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Reification, also called hypostatisation, is treating an abstract concept as if it were a real, concrete thing. The
term is often used pejoratively by epistemological
realists as a criticism of epistemological
idealists. Epistemological realists often regard reification as a logical fallacy.
Fallacious arguments based on reification may be committed when manipulations that are only possible on concrete things are said to be performable on an abstract concept. A fallacy is also said to be committed when an abstract concept is referred to as if it bore no
relation to the concrete things of which it is an abstraction. Examples of fallacious statements arising from reification
are:
- "That country doesn't have any democracy. We should give some of ours to them".
- "Just because we don't have any music, dance, paintings, drawings, or drama in this city doesn't mean we're devoid of
art".
See also: pathetic fallacy.
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Alternative uses
- In knowledge representation,
reification is sometimes used to represent facts that must then be manipulated in some way, for example to
compare logical assertions from different witnesses to determine their credibility. The message
"John is six feet tall" is an assertion of truth that commits the sender to the fact, whereas the reified statement, "Mary
reports that John is six feet tall" defers this commitment to Mary. In this way, the statements can be incompatible without
creating contradictions in reasoning.
- Reification is a term used in computer
science and artificial intelligence to describe
the act of making a data model for a previously abstract concept. Reification
allows a computer to process an abstraction like any other data.
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