Reification

The OED entry for ‘reify’:

transitive. To make (something abstract) more concrete or real; to regard or treat (an idea, concept, etc.) as if having material existence.

Here’s about how I use the word:

To make a perception, feeling, belief, or conception more real, solid, or salient, by any means.

I would say perception and belief are often downstream of our metaphysics. The definition from the OED describes one common kind of reification, which I'll discuss in more detail later.

I'd also distinguish between propositional reification and phenomenological reification, which of course are often intertwined.

Propositional reification often takes the form of constructing a model or principle to be taken as the basis for reasoning or acting with respect to some domain. Some examples:

• Social contract theory
• "The scientific method"
• Utilitarianism
• Scriptural inerrancy
• Medical diagnostic criteria
• Design frameworks
• The divine right of kings, or similarly in China, the mandate of heaven

Note, sometimes these can be used manipulatively, but often they're clarifying and generative. A model can be a useful set of assumptions for thinking about a messier domain. Furthermore the concept is even more generic; we might say that physics is "highly reified," (in the sense that it claims that all physical phenomena are constructed out of an exact list of simpler ones) but this is not to say that it's necessarily mistaken, confused, or harmful. On the other hand, reification is more important to talk about when it's being made inappropriately as a cogntive or discursive move, and so I'm more likely to talk about cases that are problematic or contentious.

In some sense, any concept at least a little bit reified. Even just to bring a concept to consciousness enough to consider it at all explicitly is to reify it, among the kaleidoscope of ways that we could see something. This is great, this is helpful, this is how thought and perception work whatsoever, but also reification is a quality that can lead us to become confused.

Reification is probably necessarily "reductive", that is, it takes something complex and reduces the apparent complexity. If we take this theory or that perception as more real than that another, then whatever complexity which is captured by the second is at least less salient, if not eclipsed entirely.

(I unfortunately waffle between this sense of reification as "taking a reductive view" and the one at the top, of "making a perception more apparently real", and so might be a bit unclear at times. I usually want to refer to this whole broad cluster of motions, without needing to be too precise.)

Phenomenological reification overlaps with propositional reification in many of the specific examples. Still, we can usefully highlight the experiential, perceptual, and emotional aspects.

One nice example is the classic old crone/young woman image. Some people will get "stuck" in one perception, but many people can actively switch between them. At one time, generally people can't see both, we can only perceive one; while we pereceive the old woman, she becomes real. Obviously, both perceptions are something like "latent," and neither can be more real than the other, but we've reified one. (Fwiw, I think this point still applies even if you can see both at the same time.)

This is sort of an easy example, but what's more interesting is all the stuff that's so much stickier. Ordinarily we take a feeling, or a way of seeing as straightforwardly real, leaving out all the other ways we could see or feel about something.

(In)appropriate (De)reification

	appropriate	inappropriate
reification
dereification

So there's a 2x2 here, and I'll gesture at what's in the different boxes.

Inappropriate reification

"Inappropriate reification" I get mostly from Mark Lippmann, and is a distinction I haven't seen much elsewhere, though it rhymes with some concepts in Zen. (Yes, sorry, and not even pop Zen either.)

Mark often uses the concept to refer to someone prematurely, or perniciously, taking something as real or stable which "should" have just been provisional. Often a person might notice that x seems to cause y, and become convinced that x always causes y, or that if y is true then x must be, etc. Some concrete examples:

• "If I sit in this posture, then I'll get concentrated in meditation"
• "Since strength training fixed my knee pain, all joint problems must be due to muscle weakness" (I don't even think this is a strawman, I expect that some people believe things like this)
• "I feel ashamed as a person because of what my mother said to me as a child"

Eg. in many examples from the first list of propositional reification, often inappropriate reifications take the form of reifying a particular perspective as absolutely, or exclusively real, when in fact it's only a helpful set of assumptions, or it's oversimplified.

Sometimes I also want to say that something is "overreified," meaning something like that it's been taken as "more real than is appropriate" (but not to say that it's not real or important at all).

Appropriate reification

Like I said, reification is helpful, and even basic human functioning relies on it, I'm thinking here say of object permanence. I would say that phenomenally constructing stable distinctions is probably the basis of perception whatsoever, and so is certainly good, useful, appropriate, etc.

Unfortunately, however, just about everything beyond that is going to be contentious. I'm thinking here of big notions of Justice, Truth, Beauty etc., maybe also one's "Path" or "Destiny." Even things like cleanliness, politeness, and correctness are non-obvious, at least at the margin.

Dereification, in general

A very common form of dereification is literally telling someone "that's not real". Some dereification occurs """naturally""", likely everyone is familiar with waking up from a dream and the reality of the dream dissolving as they come to. Often, there's learning and slow decay that happens naturally, as one way of seeing something replaces another.

Dereification is a important aspect of traditional Buddhist models, and maybe marginally in some other traditions. Sometimes, derefication is even quite reified, and seen as the goal of the spiritual path! Reports of meditation-induced dereification often include descriptions like "cutting through" or "teasing apart" perception and phenomena in general, either resulting a phenomenon appearing as flimsy or thin, or in its ceasing altogether, up to and including body, mind, and world.

(In)appropriate dereification?

Obviously, these will also be pretty contentious. Many people (likely most reading this book) think that God is not real, and should not be taken as real, but would be aghast at the idea of regarding the love for a child as "not real." I won't say more about this here, much of what I'll discuss in the sections on practice and axiology will be about this question.