Reification

Type

Informal

AKA

Hypostatization, Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness

Description

Treating an abstract concept as if it were a concrete, physical thing.

Examples

"Justice demands punishment."
"Science says you must vaccinate."

Linked from

Argument from Abstract Objects

A truth being about something is not a truth being thought by someone. That two and two would make four with no one to count is a fact about any possible collection of things, not a report that someone has always been doing the sum. The ar…

Argument from Biological Information

"Code" is a metaphor that the argument takes literally. The genetic code is a mapping between codons and amino acids implemented by transfer RNA; its origin is an open research question with several serious hypotheses (stereochemical affin…

Argument from Degrees of Perfection

Goodness, truth, and nobility are not quantities that objects contain. They are judgements made by people about things, relative to purposes (Morality, Moral claims are incomplete assertions). A knife is good for cutting and bad for spread…

Argument from Existential Dependence

"Being" is not a fluid passed down a chain. The hand moves the stick by transferring energy, a quantity that physics describes exactly. Nothing analogous is transferred when a thing "exists". The argument reifies existence into a substance…

Argument from the Laws of Nature

"Law" is an Equivocation. A law of nature is a description of how things behave, not a rule they consult. The lawgiver version trades on the legal sense of the word, in which a law is a command, and then imports the commander. Nothing in p…

Ontological Argument

Reification

Metaphysics

The Theory of Forms is the founding metaphysical system of the Western tradition and, I think, the founding mistake: the assumption that abstractions must exist somewhere in order to be real. See also Argument from Abstract Objects and Rei…

The Map is not the territory

Reification

Ship of Theseus

Reification