REIFICATION

treatment of an analytic or abstract relationship as though it were a concrete entity. (Young, p. l09)

The process of regarding something abstract as a material entity, Whitehead's "fallacy of misplaced concreteness," e.g., the mistake of confusing a system, which is a construct, with the physical entity described in its terms (see general systems theory). In social systems reification is encouraged by the use of language and underlies many processes of constructing social reality. (Krippendorff)

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