According to Charles Sanders Pierce, prescisive abstraction or prescision, variously spelled as precisive abstraction or prescission, is a formal operation that marks, selects, or singles out one feature of a concrete experience to the disregard of others. According to Pierce, prescision is the process through which a red ball, an orange ball, and a green ball are all perceived to be round.
Pierce distinguished this prescision from another form of abstraction, which he called hypostatic abstraction; roughly speaking, the inference of a quality of "redness" from the observed fact of a red ball.
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