I have seen some related questions about this, but none of them actually answered mine. In electrostatics, one usually wants to consider the electric field of a continuous charged distribution, such as a sphere or a cylinder. Most books actually start their presentation by considering a discrete set of $n$ charges and the net electric field produced by them, so the electric field produced by a continuous distribution becomes more or less intutive.
My question is: should these continuous distributions of charges be thought as a particular object/material with charge on it? Or should it just be thought as a mathematical abstraction of a continuous set of charges put together, for pedagogical purposes?
Let me explain just a bit more. We know that if we put charge on a conductor, the charge will flow to its surface and no internal electric field is produced. Hence, when an exercise says "calculate the electric field inside an uniformly charged sphere" or something like this, it obviously not considering the sphere as a conductor. So, all we have left are insulators. But these are dieletrics, which have different dieletric constants and so on. I was always a bit confused about this. What exactly is a "uniformly charged" object in practice?
