TABLE OF CONTENTS FOR THEME ONE

A spectre is haunting philosophy - the spectre of reification. 1 Etymologically the word reification derives from the Latin res. Res is translatable into English as the multi-categorial: thing, object, matter, concern, affair, business, property. Res extensa was used to denote the physical world, whilst res cogitans was used to denote the thinking being, the being that perceives its own (so-called) beingness.

We do not need the formulaic self-referential confirmative subsumptions that  Descartes considered necessary for the recognition and incorporation of one's humanness under a more general category of human. It is not the utterance of abstract nouns, verbal frequentatives (like: I think)  or the reificative lexical shells and their contents which confirm our existence as homo-sapiens. We are aware that we exist as human beings at a much deeper non-lexical neurological level without the need to articulate the obvious. We require no verbal, algorithmic mantra like: I think therefore I am nor the mouthing of the usefully encoded first-person personal pronouns: 'I' and 'me' to corroborate our manhood or womanhood.

Our brains are self-registering survivency organs, evolved to provide continuous feedback of its own indications at the maxima and minima of experiential variations. Our brains provide a ceaseless biologic systems-analysis backed up by an informative biographic arcanum of stored stratagems for survival.

A brief consideration of these facts leads us to reject the motivation, the requirement and the saneness of any ill-considered ritual of existential self-confirmation of the type represented by the spurious Cartesian cogito. The exposited content of a shell pronoun like 'I' makes available an enshelled or memory-packed abundance of potentially useful interfacial layers. Such experiential templates enable the human entity to interact with the environmental system in which it finds itself.

Whenever the personal pronouns I or me or mine are conversationally generated and introduced, the memorising brain makes available a huge empiric digest, including a complete (if somewhat fractured and abbreviated ) personal autobiography and a constantly updating compendium of one's current moods, actions, interests and anxieties with particular reference to one's current preoccupations and concerns.

I claim that even prior to the use of the word 'I' (or any other word) the brain relates the first-person pronoun to the sub-lingual existential language-possessing-entity itself, which is the utterer of the identity symbol in the first place. Therefore human entities do not need to make an cogito ergo sum existential claim - for there is no alternative to existing. To exist is a done deal which is seen to be done by the resultant existent. The very fact of existing is psychosomatically tantamount to confirming the lack of any non-existential alternative. The whole Cartesian project is rendered a grossly nonsensical redundancy - the historically spurious claim that one needs a verification that that which exists - exists.

To reify is simply to turn an idea (the neurological activity of one's brain) into a res extensa (a thing). This treatise is composed of two main themes, which, though they gravitate separately around the same theoretical axis, are conjoined in the conclusion into a syncretised, unitive hypothesis. Each theme contains a new controversial hypothesis.

Both of the above hypotheses will be outlined in the following introductory exposition of the thematic nature of the paper which follows and then extrapolated separately in the appropriate theme.

The first section is of a predominantly linguistic nature and quite specific in scope. It refers to the contending traditional philosophical and ontological accounts of reification, which are revisited and reconsidered. Where communicative speed is considered more important than absolute descriptive or ontological precision, an informative (often single-word) variable of thingification of states of affairs allows the speedy dissemination of information. Next, the grammatico-semantic elements and linguistic mechanisms that facilitate such reificatory and semantic transformations, are introduced, identified and explained.

The first controversial claim to be made is that /be/ in all of its conjugations is not a verb at all.

It is proposed that the Indo-European /is/ 2 unlike the later Latin introduction /exists/ 3 is a deictic or indicant mechanism with the adverbial payload or function of pointing or specifying the existential modality of the subject as - at the present moment and of confirming by agreement its tense and numerical nature as - a singularity. The advantage, disadvantages, benefits and dangers of reification as a unique form of abstraction is then juxtapositioned and evaluated in the second half of the treatise.

The second section of the treatise introduces new concept that is not yet in the public domain. If true, such a bio-evolutionary theory and historical interpretation of the emergence and development of reification would help to explain certain linguistic and philosophical phenomena.

Efficient communication presupposes a semantic tendency to choose brevity via concretist universalisation when circumstances demand a rapid reaction.  Whilst evolutionary ethics argues that nature has selected for a moral sense and a disposition in humans to be good in the interests of social stability,  my General Theory of Reification proposes that nature's survivalist mechanisms select in favour of communicative efficiency in a form of conatus-driven  5 rapid and efficient linguistic exchange which engenders reification. For thousands of years this Darwinian paradigm of neuro-biological discrimination has generated human vocabularies which provide for a selective switching between a slow but more accurate periphrastic exchange of information in favour of a more generalised but rapid reificatory inexactitude should the social circumstances deem it necessary. In brief The General Theory Of Reification claims that nature acts this way by engendering reificatory and abstract language as a method of harnessing neuro-linguistic and corporeal dynamics as a biogenetical investment in future progeny.

The word reification 6 first entered the English language in George Grote's History of Greece, where he stated that:

To reify is to accumulate diverse perceptual particulars and neurologically coalesce and thingify them into useful, time-saving, usually one-word pseudo-entities. These welcome speed-enhancing linguistic innovations introduced benefits to human ideation and released a plethora of abstractive thoughts.  Ideas, plans, actions and states of affairs were  hypostasised and in time became to be construed  as real existents.
So-called conceptual entities were gerundially transformed into manipulable things.

But although these useful fictions provided communicative benefits, they also engendered  the establishment of embryonic semantic mechanisms which had a divisive effect on early philosophy. The burgeoning contemporary use of reification continues to cause discord and misunderstanding, not only within the domain of  present-day academia and philosophical thought, but in most disciplines, including science, the arts religion and personal and international relations.  

The long-term prejudicial implications of thingification  for philosophy are examined in this paper and deemed worthy of further serious philosophical investigation. Our starting point in Theme One is a rigorous re-evaluation of the semantic nature of the (so-called) verb /be/ which, together with its conjugational elements, is classed semantically as the most slippery, most irregular content word in the English language. We will then look at gerundialisation and its effect upon philosophy. Each chapter is designed to be reliant upon and intrinsically associated with the preceding parts in a cogent flow of arguments and ontological determinations.

We have now arrived at Theme One in which the nature of reification is introduced in greater depth.

(a) Those inter-theoretical philosophers who remain content to concern themselves with the historically conceived, existentially multi-categorial ontological classifications of objects and the historical associations provided for them antecedently by the metaphysical tradition.

(b) Those philosophers who are antithetical to classical metaphysics, who see fit to challenge such highly abstract, seriously questionable theoretical givens and emphasise the essentiality, centrality and refinement of a materialist monist ontology as the most important task of philosophy.

At the moment we habituate ourselves to reification as part of our early experience of being cast into what Wittgenstein called: 'The world as I found it.' [3] (Wittgenstein. Tractatus. 5.631)

In this section and the sub-chapters that follow my aim is to present a cogent theoretical account of the traditional misunderstanding of the nature of /be/. It is not possible to understand the nature of the reification of the religio-philosophical concept /being/ without an understanding of the so-called be-mechanism and its implications for its conjugate predicational introductant word /is/. The fissure that runs through philosophy is based upon a misapprehension of the precise semantic roles of /be/ and its conjugates which add inflections showing person, number, gender, tense, aspect, etc., by BOTH sides of the idealist/realist divide.

Any investigation of reification or entification 7 must begin with an in-depth examination of the major reificational problem of Western philosophy - the belief by some that there is such a thing as the being of beings or the existence of that which exists which in some way is additional to and can be characterised as being ontologically different from the entity itself. This false belief, which in some people borders upon faith, presupposes and demands an initial rigorous re-examination of man's basic preconceptions of the nature of the Indo European verb /bheu/ or /bheu/ via Sanskrit and its modern diachronic sibling variant the English verb /be/.

The grammar of Panini's Treatise on Words, insists that all nouns are derived from verbs, and because of this it was perhaps natural that the Sanskrit copula should be determined to be a verb. Perhaps Panini's inclusion of the /bheu/ as a verb influenced the Greek's to wrongfully classify the /be/ word as a verb. But (although there was contact between the Greeks and the Indians, 8 there is no evidence that the early Greek grammarians were ever exposed to the Sanskrit grammar of Panini.

We will be examining Panini's contribution in chapter two, where we will be returning to man's first intellectual engagement with the concepts of the be-word and the so-called ontological difference, the little understood differentiation between what linguists call entitivity or pure presence and existential modality (the manner in which an existing object exists). It is important for an understanding of /be/ that we prioritise our investigation and examine this so-called ontological difference 9 in great detail.

The whole basis of the various ontologies of philosophy is dependant upon certain semantic, syntactical and sentential interpretations of the be-mechanism. We shall start by taking a close look at the word /be/ and consider its sentential role in some depth and then progress to consider the reification of /being/ a conceptual misconstrual which arguably has done more harm to Western philosophy than any other error in human thinking. Later we will examine the gerund, another thorn in the flesh of ontological clarity, itself an associative grammatical spin-off of the dualistic error of /being/.

Cat

Figure 1.  cat

The introductant /is/ or /was/ or /now/ indicating the numero-temporal payload which points back to the subject is only required when something is to be added regarding its existential modality one or more of the ways in which it exists such as,

		Figure 2
THE CAT	confirms individuality	IS	indicates existential mode	ANGRY.
Self-referentially instantiated		CONFIRMS CONTEMPORANEITY		SUBJECTS Current Modality

A further demonstration that the copula /is/ does not existentialise or conceptually instantiate the cat by a process of substitution can be seen in the copulaless sentence below.

Figure 3.

The cat on the mat.

Whereas in the sentence:

Figure 4.

The cat /is/ on the mat

Now consider the above sentence with the /is/ removed and replaced by an arrow. Depending upon the nature of the sentence, whether for example the statement is ostensive and refers to an actual object or refers to a fictional or an unspecified general type, the mere naming of an object as the subject is sufficient to conceptually instantiate it as the subject.

Figure 5

The cat  on the mat.

This can now be compared with the same copula depletion in Russian and other languages where the /is/ is elided altogether.

Figure 6.

IVAN SOLDAT (Ivan is a Soldier)

In present tense sentences the copuletic omission negates any sense of antecedent states, however, once temporal considerations enter into a Russian utterance (a need to express past tense) there is a reversion to an appropriate copuletic indicator.  

It will be seen that the Russian grammar is unambiguous; so, the apparently missing copula is merely implicit (covert) rather than absent. this means that these languages can't get along without a copula.

Russians, Israelis, Arabs (and some speakers of Afro-American dialects) never notice the missing /is /in present tense utterances. I have always referred to instances of copula depletion as being overt and covert, but, yes, the term explicit and implicit is OK too.

Acknowledging the fact that subject- predicate sentences are not able to get along without a indicant copula of course reinforces my claim that BE and its conjugates is, am, was were etc., NEVER EVER address pure existence bereft of any existential modality, despite hundreds of years of abusive effort on behalf of the priestly and transcendental community to try and fit a square non-ontological semantic peg into a round ontological hole.

I also have another theory, (perhaps it is more like an intuition based upon forgotten observations) which needs more research into Old and Middle English) on my behalf and as far as I know has never been posited before now. Basically it is this.

1. In view of the fact that subject-predicate sentences always require a copula (overt or covert) which indicates (by pointing to the predicate) the existential modality of the subject, the present continuous tense always provides a /be/ conjugate of some form hidden or otherwise. Russian etc., adopts a copula elision occurs in the third person present and is replaced by copuletic implicature.

2. Where antecedal conversational references make predicational repetition unnecessary they elicit simple present responses with standalone third person present simple verbs in such sentential responses as:

Here the terminal /s/ on the end of present simple verbs not only agrees with the third person nature of the utterance, but also acts as a form of truncated ghost copula [s] in the absence of the full overt form /is/ which would have appeared if the response had not been antecedently motivated but spontaneously generated as in the statement:

Janet is writing in London and Marius is managing at school.


The conjugates of /be/ - /is/ and /are/ and others - are often referred to as /the copula/ a medieval syntactical labelling meaning linking, conjoining, coupling the subject of a sentence with its properties (existential modalities); this was a consequence of an early ignorance as to the proper function of the word. Unfortunately the name stuck and is still employed by linguists in parsing sentences. In fact the role of /is/ is that of serving to indicate the subject's numérico temporal existential modality. The syntactical linking role of /is/ is no more significant than any other word in a sentential string. Indeed in cases where existential modality is sententially incorporated or embedded as an adjective, as in,

the /is/ remains existentially and adjectivally surplus to semantic requirements and has been dispensed with. Baldness has already been adjectivally ascribed as a feature of the entity Mark.  En passant, I am convinced that it is possible to influence people rhetorically  by the way that one syntactically positions the adjective in a sentence. Attributively pre-positioning an adjective ( as what Rom Harré calls directive adjectives) before the noun  as an apriori ontological given as in:

This creates an existential  modalic compound which sounds more authoritatively substantiated and is less open to disagreement by the addressee.  As an observation rather than as a claim the comment is more susceptible to acceptance and is an opinion which the addressee is less disposed to challenge.

By comparison the claim of gracefulness made in this emphatic sentence incorporating a predicative adjective as in:

Being statementally assertive rather than deictic (as the sentence 1. above with the pre-positional adjective demonstrates) the claim/opinion regarding gracefulness is more exposed to dissonance and a possible challenge by an addressee, for here the existential modality of gracefulness is syntactically separated from the subject by the copula. In other words gracefulness is not presented as an existential modalic fait acompli.

I now present the traditional view of the ontological difference interpolated with some comments of my own concerning pure existence.

There is no more suspect definitional cop-out in the history of linguistics than the notorious description of the so-called copuletic variant of the indicant *is* ( and its conjugates) as a special kind of verb to join two parts of a sentence and to express either that the two parts denote the same thing or that the first has the property denoted by the second. This definition manqué is mirrored by the failed attempts of various philosophers to puzzle out the ontological purpose and effects of such a definition (among them Aquinas and Heidegger) who threw up their hands in despair following their unproductive efforts to understand the linguistic operation involved. One curious and maybe significant piece of verified information about so-called *copular verbs* is that they are followed by adjectives - not adverbs.

More light is thrown upon this historic definitional cock-up by examining the other so-called common *copula verbs:* seem, look, turn, become, appear, sound, smell, taste, feel and get in relation to the adjectivality with which they are uniquely associated. Now such a fact is of great importance, for if copula verbs are syntactically confined to indicating adjectival predication which DESCRIBES a subject - then this means that they are concerned with a restrictive function which confines them to pointing only to representations of THE WAY, MANNER OR MODE of existing subjects and NOT the FACT that they exist as a way of introducing or acknowledging their simple existence or presence in the world

This new discovery, highlighting as it does the give-away adjectival connection, surely puts in jeopardy and exposes the distorted religious version of this rule, where, in an effort to evade, conceal, cover-up and obfuscate the logico-linguistic significance of the dianoetic consistency of the rule, aberrant forms like *God is* and other examples of the orphanic *is* are employed. Because theological and transcendental proofs rely on the assumption that *is* is a viable verb which is completely meaningful by itself.

Other embarrassing adjectiveless descriptive predication is also cynically elided in the hope that the covert descriptive predication *filled-in* by the believer, replete with the necessary and mandatory adjectival content inherent in any employment of a copula, will not clash with the crude existential claim of *pure existence* and that the subsequent illogicality of the claim that God exists will go unnoticed.
Thus is the predicational and ontological guilt off-loaded onto the naive believer leaving the clergy and philosophers like Heidegger with what they have formerly believed to have had - hands and consciences clean of of the sin or ignorance of gross illogicality and communicative vandalism.

One further curious fact leaps out the minute one examines the so-called *group of copulas* and that is that the words adjectivally describe not the existential state of the subject - but rather that they also provide an example of the existential state of the observer, commentator, or the author of such descriptive sentences, who attempt to characterise the subject. This means that the classical claim of copularity by the tradition that: *the two parts denote the same thing, or that the first has the property denoted by the second* is utter rubbish. that Some explanatory examples:

1. *She seems happy.* This is obviously an existential modality of the observer - not the observed, for here a judgement is being made by the commentator or *in the eye of the beholder* that the subject is seemingly happy not in the eye of the beheld. The beheld is either happy or unhappy.  (*Seem* is a copular verb.)

2. *The stew smells good.* Here again the fact that the stew smells good is an existential mode of the smeller - not the smelled. (*Smell* is a copular verb.)

3. *It is getting late.* It is obvious here that *time* is getting late for the existential modality of the utterer of this statement - it is not *getting late* for time itself.* (*Get* is a copular verb.)

4. *Marjorie is my girlfriend.* The nominalisations *Marjorie* and girlfriend* are attribution of identity assigned by one set of humans to another, therefore the attributing of such labels is again an existential mode of the attributing boyfriend - not Marjorie his girlfriend. (*is* is a copular verb.)
5. *Jack is British.* This sentence is an assertion regarding the attribution of the existential modality of *Britishness* to Jack. As such it is an assertive existential modality of the attributor - not the attributant. (*is* is a copular verb.)

6. *Marjorie looks intelligent.* Intelligent is an adjective in predicative position. It is an existential modality of the opinion of the observer - not the person herself. (*Look* is a copular verb.)

What is happening in such constructions is that in place of a normal natural language subject name: (say the Eiffel Tower) the precise existential nature of the subject is left open. It is supplanted by the subjectival unspecificity: There exists an X. In fact when one analyses this X term with care, it functions in a similar way to a subjectival specific term such as the aforementioned, self-instantiating term: Eiffel Tower but, (and this is the important bit) it robs us of the analytic opportunity to focus upon an actual subject  (say The Eiffel Tower) and bring to bear UPON IT our previous ontological port-folio of conclusions concerning its existential status ( i. e., defining it as either a real concrecity - or a non-existent metaphysical state of affairs etc.)

which act together in just the same way as a typical subject - copulative - construction linked to its predicate statement, but with the critical disadvantage that we are deprived of any judgemental assessment of the ontological status of the phantom X pseudo subject. The X debilitatively replaces the named subject which normally triggers an automatic, evaluative ontological analysis of the sentential import when combined with its predicate.

But more of this later... I address this logical and cognitive impuissance of some uses and users of logic lower down in more detail.

The term: a phenomenological object is a non-dialectic, ontological contradiction in terms, it is a statement that is necessarily false. The term, idea, concept
phenomenological is a putative, empirically unacknowledged, existential modality of the believing, feeling, subjectively emotionally disturbed, ontologically confused phenomenologist, and has no viable referential physical denotation. So too reality does not exist, being nothing more than a transcendental  fantasy inherited from the past

Deictically and existentially the indicant is only ever (authentically) prefaces an existential modality of its sentential subject and NEVER refers to the simple fact that the subject exists. In cases were the predicate is elided (as in sentences such as: God is etc.) the subject name God is treated as a predicationally intrinsical word which conceptually encapsulates the aggregate or compendium of Godly characteristics and existential modes as dutifully internalised by various believer-types. For example a Moslem would impute a mode of sacred singularity to the denotatum of the term: Allah, whilst a Christian would attribute a mode of tripartism (The Father, The Son and the Holy Ghost etc.) ALL subject names which appear in sentences are either accepted as real objects (concrecities) or as metaphysical states of affairs and a preferential menu-sampling of stored, existentially adjudicated modalities becomes neurologically accessible to the reader in the light of previously accumulated knowledge.

It is not the ontological function of is to be part of any claim as to the simple (entitic) existence of the subject. The name of the subject or subject phrase, say: (The Eiffel Tower or French cuisine ) of any subject-predicate sentence is not a simple identity device, it also acts as a collective modalic anthology or cognitive indenikit of the set of characteristics previously internalised by the reader of the sentence or the addressee of a verbal statement. The name by which a subject is labelled is definitively recognizable or known and judged to either exist as a real object, or is catalogued as a descriptive term, abstract noun or gerund which metaphysical describes the activity of a multiplicity of agents and their associated agential paraphernalia.

Predication is a logical process in which sentential significance is extended from the broader context of the predicationally intrinsical self-instantiative subject word which conceptually encapsulates the aggregate, to a narrower, targeted referent description which is considered communication-worthy to the address or (often a single existential mode: The cat is black or French cooking is delicious.

Since predicates lend specific meaning to their subjectival targets in cognitive processing it follows that when unnamed subjects are cued (as with: there exist an x) our ability to evaluate the predicate word meanings are ontologically stymied compared with such sentences which  are cued with known subject words capable of ontological differentiation. Thus when the reader reads the subject name of the sentence as The Eiffel Tower he is immediately aware that the subject is a real, concrete object existing in time and space, whilst in the case of the subject being: French cuisine, he is aware that the predicate will comment upon some aspect of the state of affairs surrounding the practice or manner of preparing food or the food so prepared in France.

Those transcendentalists who treat the subject name as an ontological disregard and rely on the agency of the copula as an existential descriptive factor are in fact falling into the trap of the absolute – called also system of identity or doctrine of identity a creed exemplfied by those renegades from reason Schelling and Meinong, which claims that that matter and mind, and subject and object, are identical in some putative, intuitive, fantasised domain of the subjectively absolute. The function of is (which has been misunderstood for centuries by religionists and others who have been drawn to the belief in an ontological difference) is not to DEFINE anything. It serves as an oral or textual symbol which means:

                                                What follows is an existential modality of the subject.

It is a significational role which, if we bracket out the confirmatory payload of number: (is – are) and time: (was-is) NEVER signals, betokens, claims, indicates, points, arrogates, lays claim, auspicates, predicts, establishes or launches the subject as an existing object.

IS is not an instantiational existentialiser nor an existential actualiser – It is concerned with the WAY an object exists (or does not exist) – not THE FACT that it exists. THAT sentential chore is handled by the subject name alone The Eiffel Tower) as ontologically interpreted and accepted as a real object by the reader or the addressee based upon his or her antecedal knowledge of the subject type.