The Reification Fallacy

I have written a few posts about the logical problem of making an abstract concept concrete:

• Does Culture Exist?
• Religion does not Exist

This rhetorical trick is called “The Reification Fallacy” and goes by several other names:

• Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness (Whitehead)
• Concretism
• Concretizing the Abstract
• Hypostatisation: [Gk. hypostatos: substantially existing] attributing real identity to (a concept).  See Hypostasis in theology (wiki)
• Ontological Fallacy

Reification Fallacy is the error of treating an invented idea as a concrete thing.  For example if someone, “I fought with my boss today”, “boss” is a concrete thing.  But if someone says, “During the war, I fought for justice”,  “justice” is abstract.  “Justice”, in this case is only an amalgam of ideas particular to that speaker.  Everyone has a different idea of “justice”, but if we start to think that “justice” is a real thing which we must search for the truth about, and we forget that we created the idea, then we would be reifying “justice”. The trouble comes when we start to think of abstractions as if they were concrete realities themselves.  These abstractions are only useful if people use them to talk about ideas they agree about, it only works for in-house echo-chamber conversations.  But they can be used very deceptively too.  Thus, abstractions can be used as quick heuristics for useful communication or tools to deceive ourselves and others.  So it is important to remember the difference between abstractions and real things.

The Reification Fallacy is a type of Ambiguity Fallacy (see: Fallacy Files) and I have illustrated its place on the Fallacy Taxonomy above. Interestingly, I can’t find the “Reification Fallacy” discussed in the “Fallacy Files”. But here are some sources that do discuss it:

• Reification Fallacy (wiki)
• Less Wrong: Smart Non-reductionists by Kaj Sotala
• Concretizing the Abstract: by Edward Feser
• Even Answers in Genesis discusses it: as in “fooling Mother Nature” or “Wisdom”
• Ayn Rand (The Feast of Unreason) discusses the Reification of Zero.