Paper Example on Ladder of Abstraction

Introduction

The concept of the ladder of abstraction is widely used and sometimes may be an excellent tool for communication. We apply this concept for example when giving a speech or during a heated argument and occasionally during our day-to-day conversations with our friends and colleagues. Knowledge and understanding of the ladder of abstraction is a method to prevent speakers from covering listeners with tons of data and information without giving its significance. Also, speakers that understand this concept are less likely to provide stories, ideas, and theories without explaining its practicability in a real-life scenario.

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Recently, I was engaged in an argument with a friend on a topic taught in class but was quite hard to grasp so the whole class had to search for an alternative way of understanding the topic. Since we had group discussions and we were teamed up to study, we came across the same topic. At first, we took turns in trying to explain what we understood by different sentences on the subject to engage constructively in our discussions. However, it came to the point that my friend completely took over and was trying to establish dominance among the group by showing off his academic strength. What was not known to him is that his coordination in perception, communication, and action was not in line which ultimately put him off the topic. What he did was only read the sentences under the topic and paraphrase them every time which was not entirely helpful.

While raising an issue with other members of the study group, he came out strong guns blazing trying to defend his idea from a different perspective. What was obvious the whole time is that all the members were making the same point from the sentences. Therefore, the entire argument was pointless since the fight was over irrelevant things in the discussion. An observation I made from this encounter is that despite being a human nature to compete, in this scenario it wasn't necessary. It brought a sense of being in different boats racing in a river while on the contrary, we were on the same boat fighting the waves together. Another observation made is that all the points passed across were not helping the discussion, therefore not improving the argument. One of the concepts in the ladder of abstraction is to ask yourself if your object adds value to the whole argument by improving it, which wasn't the case.

Conclusion

Placing this scenario in the ladder of abstraction, we observe that the argument started from the top of the ladder by making abstract concepts which were general. Reading out the sentences aloud and paraphrasing is merely saying the same thing but in fewer words. The middle part of the ladder was a step towards proper decision making and finding the correct solution since it bridges the gap between the abstract ideas and the concrete ideas. This section was to point out what exactly the issue was and separating them. By identifying what was not making sense to the whole group, weak points from each member would have been pointed out and therefore improve the arguments. The bottom of the ladder includes the real things and methods of solving the issue. The perception, communication and action relationship were not maintained which therefore meant there wasn't successful in the whole case.