The Ladder of Abstraction

The word noun derives from the Latin nomen, meaning ‘name’. Nouns possess a special power, a kind of magic, because when we name something, we call it into being. We may fall into a dazed stupor whenever we stare at a smartphone for too long, but it isn’t until we have a name for it – brain rot, Oxford Dictionary’s Word of the Year 2024 – that we start to treat this feeling as a phenomenon that exists for others, too.

Nouns ground us in the world, giving us a close-up view of things. Chair. Table. Carpet. These are objects we can see with our eyes, feel against our skin – even if they are ultimately just words on the page. There’s something reassuringly tangible about these kinds of nouns. We all know what a chair is, we’ve all sat on one, even if yours is a Bentwood and mine is a La-Z-Boy. Nouns are communal; they invite shared experience. 

But nouns also lift us to the heavens, transcending everyday reality. Truth. Freedom. Authenticity. Up here, we’re in an ethereal realm where nothing is solid and everything melts into air. Such nouns bring us into contact with something loftier than chairs, tables, and carpets. It’s heady, even sublime, but we can’t stay up here forever. At some point, we need to come back down to earth. 

That’s what the ladder of abstraction is for. Proposed by Canadian scholar S.I. Hayakawa in his book Language in Action, the ladder of abstraction is – like any ladder – a tool for going up and coming back down again. At the top of the ladder you’ll find words like alcoholism and sobriety, concepts that can be neither seen nor felt yet shape our lives in profound ways. A few rungs down and you’ll encounter words like beer and wine, common nouns for common things. And right at the bottom are words like Carlsberg Special Brew and Dom Pérignon Rosé 1959 – unique, unmistakable, available to our senses. 

Hayakawa advises us to go up and down the ladder of abstraction whenever we want to discuss something serious, like politics: 

If two or more persons are going to understand each other and make sense in an abstract discussion, they must find a common object or event to which their words refer. (Hayakawa, 1939: 222-3) 

In other words, you can’t just talk about the things at the top of the ladder: taxation, healthcare, human rights. If you want to make yourself understood, you also need to shimmy down the ladder, to a rise in national insurance contributions, to waiting times for hip replacement surgery, to the treatment of asylum seekers arriving on small boats. Only then can we be sure we’re not talking over each other’s heads. 

The same is true for scholarly debate. Academics love to spend their time at the top of the ladder, in the zone of abstraction. Paradigm. Governmentality. Phallogocentricism. These are important concepts that help us make sense of empirical reality. But don’t forget to anchor them in specifics, using language that’s piled up in a great big heap at the foot of the ladder. 

A well-chosen example will bring any concept to life, no matter how abstract. If you want to write about intersectionality, for instance, don’t just tell the reader about overlapping experiences of discrimination. You’ll leave the reader stranded in the middle of the ladder, neither here nor there. 

Instead, tell the reader – as Kimberlé Crenshaw does in her classic article – about the lawsuit filed by five Black women against their former employer, General Motors, alleging both race discrimination and sex discrimination, which was subsequently dismissed by the district court because the plaintiffs ‘failed to cite any decisions which have stated that Black women are a special class to be protected from discrimination’ (cited in Crenshaw, 1989: 141). With this example, we can see the women, we can hear the judge, and we can feel the injustice. It breathes life into an abstract concept and reminds the reader that we’re really concerned with people and structures and processes, not just specialist terminology. 

An example doesn’t have to be drawn from real-life. It can also be plucked from the imagination as a metaphor or simile. In a 2016 TedTalk, Crenshaw reflects on the experiences of one of the plaintiffs, Emma DeGraffenreid, who filed suit against General Motors. Think of intersectionality as a kind of crossroads or traffic junction, Crenshaw tells us: 

[T]he roads to the intersection would be the way the workforce was structured by race and by gender. And then the traffic in those roads would be the hiring policies and the other practices that ran through those roads. Now, because Emma was both Black and female, she was positioned precisely where those roads overlapped, experiencing the simultaneous impact of the company’s gender and race traffic. The law – the law is like that ambulance that shows up and is ready to treat Emma only if it can be shown that she was harmed on the race road or on the gender road but not where those roads intersected. 

We move from the top of the ladder, where intersectionality lives, down to the lower rungs, where we encounter roads, traffic, an ambulance. Figurative language is often the best way to clarify a complex theoretical point because it makes the intangible more vital and real, like a pencil sketch of a fireplace that suddenly bursts into flames.  

Roy Peter Clark points out that the ladder of abstraction is a perfect analogy because the concept exemplifies its own meaning. The ladder of abstraction is comprised of two nouns, ladder and abstraction. A ladder is solid, constructed from wood or steel. An abstraction is more elusive, existing on an immaterial plane completely beyond our grasp. We climb the ladder of abstraction simply by naming it, an act that transports us from the world of everyday objects to the realm of highbrow ideas. Didn’t I tell you that nouns are magic? 

So go up and up and up in your writing – academics need concepts. Just remember to go back down again, to situate the reader in the here and now, to make them see and feel what you ultimately want to say.