Difference between revisions of "Reification"

Revision as of 21:49, 23 September 2024

Full Title or Meme

The consideration of an abstract thing as if it were concrete, or of an inanimate object as if it were living

Context

The ultimate test of any theory or architectural design is the Reification of that abstraction into reality. Whether the Reification is simply itself an abstract process of the imagination, or a physical process of making the design a real object, the abstraction is tested against reality.

In trying to explain his notion of the ideal form, Plato imagined a cave where people were restrained to see only the shadows of reality on the back wall of the cave. Thus he described a process of the imagination to help understand how reality can be but a shadow of the pre-existing ideal. In his world the ideal was pre-existing, in our world the search for the abstraction works the other way, to try to find the best abstraction what, when reified, still makes sense.

The consideration of a human being as an impersonal object. (programming) Process that makes out of a non-computable/addressable object a computable/addressable one. (see also the Wikipedia description.)

Standards and Protocols are Holy

In biology, the individual organism is ephemeral. Each individual is incredibly fragile, and has a built-in limited lifespans, not to mention a good chance of meeting with accidental death at any moment. The only things that matter, that have at least a shot at longevity, are genes (and species, really)…

• Reification (computer science), the creation of a data model that can automatically create the data base objects.
• Reification (knowledge representation), the representation of facts and/or assertions
• Reification (statistics), the use of an idealized model to make inferences linking results from a model with experimental observations

Other uses

• Reification (fallacy), the fallacy of treating an abstraction as if it were a real thing
• Reification (Gestalt psychology), the perception of an object as having more spatial information than is present
• Reification (linguistics), the transformation of a natural-language statement such that actions and events represented by it become quantifiable
• Reification (Marxism), the consideration of an abstraction of an object as if it had living existence and abilities
• Concretization, which takes an abstraction and makes it real. Best synonym for identity management.
• Objectification, the treatment of an entity (such as a human or animal) as an object
• Catfishing, the attempt to turn a Pseudonym Into the appearance of a real person.

Computer Science

Like many things with really strange, unfamiliar names, it's unlikely that Reification matters much to you. I didn't think it mattered to me either until I started to do some serious thinking about modelling events for a project I was working on when all of the critical pieces fell into place. Then it suddenly mattered a great deal more. A Reification is a statement about a triple used in data storage. The W3C RDF-Star working group has been discussing such reifications for a while, and typically these are done in the context of annotations. However, Increasingly, there seems to be a concensus building around reifications used in a broader context,^[1]

References

• Computing Joy