Fallacy of misplaced concreteness

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The "Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness", originally coined by philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, involves thinking something is a 'concrete' reality when in fact it is merely a belief, opinion or concept about the way things are.

Specifically, the fallacy refers to Whitehead's ruminations on the relationship of spatial and temporal location of objects. Whitehead rejects the notion that a real, concrete object in the universe can be described simply in spatial or temporal extension. Rather, the object must be described as a field that has both a location in space and a location in time.

This is analogous to lessons learned from Flatland; much like humans cannot perceive of a line that has width but no breadth, humans also cannot perceive an object that has spatial but not temporal position (or vice versa).

"[A]mong the primary elements of nature as apprehended in our immediate experience, there is no element whatever which possesses this character of simple location. … [Instead,] I hold that by a process of constructive abstraction we can arrive at abstractions which are the simply located bits of material, and at other abstractions which are the minds included in the scientific scheme." (Whitehead (1925), p. 72. Also see Whitehead (1919), Part III.)