Reification can be regarded as a form of materialism. Excessive reification may be regarded as a mode of misplaced concreteness akin to fetishism. Bateson attributes the identification of this fallacy to Whitehead. For his part, Bateson suggests that Marxist historians fall into this fallacy when they maintain that economic "phenomena" are "primary".
It would be pleasant to imagine that somewhere in the world – perhaps in the East, wherever that is – people are more focused on relationships than things. In the West, we seem to be obsessed by things.
Materialism is not just a matter of wanting to possess things, although that’s certainly part of it. It’s a matter of perceiving the world as if it were composed of things. Children are taught this from an early age: most of the available books for toddlers have one word on each page, and the word is a noun: ball, bear, banana.If you really make an effort, you can find books showing activities (bathing, building, blushing) or spatial relationships (inside, outside, upside down) or even feelings (happy, sad, tired). But it’s still difficult for us adults to escape from the materialist mindset, or to avoid transmitting it to the next generation. After all, materialism is embedded in the structure of the child’s book (one page, one picture, one word), together with the implicit notion that the child’s task is to accumulate vocabulary, one word at a time.
That’s why it’s so difficult to see the world other than as objects, and why the object-oriented paradigm has been so attractive within the software world. However, technology may now be driving us beyond this paradigm, into a world where things are indexed purely by availability.
Originally posted at http://www.veryard.com/infomgt/reification.htm
For more on reification, see https://rvsoapbox.blogspot.com/search/label/reification
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