Prescisive abstraction

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.

The above definition is adapted from the one given by Charles Sanders Peirce (CP 4.235, &ldquo;The Simplest Mathematics&rdquo; (1902), in Collected Papers, CP 4.227–393).