Reification

Look up reification or reify in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Reification generally refers to 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 (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

See also

• Concretization
• Objectification, the treatment of a human being as no more than an object