff, 1985; Grant & Evans, 1994; Merrill, Tennyson, & Posey, 1992; Miller &
Weaver, 1976; Shimamune & Malott, 1995; Tiemann & Markle, 1990), which has pro-
duced innovations in the design of textbooks (e.g., Miller, 1997; Peterson, 1978) and
computer-­based instruction (Fox & Ghezzi, 2003; Grant & Courtoreille, 2007) and has
contributed to the development of comprehensive approaches to effective teaching
(Engelmann & Carnine, 1991; Johnson & Layng, 1992). Within this diverse literature,
the issue of the relationship between abstract constructs and specific construct instances
is centered on the practical issue of concept teaching. This focus has produced useful
teaching methods, along with a systematic means of maintaining a correspondence
between constructs and their appropriate referents, including the empirical analysis of
faulty correspondences, as seen in errors of overgeneralization, undergeneralization, and
misconception. This empirical work has arrived at a set of conclusions, parallel to those
of Whitehead and Kantor, that support closely linking abstract constructs and terms with
concept instances. For example, effective concept teaching requires (a) use of a broad
range of concept instances (e.g., Carnine, 1980), which provides breadth of real-­world
experience; (b) use of both concept instances and noninstances, which provides specific
and real illustrations of what the concept is and is not (Tennyson, Woolley, & Merrill,
1972); and (c) specifications of how the definitional features of abstract terms explicitly
appear in concept instances (Carnine, Kameenui, & Maggs, 1982; Grant, McAvoy, &
Keenan, 1982). Specific concept teaching practices are available to avoid specific classes
of errors, including overgeneralization, undergeneralization, and misconception
(Tennyson et al., 1972). The procedures that make concepts teachable and clear to nov-
ices, by linking them to specific concept instances, are essentially the same ones that
clarify abstractions for those well advanced in a discipline, by grounding them in con-
crete particulars.
Additional solutions include encouraging and institutionalizing greater stylistic use of
specific examples in academic writing, for example, as in Daly’s (1980) analysis of eight
economic concepts that fail to match up with real-­world exemplars. Incorporating sets of
reference examples in disciplinary dictionaries would be another means of progress, espe-
cially with the increasing use of online dictionaries immediately accessible through hyper-
text links. An empirical approach to lexicography (e.g., Josselin-­Leray & Roberts, 2005)
may also lead to helpful innovations. For example, Martin-­Rutledge (1998) found that
dictionaries that provide an appropriate breadth of context-­specific examples improved
users’ correct application of terms. Dictionaries might also take advantage of computeriza-
tion to incorporate interactivity and immediate user testing (e.g., Polson, Grant, Cheung, &
Mah, 2010) using examples and nonexamples.

Summary
Problems with abstractions will likely continue to confound human thinking for the
foreseeable future, until the behavioral processes of stimulus-­feature discrimination
become more broadly understood. Aside from the problems detailed here, progress in
many academic disciplines consists of little more than a serial replacement of old abstrac-
tions with newer, trendier ones, no more well connected to real-­world event instances than
their predecessors. This is a particular problem in the field of sustainability, where con-
crete behavior change is at the root of the problem (e.g., Lehman & Geller, 2004).
The most important difference between psychological and economic misadventures in
abstractionism pertains to consequences. Whereas philosophy and psychology have oper-
ated at a level of reduced effectiveness under the weight of poorly chosen constructs, in
economics the stakes are increasingly higher and encompass the possibility of an ecologi-
cal and cultural collapse that could decimate the human species (Catton, 1982; McKibben,
2010). For those in the behavioral sciences who have struggled in a seemingly quixotic
challenge to Western cultural and abstractive traditions, the playing field has turned out to
be larger and the stakes higher than even they may have ever supposed.
348 Grant

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