THE PROCESS OF ABSTRACTING
“We relate ourselves intelligently to the surrounding world that we know only in part; and from the
parts that we know, we attempt to construct a world that makes sense to us.
“To ‘abstract’ means to leave out certain features of a situation; we register only features that are
relevant to our needs, our purposes, or our habits. We do this ‘silently’ and verbally, and between
these two levels there is no common measure. Our mental model constructs are not pictures of an
‘objective reality,’ but schemes of how we can participate in our life experiences and situations as
aspects of an on-going cosmic process.”
– J. Samuel Bois, The Art of Awareness
SEMANTIC TRANSACTOR MODEL
From J. Samuel Bois, The Art of Awareness
sensory-motor
Some corollaries of the Semantic Transactor:

No transaction is exclusively intellectual, emotional, or physiological. We transact as a
whole, whether we are conscious of it or not.

A conversation is not so much an exchange of objective information between two persons
as the encounter of two semantic transactors—of two human capsules in flight, each
following its own orbit, with its mass, its momentum, its direction, and its capacity to
withstand shocks.

The semantic character of our transactions does not depend on the dictionary definition of
words or the “objective” nature of the event; it depends mostly on the meaning we attach
to words, events, and persons, and how these meanings are related – positively or
negatively – to the values we cherish, respect, or hold in contempt. This suggests that the
"feeling" aspect of our semantic transactions is, more often than not, the determining
factor in our behavior.