reification

First attested around 1846; a macaronic calque of German Verdinglichung, using -ification (“making”) for ver- + -lich + -ung, and Latin rēs (“thing”) for Ding (“thing”)

• IPA^(key): /ˌɹeɪəfəˈkeɪʃən/, enPR: rāəfəkāshən
• Rhymes: -eɪʃən

reification (countable and uncountable, plural reifications)

1. The consideration of an abstract thing as if it were concrete, or of an inanimate object as if it were living.
   • 2002, Timothy Bewes, Reification: Or The Anxiety of Late Capitalism, Verso, →ISBN, page 146:

     The reification of art and religion, a symptom of their historical obsolescence, takes the form of their instrumentalization, their reduction to a mere use value. At this point they become ‘cultural goods’, writes Adorno, and ‘are no longer taken quite seriously by anybody.’

   • 2018, Pieter Seuren, Saussure and Sechehaye […] , BRILL, →ISBN, page 209:

     Computer scientists found out how functional reification is in programming languages: they call it ‘object-oriented programming’ […] .

   • 2022 September 20, Danielle Carr, “Mental Health Is Political”, in The New York Times‎, →ISSN:

     Reification swaps out a political problem for a scientific or technical one; it’s how, for example, the effects of unregulated tech oligopolies become “social media addiction,” how climate catastrophe caused by corporate greed becomes a “heat wave” — and, by the way, how the effect of struggles between labor and corporations combines with high energy prices to become “inflation.”

2. The consideration of a human being as an impersonal object.
3. (programming) A process that makes a computable/addressable object out of a non-computable/addressable one; or a concrete class out of a generic one.
   • 2020, Marco Faella, Seriously Good Software: Code that works, survives, and wins, Simon and Schuster, →ISBN, page 251:

     Contrary to Java, C++ and C# implement generics via reification, meaning that each specific version of a generic class, like List<String> is converted into a concrete class, either at compile time (C++) or at runtime (C#).

4. (linguistics) The transformation of a natural-language statement into a form in which its actions and events are quantifiable variables.

• hypostatization
• materialization
• objectification
• pathetic fallacy
• thingification

• dereification

• reify