The Role of Abstraction in Design

"Abstraction: The principle of ignoring those aspects of a subject that are not relevant to the current purpose in order to concentrate more fully on those that are."... Dictionary of Computing, Oxford Univ. Press, 1986
To be able to abstract something, you must first be able to encapsulate an aspect of the design (sometimes called Information Hiding).
The "name" of something is an abstraction of it. The name, in some sense, "encodes" all the data relevant about a design entity.