Crossword clues for reification
reification
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
1846, "act of materializing," from Latin re-, stem of res "thing" + -fication. In Marxist jargon, translating German Verdinglichung.
Wiktionary
n. 1 The consideration of an abstract thing as if it were concrete, or of an inanimate object as if it were living. 2 The consideration of a human being as an impersonal object. 3 (context programming English) Process that makes a computable/addressable object out of a non-computable/addressable one. 4 (cx linguistics English) The transformation of a natural language statement into a form in which its actions and events are quantifiable variables.
WordNet
n. regarding something abstract as a material thing [syn: hypostatization, hypostatisation]
representing a human being as a physical thing deprived of personal qualities or individuality; "according to Marx, treating labor as a commodity exemplified the reification of the individual" [syn: depersonalization, depersonalisation]
Wikipedia
Reification is making something real, bringing something into being, or making something concrete.
Reification may also refer to:
- Reification (Gestalt psychology), the perception of an object as having more spatial information than is actually present
- Reification (Marxism) (German: Verdinglichung), the consideration, in Marxism, of an abstraction or an object as if it had living existence and abilities (also sometimes called "objectification", but see below)
- Reification (computer science), the creation of a data model
- Reification (fallacy), the fallacy of treating an abstraction as if it were a real thing
- Reification (knowledge representation), the representation of facts and/or assertions
- Reification (linguistics), the transformation, in natural-language processing, of a natural-language statement such that actions and events represented by it become quantifiable variables
- Reification (statistics), the use of an idealized model to make inferences linking results from an actual model with experimental observations
Reification is the process by which an abstract idea about a computer program is turned into an explicit data model or other object created in a programming language. A computable/addressable object — a resource — is created in a system as a proxy for a non computable/addressable object. By means of reification, something that was previously implicit, unexpressed, and possibly inexpressible is explicitly formulated and made available to conceptual (logical or computational) manipulation. Informally, reification is often referred to as "making something a first-class citizen" within the scope of a particular system. Some aspect of a system can be reified at language design time, which is related to reflection in programming languages. It can be applied as a stepwise refinement at system design time. Reification is one of the most frequently used techniques of conceptual analysis and knowledge representation.
Reification in knowledge representation is the process of turning a predicate into an object. Reification involves the representation of factual assertions that are referred to by other assertions, which might then be manipulated in some way; e.g., comparing logical assertions from different witnesses in order to determine their credibility.
The message "John is six feet tall" is an assertion involving truth that commits the speaker to its factuality, whereas the reified statement "Mary reports that John is six feet tall" defers such commitment to Mary. In this way, the statements can be incompatible without creating contradictions in reasoning. For example, the statements "John is six feet tall" and "John is five feet tall" are mutually exclusive (and thus incompatible), but the statements "Mary reports that John is six feet tall" and "Paul reports that John is five feet tall" are not incompatible, as they are both governed by a conclusive rationale that either Mary or Paul is (or both are), in fact, incorrect.
Reification in natural language processing refers to where a natural language statement is transformed so actions and events in it become quantifiable variables. For example "John chased the duck furiously" can be transformed into something like
(Exists e)(chasing(e) & past_tense(e) & actor(e,John) & furiously(e) & patient(e,duck)).Another example would be "Sally said John is mean", which could be expressed as something like
(Exists u,v)(saying(u) & past_tense(u) & actor(u,Sally) & that(u,v) & is(v) & actor(v,John) & mean(v)).Such representations allow one to use the tools of classical first-order predicate calculus even for statements which, due to their use of tense, modality, adverbial constructions, propositional arguments (e.g. "Sally said that X"), etc., would have seemed intractable. This is an advantage because predicate calculus is better understood and simpler than the more complex alternatives (higher-order logics, modal logics, temporal logics, etc.), and there exist better automated tools (e.g. automated theorem provers and model checkers) for manipulating it.
Reified forms can be used for other purposes besides the application of first-order logic; one example is the automatic discovery of synonymous phrases.
The reified forms are sometimes called quasi-logical forms, and the existential variables are sometimes treated as Skolem constants.
Not all natural language constructs admit a uniform translation to first order logic. See donkey sentence for examples and a discussion.
In statistics, reification is the use of an idealized model of a statistical process. The model is then used to make inferences connecting model results, which imperfectly represent the actual process, with experimental observations.
Also, a process whereby model-derived quantities such as principal components, factors and latent variables are identified, named and treated as if they were directly measurable quantities.
Reification (also known as concretism, hypostatization, or the fallacy of misplaced concreteness) is a fallacy of ambiguity, when an abstraction (abstract belief or hypothetical construct) is treated as if it were a concrete real event or physical entity. In other words, it is the error of treating something which is not concrete, such as an idea, as a concrete thing. A common case of reification is the confusion of a model with reality: " the map is not the territory".
Reification is part of normal usage of natural language (just like metonymy for instance), as well as of literature, where a reified abstraction is intended as a figure of speech, and actually understood as such. But the use of reification in logical reasoning or rhetoric is misleading and usually regarded as a fallacy.
In Marxism, reification (, literally: "making into a thing" (cf. Latin res meaning "thing") or Versachlichung, literally " objectification"; regarding something impersonally) is the thingification of social relations or of those involved in them, to the extent that the nature of social relationships is expressed by the relationships between traded objects (see commodity fetishism and value-form).
This implies that objects are transformed into subjects and subjects are turned into objects, with the result that subjects are rendered passive or determined, while objects are rendered as the active, determining factor. Hypostatization refers to an effect of reification which results from supposing that whatever can be named, or conceived abstractly, must actually exist, an ontological and epistemological fallacy.
The concept is related to, but is distinct from, Marx's theories of alienation and commodity fetishism. Alienation is the general condition of human estrangement. Reification is a specific form of alienation. Commodity fetishism is a specific form of reification.
Usage examples of "reification".
Sandy the witch wanted to heal, to make of the physical world, if not an absolute reification of divine love, then at least an echo of it, to touch pain and sickness with a hand that was at once her own and that of her Goddess, manifesting divinity with word and with music.
Each implementation would be scored against a single criterion -- how successfully the reification initiative is fought off.
Dylar is a kind of pharmaceutical reification of white noise: a pill to evade the death-fear.
The common error in all three of these philosophical positions is reification, which makes it impossible to construct compelling theories accounting for interrelationships among reified entities of any kind.
The problem lies not in the inaccessibility of consciousness, as Searle implies, but in the absolute reification of subjective consciousness versus objective reality.
The techniques of the fantasy -- reification of abstract concepts within the framework of a simplified moral system -- lend themselves to the exposure of existing social and cultural ills.
At the present time, unfortunately, all signs point, not to decentralization and the abolition of man-herders, but rather to a steady increase in the power of the Big Shepherd and his oligarchy of bureaucratic dogs, to a growth in the size, the complexity, the machine-like efficiency and rigidity of social organizations, and to a completer deification of the State, accompanied by a completer reification, or reduction to thing-hood, of individual persons.
The pain was unbelievable, a reification of personal loss, physical grief.
Bandar knew the dark eidolon was not the real Gabbris, was in fact a projected reification of those negative qualities that Bandar rejected in his own makeup.
Yet the truth is that they were the culmination and reification of European history in the 19th century.
The reification of paradox is the underlying, unspoken phenomenon of this discourse.
Henry Mackie says is a famous revolutionary catchword and which outlines, in clear, simple language, Henry Mackie's program for the reification of the human condition from the ground up.
It could be an egomaniac's sublime nirvana state -- the self, exponentiated by countless virtual duplicates that reflect and resonate in perfect harmony, preparing to burst through, en masse, to a splendid new level of spiritual reification.
This tendency is known as reification, and according to the Madhyamaka view, this is an inborn delusion that provides the basis for a host of mental afflictions.