It&#x27;s not as much a matter of determining whether &quot;x is &#x27;just&#x27; a subset of y&quot;, as it is a matter of finding the most fundamental truth about something.<p>For instance, if you state that (paraphrasing) racism is wrapped up in &#x27;in-group bias&#x27; and it turns out that people are actually racist because of something in our DNA (similar to being afraid of spiders) or something like that (NB: completely contrived, to provide context related to your comment), the you would have lost the truth in a higher abstraction layer, by hiding the underlying principle.<p>Now, abstraction is a helpful tool, but it should be used to abstract things to the level necessary to convey an exact message. Einstein might have said, &quot;Abstract things as high and low as necessary, while preserving the truth, but no higher or lower.&quot;... but in the meantime, I made that quote up.<p>Take, for instance, my &quot;Anchoring&quot; example. There are more fundamental things that are going on <i>beneath</i> the &quot;Anchoring&quot; abstraction. Perhaps a specific part of the human psyche, which is also responsible for recognizing patterns (e.g., Reticular Activating System) is also responsible for the mental constructs that lead to such a cognitive bias. But, once that science is understood sufficiently enough to be trusted, a concept like &quot;Anchoring&quot; is a helpful delineation.<p>In the aforementioned case of racism that I contrived, the abstraction layer of &quot;racism&quot; and the perceived lower level abstraction &quot;in-group bias&quot; hides the truth, and this fallacious abstraction actually becomes, as Noam Chomsky might suggest, a part of our mental grammar, which prevents us from ever learning the truth, unless the abstraction is broken in our minds.