Abstraction and Projection

José Zalabardo’s recent book, Pragmatist Semantics, illuminates many important questions about the foundations of semantics. The main thesis is that the attribution of semantic properties is grounded on certain principles of abstraction defined over the real use of language. There are numerous problems concerning the introduction of ontological novelties through principles of abstraction. However, we will argue that the abstraction principles proposed by Zalabardo do not need to introduce any particularly suspect properties. Their basis could consist of projection processes in certain spaces so that some of the invariances originated can play, in quite a dynamical and open way, the role of the properties that are introduced for logical or semantic purposes. We will suggest the possibility of generalising our approach in relation to the application of abstraction principles in other areas.