Reification (fallacy)

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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. [1] [2] 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".

Contents

Reification is part of normal usage of natural language, 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. [3]

A potential consequence of reification is exemplified by Goodhart's law, where changes in the measurement of a phenomenon are mistaken for changes to the phenomenon itself.

Etymology

The term "reification" originates from the combination of the Latin terms res ("thing") and -fication, a suffix related to facere ("to make"). [4] Thus reification can be loosely translated as "thing-making"; the turning of something abstract into a concrete thing or object.

Theory

Reification takes place when natural or social processes are misunderstood or simplified; for example, when human creations are described as "facts of nature, results of cosmic laws, or manifestations of divine will". [5]

Reification may derive from an innate tendency to simplify experience by assuming constancy as much as possible. [6]

Fallacy of misplaced concreteness

According to Alfred North Whitehead, one commits the fallacy of misplaced concreteness when one mistakes an abstract belief, opinion, or concept about the way things are for a physical or "concrete" reality: "There is an error; but it is merely the accidental error of mistaking the abstract for the concrete. It is an example of what might be called the 'Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness.'" [7] Whitehead proposed the fallacy in a discussion of the relation of spatial and temporal location of objects. He rejects the notion that a concrete physical object in the universe can be ascribed a simple spatial or temporal extension, that is, without reference to its relations to other spatial or temporal extensions.

[...] apart from any essential reference of the relations of [a] bit of matter to other regions of space [...] there is no element whatever which possesses this character of simple location. [... Instead,] I hold that by a process of constructive abstraction we can arrive at abstractions which are the simply located bits of material, and at other abstractions which are the minds included in the scientific scheme. Accordingly, the real error is an example of what I have termed: The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness. [8]

Vicious abstractionism

William James used the notion of "vicious abstractionism" and "vicious intellectualism" in various places, especially to criticize Immanuel Kant's and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's idealistic philosophies. In The Meaning of Truth, James wrote:

Let me give the name of "vicious abstractionism" to a way of using concepts which may be thus described: We conceive a concrete situation by singling out some salient or important feature in it, and classing it under that; then, instead of adding to its previous characters all the positive consequences which the new way of conceiving it may bring, we proceed to use our concept privatively; reducing the originally rich phenomenon to the naked suggestions of that name abstractly taken, treating it as a case of "nothing but" that concept, and acting as if all the other characters from out of which the concept is abstracted were expunged. Abstraction, functioning in this way, becomes a means of arrest far more than a means of advance in thought. ... The viciously privative employment of abstract characters and class names is, I am persuaded, one of the great original sins of the rationalistic mind. [9]

In a chapter on "The Methods and Snares of Psychology" in The Principles of Psychology , James describes a related fallacy, the psychologist's fallacy, thus: "The great snare of the psychologist is the confusion of his own standpoint with that of the mental fact about which he is making his report. I shall hereafter call this the "psychologist's fallacy" par excellence" (volume 1, p. 196). John Dewey followed James in describing a variety of fallacies, including "the philosophic fallacy", "the analytic fallacy", and "the fallacy of definition". [10]

Use of constructs in science

The concept of a "construct" has a long history in science; it is used in many, if not most, areas of science. A construct is a hypothetical explanatory variable that is not directly observable. For example, the concepts of motivation in psychology, utility in economics, and gravitational field in physics are constructs; they are not directly observable, but instead are tools to describe natural phenomena.

The degree to which a construct is useful and accepted as part of the current paradigm in a scientific community depends on empirical research that has demonstrated that a scientific construct has construct validity (especially, predictive validity). [11] Thus, in contrast to Whitehead, many psychologists[ who? ] seem to believe that, if properly understood and empirically corroborated, the "reification fallacy" applied to scientific constructs is not a fallacy at all; it is one part of theory creation and evaluation in 'Normal science'.[ original research? ]

Stephen Jay Gould draws heavily on the idea of fallacy of reification in his book The Mismeasure of Man . He argues that the error in using intelligence quotient scores to judge people's intelligence is that, just because a quantity called "intelligence" or "intelligence quotient" is defined as a measurable thing does not mean that intelligence is real; thus denying the validity of the construct "intelligence." [12]

Relation to other fallacies

Pathetic fallacy (also known as anthropomorphic fallacy or anthropomorphization) is a specific type[ dubious – discuss ] of reification. Just as reification is the attribution of concrete characteristics to an abstract idea, a pathetic fallacy is committed when those characteristics are specifically human characteristics, especially thoughts or feelings. [13] Pathetic fallacy is also related to personification, which is a direct and explicit ascription of life and sentience to the thing in question, whereas the pathetic fallacy is much broader and more allusive.

The animistic fallacy involves attributing personal intention to an event or situation.

Reification fallacy should not be confused with other fallacies of ambiguity:

As a rhetorical device

The rhetorical devices of metaphor and personification express a form of reification, but short of a fallacy. These devices, by definition, do not apply literally and thus exclude any fallacious conclusion that the formal reification is real. For example, the metaphor known as the pathetic fallacy, "the sea was angry" reifies anger, but does not imply that anger is a concrete substance, or that water is sentient. The distinction is that a fallacy inhabits faulty reasoning, and not the mere illustration or poetry of rhetoric. [2]

Counterexamples

Reification, while usually fallacious, is sometimes considered a valid argument. Thomas Schelling, a game theorist during the Cold War, argued that for many purposes an abstraction shared between disparate people caused itself to become real. Some examples include the effect of round numbers in stock prices, the importance placed on the Dow Jones Industrial index, national borders, preferred numbers, and many others. [14]

See also

Related Research Articles

Abstraction is a process wherein general rules and concepts are derived from the usage and classification of specific examples, literal signifiers, first principles, or other methods.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Concept</span> Mental representation or an abstract object

A concept is defined as an abstract idea. It is understood to be a fundamental building block underlying principles, thoughts and beliefs. Concepts play an important role in all aspects of cognition. As such, concepts are studied within such disciplines as linguistics, psychology, and philosophy, and these disciplines are interested in the logical and psychological structure of concepts, and how they are put together to form thoughts and sentences. The study of concepts has served as an important flagship of an emerging interdisciplinary approach, cognitive science.

Process philosophy, also ontology of becoming, or processism, is an approach in philosophy that identifies processes, changes, or shifting relationships as the only real experience of everyday living. In opposition to the classical view of change as illusory or accidental, process philosophy posits transient occasions of change or becoming as the only fundamental things of the ordinary everyday real world.

<i>The Mismeasure of Man</i> 1981 book by Stephen Jay Gould

The Mismeasure of Man is a 1981 book by paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. The book is both a history and critique of the statistical methods and cultural motivations underlying biological determinism, the belief that "the social and economic differences between human groups—primarily races, classes, and sexes—arise from inherited, inborn distinctions and that society, in this sense, is an accurate reflection of biology".

Reification may refer to:

An operational definition specifies concrete, replicable procedures designed to represent a construct. In the words of American psychologist S.S. Stevens (1935), "An operation is the performance which we execute in order to make known a concept." For example, an operational definition of "fear" often includes measurable physiologic responses that occur in response to a perceived threat. Thus, "fear" might be operationally defined as specified changes in heart rate, galvanic skin response, pupil dilation, and blood pressure.

Reification is the process by which an abstract idea about a computer program is turned into an explicit data model or other object created in a programming language. A computable/addressable object—a resource—is created in a system as a proxy for a non computable/addressable object. By means of reification, something that was previously implicit, unexpressed, and possibly inexpressible is explicitly formulated and made available to conceptual manipulation. Informally, reification is often referred to as "making something a first-class citizen" within the scope of a particular system. Some aspect of a system can be reified at language design time, which is related to reflection in programming languages. It can be applied as a stepwise refinement at system design time. Reification is one of the most frequently used techniques of conceptual analysis and knowledge representation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Map–territory relation</span> Relationship between an object and a representation of that object

The map–territory relation is the relationship between an object and a representation of that object, as in the relation between a geographical territory and a map of it. Mistaking the map for the territory is a logical fallacy that occurs when someone confuses the semantics of a term with what it represents. Polish-American scientist and philosopher Alfred Korzybski remarked that "the map is not the territory" and that "the word is not the thing", encapsulating his view that an abstraction derived from something, or a reaction to it, is not the thing itself. Korzybski held that many people do confuse maps with territories, that is, confuse conceptual models of reality with reality itself. These ideas are crucial to general semantics, a system Korzybski originated.

The fallacy of four terms is the formal fallacy that occurs when a syllogism has four terms rather than the requisite three, rendering it invalid.

Construct validity concerns how well a set of indicators represent or reflect a concept that is not directly measurable. Construct validation is the accumulation of evidence to support the interpretation of what a measure reflects. Modern validity theory defines construct validity as the overarching concern of validity research, subsuming all other types of validity evidence such as content validity and criterion validity.

Ideal type, also known as pure type, is a typological term most closely associated with the sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920). For Weber, the conduct of social science depends upon the construction of abstract, hypothetical concepts. The "ideal type" is therefore a subjective element in social theory and research, and one of the subjective elements distinguishing sociology from natural science.

<i>Process and Reality</i> 1929 book by Alfred North Whitehead

Process and Reality is a book by Alfred North Whitehead, in which the author propounds a philosophy of organism, also called process philosophy. The book, published in 1929, is a revision of the Gifford Lectures he gave in 1927–28.

We diverge from Descartes by holding that what he has described as primary attributes of physical bodies, are really the forms of internal relationships between actual occasions. Such a change of thought is the shift from materialism to Organic Realism, as a basic idea of physical science.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Informal fallacy</span> Form of incorrect argument in natural language

Informal fallacies are a type of incorrect argument in natural language. The source of the error is not just due to the form of the argument, as is the case for formal fallacies, but can also be due to their content and context. Fallacies, despite being incorrect, usually appear to be correct and thereby can seduce people into accepting and using them. These misleading appearances are often connected to various aspects of natural language, such as ambiguous or vague expressions, or the assumption of implicit premises instead of making them explicit.

Hypostatic abstraction in mathematical logic, also known as hypostasis or subjectal abstraction, is a formal operation that transforms a predicate into a relation; for example "Honey is sweet" is transformed into "Honey has sweetness". The relation is created between the original subject and a new term that represents the property expressed by the original predicate.

Reification in natural language processing refers to where a natural language statement is transformed so actions and events in it become quantifiable variables. For example "John chased the duck furiously" can be transformed into something like

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Construct (philosophy)</span> Object whose existence depends upon a subjects mind

In philosophy, a construct is an object which is ideal, that is, an object of the mind or of thought, meaning that its existence may be said to depend upon a subject's mind. This contrasts with any possibly mind-independent objects, the existence of which purportedly does not depend on the existence of a conscious observing subject. Thus, the distinction between these two terms may be compared to that between phenomenon and noumenon in other philosophical contexts and to many of the typical definitions of the terms realism and idealism also. In the correspondence theory of truth, ideas, such as constructs, are to be judged and checked according to how well they correspond with their referents, often conceived as part of a mind-independent reality.

The mind projection fallacy is an informal fallacy first described by physicist and Bayesian philosopher E. T. Jaynes. In a first, "positive" form, it occurs when someone thinks that the way they see the world reflects the way the world really is, going as far as assuming the real existence of imagined objects. That is, someone's subjective judgments are "projected" to be inherent properties of an object, rather than being related to personal perception. One consequence is that others may be assumed to share the same perception, or that they are irrational or misinformed if they do not. In a second "negative" form of the fallacy, as described by Jaynes, occurs when someone assumes that their own lack of knowledge about a phenomenon means that the phenomenon is not or cannot be understood

In Marxist philosophy, reification is the process by which human social relations are perceived as inherent attributes of the people involved in them, or attributes of some product of the relation, such as a traded commodity.

References

  1. ↑ Reification, Encyclopædia Britannica
  2. 1 2 "Logical Fallacies, Formal and Informal". usabig.com. Archived from the original on 22 November 2011. Retrieved 10 April 2018.
  3. ↑ Dowden, Bradley. "Fallacy". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. ISSN   2161-0002 . Retrieved 26 April 2021. Whether a phrase commits the fallacy depends crucially upon whether the use of the inaccurate phrase is inappropriate in the situation. In a poem, it is appropriate and very common to reify nature, hope, fear, forgetfulness, and so forth, that is, to treat them as if they were objects or beings with intentions. In any scientific claim, it is inappropriate.
  4. ↑ "reification, n." OED Online. Oxford University Press, September 2016. Web. 24 September 2016. Format
  5. ↑ David K. Naugle (2002). Worldview: the history of a concept . Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. p.  178. ISBN   978-0-8028-4761-4.
  6. ↑ David Galin in B. Alan Wallace, editor, Buddhism & Science: Breaking New Ground. Columbia University Press, 2003, p. 132.
  7. ↑ Whitehead, Alfred North (1997) [1925]. Science and the Modern World. Free Press (Simon & Schuster). p.  52. ISBN   978-0-684-83639-3.
  8. ↑ Whitehead, Alfred North (1997) [1925]. Science and the Modern World. Free Press (Simon & Schuster). p.  58. ISBN   978-0-684-83639-3.
  9. ↑ James, William, The Meaning of Truth, A Sequel to 'Pragmatism', (1909/1979), Harvard University Press, pp. 135-136
  10. ↑ Winther, Rasmus G. (2014). James and Dewey on Abstraction. The Pluralist 9 (2), pp. 9-17 http://philpapers.org/archive/WINJAD.pdf
  11. ↑ Kaplan, R. M., & Saccuzzo, D. P. (1997). Psychological Testing. Chapter 5. Pacific Grove: Brooks-Cole.
  12. ↑ Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel (March 1987). "Rethinking reification". Theory and Society. 16 (2): 263–293. doi:10.1007/bf00135697. ISSN   0304-2421. S2CID   189890548.
  13. ↑ http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/446415/pathetic-fallacy pathetic fallacy. Retrieved on: 9 October 2012
  14. ↑ Schelling, Thomas C. (1980). The Strategy of Conflict. Harvard University Press. ISBN   9780674840317.
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