Abstraction and Instantiation

This document proposes tools for describing abstractions and their instantiations. The merit of abstraction is the economy of description. Abstractions allow you to avoid repeating similar descriptions over and over again. You write one abstraction to address the shared structure of descriptions and reuse it when you want similar descriptions. Suppose you want to describe many occurrences of a common pattern of events and states of affairs, such as a type of configuration of soccer players in the field. You will describe the positions of eleven people to address this configuration. Once you set up an abstraction to describe this common pattern, you can address each occurrence of the pattern by just binding the eleven non-specific people to particular players, without repeating the descriptions of their positions.