Marsha said to Mark:
I see reification as a tool too. But as dmb says that James says,
"Intellectualism becomes vicious, he said, when concepts are reified, deified
and the empirical reality from which they were abstracted in the first place is
denigrated as less than real."
dmb says:
Reification is not a tool. It is a certain kind of mistake, a conceptual error.
It is a particular way to misuse a concept or abuse an idea. Nobody needs to
take my word for it. Look it up. When generalizations and abstractions are
mistakenly given concrete, existential status, when a concept is taken as
something more than a concept. Around here, subjects and objects would be the
prime example. They are fine AS concepts. When they are treated as different
kinds of substances or mistaken for metaphysical categories, you've committed
the error known as reification. The term is used to oppose various kinds of
essentialism and Platonism, as well as SOM
I think it was Marsha who said:
And in this reification process, it is that cage wall that creates separation
between the phenomenon/concept and the self when an image, construct or
definition is erected and assigned. imho
dmb says:
I can't make much sense of this word salad but it's pretty clear that you're
confused about the definition of "definition". A definition is like a line or a
wall that surrounds a word or a concept. But that line does not separate the
word from experience or from the phenomenal reality. The wall around each word
or concept separates it from OTHER WORDS and OTHER IDEAS. Words mean what they
mean in relation to all the other words in the language. The definition of
every word is never anything except more words. It's a system of relations.
It's a system of distinctions and relations, similarities and opposites, of
subtle connotations and stark contrasts. That's root basis of all conceptual
thought. All these analogies, comparisons, oppositions and distinctions are
verbal and intellectual. They're explainable and knowable and useful and good.
There no rule that says this must be spoiled by "reification".
I think it would make sense to use that term to push back against the error
whenever it appears someone is committing it. If you or Mark actually
understood the problem and could recognize it when you saw it, you'd be on the
war path against Ham's essentialism. You can see here what James meant by
"reifying" the concept of a circle and "denigrating" the actual experiential
reality of circles.
An essence characterizes a substance or a form, in the sense of the Forms or
Ideas in Platonic idealism. It is permanent, unalterable, and eternal; and
present in every possible world....Socrates was one of the first essentialists,
believing in the concept of ideal forms, an abstract entity of which individual
objects are mere facsimilies. To give an example; the ideal form of a circle is
a perfect circle, something that is physically impossible to make manifest, yet
the circles that we draw and observe clearly have some idea in common — this
idea is the ideal form. Plato believed that these ideas are eternal and vastly
superior to their manifestations in the world, and that we understand these
manifestations in the material world by comparing and relating them to their
respective ideal form. Plato's forms are regarded as patriarchs to essentialist
dogma simply because they are a case of what is intrinsic and a-contextual of
objects — the abstract properties that makes them what they are. For more on
forms, read Plato's parable of the cave.
The sun will come up tomorrow and the point of this post will be even further
over Marsha's head.
Bet on it.
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