Reification
Robert Sinclair
Objects derive their influence not from properties inherent in them; but from such as are bestowed upon them by the minds of those who are conversant with or affected by these objects.
John Ruskin, Modern Painters
A relative newcomer to the world of logical fallacies, reification is difficult to place and its status as a fallacy not that well understood. In general, reification involves taking something that is abstract, like an idea or concept, and making it concrete, or assigning it a concrete, ‘real’ existence. The apparent error involves assuming that something with only abstract existence should be seen as having material, physical existence. Examples might include the myriad uses of ‘nation,’ ‘state,’ ‘nature,’ and ‘race.’ Take the old familiar expression “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.” Here, ‘Nature’ is an abstraction or abstract concept used to name a sequence of natural events. But the expression assigns a material human character to this concept, which as an abstraction it cannot have. Put simply, nature is not a human being and cannot then be fooled. When used metaphorically as in this and many other everyday examples, such reifications are relatively harmless. It is when they form part of an argument that they become more problematic. Consider the following short argument:
The State controls the business world and has its hand in everyone’s pocket. By limiting this governmental pickpocketing, we can prevent such obstructions to our individual rights and freedoms.
Here, the concept of the ‘State’ has been assigned humanlike traits involving the desire to control and ‘pickpocket.’ While not explicit, it is further suggested that such desires are wrong and the government is then behaving unethically when it engages in such actions. However, the ‘government’ or ‘State’ is not a person, but a legal entity of some kind, or, perhaps, a specific kind of social organization designed to meet the interests of its citizens.
It is not a human agent that is capable of possessing these human traits and desires. The State’s taxing of individuals and control of the business community may be mistaken but cannot be convincingly shown to be wrong through this flawed (and misleading) attribution or reification of human characteristics. The faulty reasoning of such arguments rests on a specious presumption concerning the assignment of concrete properties, traits, and causal powers to an abstraction (the State) and so fails to offer any support for its conclusion (Dewey 2012, 41-59). Avoiding this type of mistaken reasoning requires that one not make this presumption. Consider this example:The policies of the current government (an organized group of public officials) seek to control the economic transactions within the business community and use taxation to limit the income of its citizens. Such actions are not in the interest of either the business community or its citizens. The public officials who are implementing such policies do so wrongly. In order to prevent this we must limit such actions by taking the needed step to remove these individuals from public office.
This argument attempts to capture the main criticism of the previous argument but without assigning humanlike causal agency to the state itself. It does so by focusing more carefully on the specific context of this alleged connection between the government and its activities. Here, we can see that while this argument is still somewhat general, it more specifically targets the way public officials are promoting policies that are not in the interest of those individuals they serve. While it remains inconclusive, it has become more convincing precisely because it highlights the problematic consequences of human individual actions that are based on flawed social policies.
The standard analysis of reification then presents it as a fallacy of presumption, which can be avoided by minimizing the assignment of causal agency to the abstractions used in logical reasoning.
However, the perhaps deeper and more serious consequences of what has been called “pernicious reification” have been further explored by the pragmatist philosophers William James and John Dewey (Winther 2014, 9). Both philosophers emphasize the indispensable value found through the use of abstract thought (Dewey 1920, 86-87; James 1997, 246-247; also see Quine 2015, 17-19). But they further warn us of the ways in which our aptitude for abstraction and classification can be misused. Take, for example, abstract concepts such as ‘elasticity’ or ‘voluminousness,’ which can be partially but incompletely applied to any physical body, or the further judgment that someone is a ‘drunkard,’ which can result in an overly universal and fixed claim about someone’s basic identity. Dewey and James take such examples to show that abstractions, including concepts and judgments, are purpose-driven and, while only providing partial descriptions of things, remain useful for understanding, inference-making, and within our various interventions with the environment (James 1997, 246-250; Winther 2014, 1). However, most philosophers have missed these salient facts about abstractions, forgetting the context in which they are used. This results in mistakenly using them in ways that are too rigid, too universal, and too ontologically determinate. In such cases, we forget the specific functions assigned to a given abstraction and in the process run the risk of impairing epistemic and moral reasoning in everyday affairs, science, and philosophy (Winther 2014, 9-17).James describes such mistakes as examples of ‘vicious abstractionism,’ when the attempt to classify things yields the belief that the abstracted elements of a situation provide a complete and accurate description of the phenomena in question (James 1997, 249; Winther 2014, 10-11). The person who kills someone is wholly and exclusively classified as a ‘murderer’ without any reference to any other features of that person (such as his being a father or policeman).
This oversimplification is obviously limiting, since other concepts (denoting other features) may be connected to the feature picked out by the concept being used. These further connections might then prove useful for different explanatory aims and in different contexts. The error here involves forgetting the specific function of the concept in focusing on only one or perhaps several properties and how these properties are further connected to a fallible network of other concepts (James 1997, 249-250; Winther 2014, 11). This important local and specific function of concepts is ignored, resulting in classifications that are at once both too narrow and too universal. Dewey more generally labels this mistake the philosophic fallacy, where the failure to note function and context leads philosophers to convert “eventual functions into antecedent existence” (1929, 29; also see Pappas 2008, 26-29). All attempts at reasoning and explanation must be selective, but when such decisions are disregarded, the selected abstraction (the possible eventual function) is replaced in thought as a finished reality that preceded it (antecedent existence), resulting in an overly generous and unnecessary reification of that prior decision. Dewey argues that the empirical method used in modern science helps to keep focus on this initial decision and thus keeps us on guard against these abstractive reifications. This perspective is seen with Dewey’s criticism of psychological descriptions of human reflexes in terms of a ‘reflex arc,’ where a firm distinction is drawn between stimulus and response. Dewey contends that rather than denoting a fixed ‘antecedent’ reality, this distinction is a functional one that points to the way behavior is integrated and continuous with its environment (Winther 2014, 15). By taking the distinction between stimulus and response as a fixed reality, we fail to recognize that the proper unit of psychological analysis is located in the organized functional coordination of sensations and responses.Within the rarified air of philosophical theory, the failures of abstraction that lead to pernicious reification might be of little consequence. But abstract reasoning plays a fundamental role in both science and everyday reasoning, and so its abuses can lead to inaccurate scientific explanations and further damaging social consequences (Duster 2005). For example, it has been recently argued that the biological data used to support various positions on the biological reality of ‘race’ fail to distinguish competing claims about racial classification (Kaplan and Winther 2013, 410). The social backdrop to such debates concerning the reality of socially identified races involves the way differences in human welfare (including life expectancy, standards of living, and overall quality of life) are often linked to racial classifications. Pernicious reification in the biological sciences might contribute to mistaken views of such differences, blinding us to the social circumstances that can play a significant role in accounting for the existence of these variations in human well-being across socially recognized racial groups.
References
Dewey, John. 1920. Reconstruction in Philosophy. New York, NY: Dover Publications.
Dewey, John. 1929. Experience and Nature. New York, NY: Dover Publications. Dewey, John. 2012. The Public and its Problems, edited by Melvin Rodgers.
University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Duster, Troy. 2005. “Race and Reification in Science.” Science (307): 1050-1051. James, William. 1997. The Meaning of Truth. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. Kaplan, Jonathan, and Rasmus Gr0nfeldt Winther. 2013. “Prisoners of Abstraction?
The Theory and Measure of Genetic Variation, and the Very Concept of ‘Race’.” Biological Theory (7): 401-412.
Pappas, Gregory. 2008. John Dewey’s Ethics: Democracy as Experience. Bloomington, IA: Indiana University Press.
Quine, W.V. 2015. “Levels of Abstraction.” In Quine and his Place in History, edited by Frederique Janssen-Lauret and Gary Kemp. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 12-20.
Winther, Rasmus Gr0nfeldt. 2014. “James and Dewey on Abstraction.” The Pluralist (9): 1-28.