# Reification

*Also called: Hypostatisation, concretism*

- **Cluster:** Broken structure — The form itself does not carry the conclusion
- **Page:** https://fallacy.wiki/fallacy/reification/
- **In Arabic:** https://fallacy.wiki/ar/fallacy/reification.md
- **Licence:** CC BY 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

## 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.

## 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.

## Nearby

- [Ecological fallacy](https://fallacy.wiki/fallacy/ecological.md)
- [Fallacy of composition](https://fallacy.wiki/fallacy/composition.md)

## Read more

- [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification_(fallacy))
- [Fallacies Online](https://fallacies.online/wiki/abstraction/reification)

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From fallacy.wiki — a bilingual field guide to 91 logical fallacies, published by phi holdings. Licensed CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/): reuse freely with attribution to fallacy.wiki.