Comment by galaxyLogic

"Abstracting" means extracting the commnon parts of multiple instances, and making everything else a parameter. The difficulty for software is that developers often start by writing the abstraction, rather than having multiple existing instances and then writing code that collects the common parts of those multiple instances into a single abstraction. I guess that is what "refactoring" is about.

In sciences and humanities abstraction is applied the proper way, studying the instances first then describing multitude of existing phenomena by giving names to their common repeating descriptions.