Idealizations Quotes

First, it is a commitment to particularism, to giving priority to the specificity of particulars, not to abstractions and generalities that divert our attention away from concrete realities. Idealizations tend to be partial and distorting, obscuring the heterogeneity and complexity of actual experiences and concrete practices, which is why they do not provide an adequate standpoint for the diagnosis of social problems and injustices. ~ Jose Medina

There's a difference between really loving someone and loving the idea of her. ~ Gillian Flynn

If our friends' idealizations of us need the corrective of our own experience, it may be true also that our own sordid view of our lives needs the corrective of our friends' idealizations. ~ Oscar W. Firkins

Parks are idealizations of nature, but nature in fact is not a condition of the ideal. ~ Robert Smithson

In rational inquiry, we idealize to selected domains in such a way (we hope) as to permit us to discover crucial features of the world. Data and observations, in the sciences, have an instrumental character. They are of no particular interest in themselves, but only insofar as they constitute evidence that permits one to determine fundamental features of the real world, within a course of inquiry that is invariably undertaken under sharp idealizations, often implicit and simply common understanding, but always present. ~ Noam Chomsky

.....every object is a mixture of lots of things, so we can deal with it only as a series of approximations and idealizations. ~ Richard P. Feynman