Full Idea
The development of a language for describing our correlational activity itself enables us to perform higher level operations.
Gist of Idea
We develop a language for correlations, and use it to perform higher level operations
Source
Philip Kitcher (The Nature of Mathematical Knowledge [1984], 06.2)
Book Reference
Kitcher,Philip: 'The Nature of Mathematical Knowledge' [OUP 1984], p.111
A Reaction
This is because all language itself (apart from proper names) is inherently general, idealised and abstracted. He sees the correlations as the nested collections expressed by set theory.