What it is
Treating an abstraction as if it were a concrete agent that can act or want.
In the wild
The market wants stability, so it will act.
How to answer it
Replace the abstraction with the actual people involved and see if the claim survives.
Broken structure
Reification
Also called Hypostatisation, concretism
In depth
Origin and naming
From the Latin res, 'thing' — to reify is to thing-ify. Alfred North Whitehead named the philosophical version 'the fallacy of misplaced concreteness' in Science and the Modern World (1925); William James had called a nearby habit 'vicious abstractionism' in 1909. Stephen Jay Gould used it as the spine of The Mismeasure of Man, against the idea that intelligence is a measurable thing.
More places it shows up
The algorithm has decided the applicant is a risk — as if a scoring rule could decide anything on its own.
Science says we evolved for scarcity — as though a research programme could make claims without the researchers inside it.
The brand wants to connect with a younger audience — the brand, apparently, having committee meetings of its own.
History teaches us that empires fall — which absolves everyone who actually pulled the levers.
How to spot it
- Notice when an abstraction — the market, the system, the algorithm — is cast as the subject of a verb of wanting or deciding.
- Notice when replacing the abstraction with actual people turns a confident prediction into an obvious question.
- Notice when a model or metric is deferred to as if it had a stake in the outcome.