Reification

Reification (also known as concretism, hypostatization, or the fallacy of misplaced concreteness) is a fallacy of ambiguity, when an abstraction (abstract belief or hypothetical construct) is treated as if it were a concrete real event or physical entity. In other words, it is the error of treating something that is not concrete, such as an idea, as a concrete thing. A common case of reification is the confusion of a model with reality: "the map is not the territory".

Reification is part of normal usage of natural language (just like metonymy for instance), as well as of literature, where a reified abstraction is intended as a figure of speech, and actually understood as such. But the use of reification in logical reasoning or rhetoric is misleading and usually regarded as a fallacy.

For example: if the phrase "holds another's affection", is taken literally, affection would be reified.

Another common manifestation is the confusion of a model with reality. Mathematical or simulation models may help understand a system or situation but real life always differs from the model.

Note that reification is generally accepted in literature and other forms of discourse where reified abstractions are understood to be intended metaphorically,[1] but the use of reification in logical arguments is usually regarded as a fallacy. For example, "Justice is blind; the blind cannot read printed laws; therefore, to print laws cannot serve justice." In rhetoric, it may be sometimes difficult to determine if reification was used correctly or incorrectly.

Anthropologists are often concerned to show that social and cultural phenomena are results of underlying processes that we have a tendency to overlook, and that they are thus "something other than what they seem to be". Reification stands for the opposite: that we take phenomena for given, as they appear to us. It is often claimed, for example, that the concept of culture is a reification, since we have a tendency to think of "a culture" as a completed object, a "thing" we can "touch and feel", which all members of the culture share - rather than a complex aggregate of processes, which different people participate in, to a greater or lesser extent. When we reify, we do not see the details, because they are overshadowed by the whole. We think, e.g. of "Norway" as if it were one thing, while in reality it is a near-infinite agglomeration of people, projects, actions, expressions and objects, in constant movement and conflict, within a landscape which is neither homogeneous, stable or geographically bounded. When I say "I am a Norwegian", this is a reification, which hides the countless other things I also am. Similarly, Marx claimed that money was a reification (a fetish) of the production processes - the labor - that creates the values that money measures. ...

Reification, according to Lukács, means [mis]taking social relations for things. An institution, for example, a university, is in reality a complex of social relations, but it appears as a solid and substantial thing like a natural object. Breaking with the illusory thinghood of social institutions and recovering their contingency is “dereification.” This idea is usually explained as a theory of ideology, but implied in the contrast between social relations and things is a deeper argument concerning the nature of action, or practice as Lukács calls it. Practices establish a world within which reified objects appear. These objects are understood “immediately,” that is to say, without critical awareness, in a reified standpoint. That standpoint is derivative of the practices, not their origin, but the standpoint contributes to the reproduction of the world the practices sustain.

The theory of reification thus explains the relation of structure to agency. Reification provides structure through determining a specific type of practice that reproduces the institutions, while dereification involves another type of practice with the power not only to penetrate the il- lusion of reification but to transform the practices and the structures it establishes.

From Lukács’s Theory of Reification and Contemporary Social Movements by Andrew Feenberg