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.

To reify is simply to turn an idea into a res (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 claim.

Both 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 characterising its 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 gerundally transformed into ideationally manipulable things.

Bu 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 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:

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 entification7 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. 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 /bhu/ 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 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 is angry

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

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

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 adjectively ascribed as a feature of the entity Mark.

For the copula to re-confirm Mark's initial instantiation by name alone would be a semantic redundancy. The general theory of reification argues human communication tends to eliminate or reduce complexity by excluding periphrasis or indirect ways of expressing things. This is accomplished by selecting for reification in place of digressive description.

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

The word entititive 10 means to be considered as a pure entity; abstracted from all circumstances. Commonsense informs us it is physically impossible to exist purely or entitively - bereft of any existential modality or property at all. It is infeasible to be here in the world and be physically propertyless at the same time, in the absence of a single characteristic, attribute, essence or state. The very idea of being is a reification - a misnomer for two very good reasons.

This can be evidenced by the very fact that God said to Moses,

He did not say (triadically)

Only changing objects that are constantly becoming slightly different versions of themselves with each passing nanosecond could ever exist. Therefore the conceptualisation of being is an illegitimate heteron12 or wrongful ideational mirror image of the Greek instantiation to mae on (that which is not.) Interestingly in the case of both being and nothing the concepts are particular modes of the human neurological system when it selects the words as nominals bereft of any denotatum in an attempt to denote the presence or absence of some unspecified entity or entities. The cognitive intellections being and nothing are ALWAYS used as non-existent others  (heterons) for purposes of differentiating occupied rather than unoccupied space.

A photon of light is a massive particle. It MUST have mass. That which does not have mass does not exist — there is no such thing as that which does not have mass.
Dancing or doing crosswords does not exist - only the mass of human meat we call dancers and crossword players exist

Energy does not exist - only that which has mass and is energetic exists.

Motion or movement does not exist - only that which has mass and moves exists.

Waves do not exist - only that which waves (water, particles, hair, grass,) exists.


In the arrow paradox, Zeno imagines an arrow in flight. He then asks us to divide up time into a series of indivisible nows or moments. At any given moment, he argues, if we look at the arrow, it has an exact location, so it is not moving. Yet that movement has to happen in the present; it cannot be that there is no movement in the present yet movement in the past or future. So throughout all time, he concludes, the arrow is at rest, and thus, motion cannot happen.

Zeno is correct -but for the wrong reasons. Motion cannot happen because motion does not exist. What exists is the relocating, moving arrow. But Zeno was wrong when he claimed that if we look at the arrow it is not moving at any given moment. If an airborne arrow was not moving continuously it could never fly and if its constituent particles where not moving it would not exist at all (and neither would the particles.)

It may be possible for Zeno to fantasise, to imagine or conceive of the arrow being stationary, and freeze-frame it in the neurophysical networked ideating brain-material that he employs for thinking, but such anthropocentric imaginings have absolutely nothing to do with the reality of the moving arrow. Thus it only remains a paradox for those folk-scientists who are ontologically challenged.

Scientists have simply dreamed up abstract nouns and adjectives to describe the behaviour of objects and then started to believe science's useful fictions that there is something that really exists as the nominata of its descriptive periphrastic-avoidance terms. The behaviour of objects does not exist - (there is no such thing) only  the behaving objects exist. A large part of the jargon of science refers to nothing other than the adjectives they use to describe what objects are observed to do rather than the objects themselves.

To behave in such a way is to be nothing more than a metaphysician - not a scientist.

As for the often-made claim that:  energy makes up all matter, but remains  massless while the matter itself has mass, that the faithful worshippers of folk science continue to believe in is an updated version of witch-doctory. - it is the biggest load of old tosh I have ever heard as you correctly point out. There is no such thing as energy (read any dictionary - and experience the circular-semantic run-around.) What exists are changing objects. Why do objects change? Because there is a material imperative to do so. Because that is the only way that objects CAN exist. No change = no objects and no cosmos. Why? Because that is the way the cosmos is the cosmos.

Nothing or nothingness (an absence of objects) could not exist - because if nothing existed (or did not exist)  then nothing would be in a state of non-existence and to be in any state at all - of whatever nature -  is to exist in that state, and to exist in a state is NOT not to exist.

Bottom line? Much of science is nothing more than mere word-play and must be taken with a large pinch of salt.


The problem is the assumption that the very process of employing these ontological devices neurologically instantiates them by the very fact that they appear to be the opposites of each other. The key to understanding being and nothing is to be aware that they are not the opposites or antonyms of ANYTHING - never mind of each other. Plato initiated a trend of misidentification by first confusing the Greek word ousia, [from einai, 'to be'] with what he thought was a verb of pure existence (or elementary presence) He then misapplied and reified the ousia with the equivalent of the entititive BE-word /being/. In ancient Greek ousia actually meant:

Compare the correct usage of ousia in the biblical passage translated from the Greek below: Luke 15:13 -

It can now be confidently stated that all conjugational instances of the BE-word including the sententially implicative predicational covert /is/ and /am/ of: God is. and I am with their unspoken descriptive attributes, are syntactically colligated with a subject that is:

Linguistically and semantically the classification of Descartes' and/or God's: /I am/ as in,

are examples of the so-called absolute signification. [6] (OED 2005) They cannot possibly refer to a pure property-free state, for it would be impossible for such an entity to exist. We conclude therefore that in both cases the existential predication is covert. We already know from the start that God's ['I'] /am/ refers to God's unmentioned properties. Similarly we already know (and have impatiently anticipated) that the entity who thinks that he thinks, and therefore thinks that he exists, and finally accepts that he exists as Descartes - was (rather predictably) Descartes all along.

While discussing historical grammar, it is essential to acknowledge the great Indian grammarian Panini, after which we will consider what the Greeks and their lack of a word for existence and use of to on (that which is.) and the heteron-type conceptual instantiation of what they referred to as: to mae on (that which is not.)

In order to understand something of the underlying origins and nature of reification and its implications for modern European languages and philosophy, one needs to travel backward in time to the northwest area of the Indian sub-continent of two and a half thousand years ago. It is quite certain that the use of abstraction was widespread in human language long before its efflorescence in the period of classical Greece.

We are lucky in the person of Panini (circa 520-460 B. C.) 14 to have a witness, whose remarkable grammar defined Classical Sanskrit. Panini is generally acknowledged to be the greatest grammarian who ever lived. His use of metarules, transformations, and recursion together make his grammar as rigorous as a modern Turing machine. The Backus-Naur form (Panini-Backus form15) or BNF grammar is used to describe modern programming languages and has significant similarities to Panini grammar rules. [7] (Wikipedia. Panini 2007)

The existential ambiguity (ontological difference) often caused by the gerund, a word-type which, together with the abstract noun is a leading grammatical component of reification, is not something new, nor is it restricted to its use in philosophical writings and discussion.

The Indo-European Mother Language (the language of Ur) 16 Sanskrit has an unbroken historical record of about 3000 years. So, beginning with any of the modern Indo- Aryan languages (like Urdu and Hindi), one should in principle be able to reconstruct where and how complex predicates originated.

Diachronic linguist Miriam Butt of UMIST in her The Light Verb Jungle, reminds us:

With ambiguity in mind we will now move on to a consideration of the part that the Greeks played in the consolidation of the habit and practice of reification for philosophy in particular and natural language in general.

The phenomenon of reification in relation to philosophy is not something unique to the Greek language or culture, or indeed to any of the great Indo-European language family itself, of which almost all European languages are sibling tongues. Greek is more interesting and relevant to our investigation because English adopted so many Greek words into its corpus and our culture is heavily influenced by Greek ideas, Greek abstraction and Greek reification in every domain of our practical and intellectual activities and is a predominant feature of philosophical discourse. There comes a time in the development of any language when the pragmatic, prosaic crudities of descriptive naďveté make way for the inevitable progression towards the sophisticated, fanciful and imaginative. In Europe this linguistic transformation happened to the ancient Greek language before any other.

Parmenides provided a compelling reason-based argument in poetic form regarding the way we talk about the abstraction Being. He recommended that all reference to non-existents should be eliminated from human discourse. It is a curious fact of language that the very mention of a non-existent instantiates the concept of such a will-of- the-wisp in the human mind and introduces a dimension of phantom concrecity. Although this dissertation is obviously directed at the philosophical community, the problem of reification is more widespread and is not restricted to that domain.

Encounters with reification are more noticeable in philosophical texts and discourse simply because the level of discussion is more complicated due to philosophy's rightful preoccupation with ontology, and the necessarily measured evaluation of words and meaning.

As we have seen in earlier sections, reification was obviously rampant in pre-Socratic times as verified by Parmenides' strictures against the concretisation of the abstractive /being/ (not the ontic 17 to on version of being) and his remonstrances against non-existent to mae on. We already know that Parmenides advocated the total elimination of such linguistic references:

Non-being, for Parmenides is infeasible as meaningful language because only being, (ta onta - the plural, literally beings) exists, and non-being (to mae on), is not. Parmenides may well conclude that such a way is unthinkable, and it is interesting to speculate which of the two meanings Parmenides intended in using the word unthinkable. Perhaps it was both? I prefer number two for reasons I will reveal shortly:

Though I admire Parmenides' radical eliminativism, (are we dealing with the first eliminativist in history?) I think he takes it a bit too far when he insists that: that which is not is a notion that cannot be thought about. I am in general agreement with the great Eleatic philosopher that to reify such non-existents should be discouraged, I do not agree however that such reificational practices invalidate abstraction as an element of debate if employed with care, as a useful feature of human discourse.

In my view it is enough to inform people as to the dangers of reifying such abstractions and advise them that to THINK about a non-existent is not to existentialise it - but merely to instantiate a neurological concept of it. Perhaps if transcendentalist philosophers simply acknowledged the differences between existentialisation and instantiation, much of the dialectical tension between the more spiritually orientated thinker and the materialist would evaporate.

Thus would we be liberated from the corrosive dangers of objectifying such conceptual instantiations as being and nothing (as was the case with Heidegger), and both sides of the ontological divide could draw closer, and talk about being and existence and experience free from the angst and annoyance that such ontological uncertainty engenders. It is understood and accepted that we have a need to be able to talk about Being and Not Being in order to render accounts of our world, but we do not have any need to reificationally interiorise the abstractions that we use to communicate such worldly observations.

Parmenides, of course, would insist that non-existence, to mae on is impossible. Scientifically this concords with Einstein's conservation of energy principle, whereby, though mass and energy can turn into each other, mass cannot be absolutely created or destroyed. Sounding remarkably like Einstein himself, Parmenides writes of to on in Fragment 8 of the Proem: So, coming into being is extinguished and perishing is unheard of. Nor is it divisible, since it is all alike. Nor is there somewhat more here and somewhat less there that could prevent it from holding together; But all is full of Being. Therefore it is all continuous, for Being is in contact with Being. [10] (Taran. 1971 frag. 8)

Parmenides bequeathed the argument about Not Being to subsequent philosophy - that means to us. What is to be made of it? The One became the common name for Being as it was described by Parmenides.

The great Eleatic philosopher instinctively grasped the concept of the impossibility of mere presence and consequently never used any predications with it is not, simply because for him no predications are possible of the non-existent, and a predication-less (purely existential) entity is an impossibility.

Somewhat annoyingly the phrase, It is not, seems to instantiate the erroneous ontological notion that there is a phantom /it/ which is a pronoun standing for something.

THE ONE is a key phrase in Parmenides. It is to that important concept that we now turn our attention. We can be pretty sure that Parmenides was aware of the fact that there are two ways of looking up at the night sky, or indeed of contemplating a heap of sand. Both can be looked at as either: the one or the many, depending upon circumstance or mood.

Each object in the cosmos is not merely a discrete, uneffectuated holon18 or entity, but a reciprocative autonomous, sub-systemic component of the universal environmental meronymy.19 From a human point of view all objects can be conceived of as being at the same time the parts and the sum of those parts - both the constituents and the integrum. We can conceive of a heap of sand as either a multitude of individual grains, or as a unitary object.

One can gaze up at the splendour of the starry heavens and see an infinite myriad of shimmering uncountable individuates, or one can throw one's optico-neurological lens switch to wide-angle macro-view and suddenly see the Milky Way as one gigantic, breathtaking, cosmic holism. But now we turn to the more familiar battlements of Elsinore Castle in Denmark,20 where the figure of a gloomy prince, contemplating suicide looks down upon the waves crashing upon the jagged rocks below.

Abstraction is the stuff of literature, philosophy and poetry, as the well-known line from Hamlet demonstrates:

Considered from a strict ontological rather than a poetic point of view, Hamlet's phrasing of the ontological alternative involved in committing suicide does not make sense. In spite of traditionalist opinion to the contrary, being does not exist - it follows of course that non-being does not exist either. One just cannot not exist. The aspirational condition of moving towards a new state of not-being is an intangible transcendental bluebird that flutters away the nearer your rapidly falling body gets to the rocks below.

There is no state of not-being, as both Parmenides and Einstein will rush to confirm. As it happens, and this may come as a surprise, there is no state of being either. There is only the state of being some THING. It will be remembered from an earlier section that pure existence is a physical impossibility. Shakespeare's Hamlet either continues to exist as Hamlet Prince of Denmark, or the lifeless body of Hamlet continues to exist as the bloodied decomposing corpse of the dead Prince sprawled upon the rocks below the castle walls. (In the play he actually died in the castle as is well known.)

Every object in the cosmos changes seamlessly. There are no temporal interstices where we can rest awhile and BE in this state or that. As Parmenides and Einstein both agreed, we either are or we are not something. If we are not one form of entity we are always something else -a living human being or the material that once was us in a pile of bleached bones, or grey ash, or a cloud of detritus blowing about the universe like the cosmic dust that we originally were and always will be over and over again.

One of the reasons why so much philosophical discourse is confused is because, many people find it difficult to differentiate between /being/ as:

Certain philosophical and religious systems have plainly reified the brain's unremitting neurological self-monitoring, self-referential reportage, or the feed-back-account of our somatic activity into something they are incapable of describing but call /being/ which is no more than a conceptualised instantiation of the fact and recognition of our own existential presence. Most people become habituated through language to such unreal ontologically defective reification from birth onwards and bring it with them to philosophy as transcendental baggage when they are adults.

In the third chapter that now follows we examine the various types of reification and discuss the responses of certain notable philosophers of the past who have recognised the ubiquity and dangers of the problem.

The gerund has been absorbed into the language of philosophy - one might even say that there has been a philosophicalisation of the gerund 21 and the abstract noun over the centuries. This is not surprising, for much of philosophy is precisely engaged with the employment of reification and abstraction as a useful tool in search of truth. When the concept of a given abstraction is made external or objective, or given token existential reality, then that is an example of reification. Though material-object status is not always claimed, the nominalised reified abstraction is referred to conceptually and treated grammatically, syntactically, semantically and sententially as if it did in fact exist. The three main grammatical constituents of natural language which are responsible for most of the ontological confusion we find in philosophy are

Leibniz wrote:

At first glance what Leibniz says here sounds fine, but he could also be interpreted as supporting the tendency to create reification in order to dispel problems bristling with difficulties. If by the word concretes he did mean material objects, then he is in good company with Parmenides, who also wished to dispel the ontological difficulty of to mae on (that which is not) by banning all talk of it and brushing it under the ontological carpet. But philosophers do not want to dispel difficulties, they wish to engage with them, interrogate them, and if possible solve them to the best of our ability.

There are many forms of reification. James. W. Woodard in his Intellectual Realism and Culture Change 1935, identified six main types, which may be classified as follows:

Woodard mentions a piece that appeared in American Popular Science Monthly, which exemplified the word reification in the following manner:

As Woodard makes clear, to reify means taking as perceptual what is only conceptual, or taking as a thing what is only conceptual, or even taking as an impersonal thing what is personal. That is, the distortion at the hands of reification is in the conferring of an exaggerated concreteness or tangibility upon what is only conceptual, comparative, or functional.

 

The word for reification in German Verdinglichung 22 which means thingification, a word which when it is mentioned most philosophers immediately associate with Karl Marx in general and György Szegedy von Lukács 23 in particular. The Hungarian born philosopher is most well known for his famous treatise on: Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat. According to Pitkin, neither Hegel nor Marx used the word reification. It was introduced into Marxism by Lukacs himself who claimed that the idea of reification is central to Marx's thought.

In discussing modern rationalism in his: History and Class Consciousness; The Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought, (section IV.) Lukacs refers to bourgeois thought as

In Reification and Proletarian Consciousness Lukacs addresses the section of Capital in which Marx discusses the fetishistic character of commodities. He argues that,

They take the social relations of producers to the sum total of their labour to be a social relation of things existing outside them. In other words, a social relation between men has taken on the phantasmagoric form of a relation between things.

Marx finds an analogy in religion, where the products of the human mind appeared to the believer as independent objects. This is what Marx calls the fetishistic character of commodities. Marx's account of this according to Lukacs is a description of the basic phenomenon of reification.

For Parkinson, Lukacs, like other Marxists: The concept of reification is used by Marx to describe a form of social consciousness in which human relations come to be identified with the physical properties of things, thereby acquiring an appearance of naturalness and inevitability. [18] (Burris. 1988 p. 22)

In industrial relations the thoughtless use of particular reifications, (such as the thingification of factory workers) or when metaphorical economic concepts are nonchalantly glossed as an assumed underlying element of reality, often leads to the rigidification and polarisation of long established antagonistic dogmas.

Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness not only applies to philosophy, but to the sciences, to politics, to industrial and foreign relations, for the error of representing mental constructs of whole social groups, aggregations, systems, organisations etc., as conjectural physical entities is also a characteristic of general systems theory, sociology, computerology, politics, literary criticism logic and even mathematics.

Zerzan quoting Peter Sloterdijk finds that:

There have been such outstanding men of discernment, and it is to such thinkers endowed with the sagacity and mental ability to understand and discriminate between good philosophy and false semantic relations that we turn to in the following pages.

Over the centuries many thinkers have challenged the more obvious ontological abuses of language, such as the use of universals. We have to wait until the twentieth century for a philosopher to carry out a rigorous anti-reificational analysis of ontological language abuse and construct a completely alternative system. Tadeusz Kotarbinski, (1886-1981) was President of the Polish Academy of Sciences (1957-1962), and one of the leading members of the Lvov-Warsaw School. He introduced the term reism to denote the philosophical view that the category of things (objects) is the sole ontological category. In other words, reism reduces all categories to that of objects.

Reism also has a semantic dimension, for it recommends that only singular names, that is, names referring to concrete things, (nominata) should be used, and (going even further than Parmenides) abstract words totally avoided. Eventually, one can use sentences with abstract words provided that they have translations into statements with singular terms.

Kotarbinski's most important contribution to Western thinking was Elementy Teorii Poznania, Logiki formalnej i Metodologii Nauk, 24 published in Lwów, in 1929.

His influence upon Polish philosophical culture was enormous, and many consider him to be the greatest philosopher that Poland has ever produced. Reism is the ontological position that only things (objects) exist. In ancient Greek of course there was no word for things, which, like the word exist was a Latin invention. Etymologically the word Reism which Kotarbinski chose to name his system by is derived from the Latin noun res (thing) from which we derive the word reification.

Kotarbinski calls reificatory pseudo-names and apparent-names or abstractives onomatoids. From this point of view, in the expression: the departure of the train was delayed, the term departure is an apparent name as it has no designatum: the departure does not exist, but only a train that is departing. Kotarbinski's case is interesting in that whilst his atheistic, materialistic reism or pan-somatism, which holds to an all-concretist universe could in no way be characterised as dilettante or bourgeois, it was criticised by Polish Marxists, who, under the tutelage of their Soviet neighbour, dominated the Polish homeland. Whilst these comrades were able to agree (and they dared not disagree) with Karl Marx's analysis of the notorious reificational activities of the capitalist class in relation to the toiling masses, they were rather abashed when they realised that the professor's condemnation of the reification of the unreal was also laid at their own communist doorstep.

Marxism positively drips with all of the reificational sins which the great thinker attributed to his class enemies. Having discussed the phenomena of reification in theme one in some depth, it is time to attempt an account of reification from the standpoint of natural selection. Theme Two, which follows, addresses the possibility that in the same way that human morality might be bio-genetically selected as a survival mechanism, the linguistic indicatory codes and semiotics we use to interact with our social environment may also be influenced by Darwinian dispositions.

This dissertation proposes that there is a bio-evolutionary element in the selection of reification as an innovative, linguistic device for eliminating periphrastic verbiage. Sensory motor maps 25 support a neurological link between manual dexterity and speech, and It is this paper's position that it was the importance of manual dexterity as a survivalist necessity which forced the adaptation of the communicational compaction of reification as against periphrastic verbiage as an synergistic elaboration of speech. My historical account and theory of reification endeavours to explain reification as an experiential feature of our human domain of world-experience that arises as a biological response to the praxis of our lives characterised as a biological phenomenon. For some people it is only with a profound meta-experiential effort of the imagination that they are able to conceive that a reificatory statement, or a sentence containing hypostatised elements, is ontologically suspect. The psychological profundity of the habituation to abstraction and the ability to distinguish its dangers varies from person to person. On the basis of reification itself being biogenetically instilled in humankind, this discrepancy in the ability to discern its presence as both a communicative advantage and ontological hazard is hardly surprising.

Levy-Bruh writing of the languages of the primitive:

Reification is a useful fallacy selected by nature and reinforced by gradual genetic changes achieved through a series of chance mutations and the well known processes of natural selection. In early man those with the ability to act quickly, to distinguish, to categorise, and above all to reificationally generalise were provided with a distinct advantage for survival.

Those who could manipulate images, hypotheses or possible action were able to enter an originative or figurative realm beyond that of their more neurologically challenged associates. The fact that we seem to be unaware of the reasons why we reify philosophical concepts so profusely may be intended by nature. We are reminded of Ruse's well known question/suggestion that the origin of morality could be biological.

The General Theory of Reification claims that the thingification of transcendental ideas is selected and biologically transmitted as an involuntary, heritable neuro-linguistic process integrative with the central nervous system and imposed on us on us by our DNA for reproductive ends? 26

With Ruse's words ringing in our ears, it might be fruitful in order to understand our apparent unawareness of the useful fiction that we call reification if we slightly modify and paraphrase Ruse's comment as: The thingification of states of affairs and universals is no more than an unconscious collective illusion fobbed off on us by our genes for reproductive ends. For prestige reasons, the soft sciences try to take on the mantle of the hard sciences by using scientific sounding terminology, which consists almost totally of reification of one sort or another. So we see softer domains of study attempting to shift from the terminologically-reified left to the terminologically-stricter and harder scientific right.

Theoretical explanations can sometimes be made more evident by showing how they belong to our daily life. So that it may be made apparent how we human beings are all involved in the biogenetic accounts that I provide, I must mention some support for my supposition of soft <--> hard shift in certain sections of science and the fact that it is not a one-way street.

As far as the members of a hard science softening their discipline is concerned, Catt can only mean being less objective. Being to greater extent influenced by emotion or personal bias entails being less explicit or willing to challenge existing paradigms. It also necessitates employing fuzzy, abstract, reificative language, which is less specific and less open to criticism. It suggests a slackening of rigour fuelled by fears of a lack of success, or the inclusion of abstraction or reificational descriptive language in findings and reports in order to conceal areas of uncertainty. In this manner the scientist makes his status, career and research grants more secure by tempering the uncompromising resolution of his approach and confining himself to more traditional or establishment expectations.

The effect of such a softening of the scientific discipline is a movement by elements of the hard scientific right to the abstractive and reificatory comfort zone of the soft concretist left. 27 Inductive sociology, philosophy, psychology and the other soft sciences rely on ideational models as real things for simulating situations where Popperian-style falsifiable deductive checks are impossible to apply. Unfortunately a secondary and usually adverse effect of this reliance upon concretised states of affairs is that it is often built on data that has no relation to the real world. Such reified models are not formed by the coalescence of material particles but of a coalescence of disparate conceptualisation.

There is a paradoxical paradigm of a shift on the part of one fact-finding discipline which perceives it to be in its interest to tone down or modify the amount of reification in its discourse for purposes of credibility, whereas another investigatory body may perceive a need to do precisely the opposite and increase the amount of reificatory language for the same reason.

It may well be that this behaviour is a response to the need to submit annual progress reports to the sources of funding in order to obviate uncomfortable scrutiny from the expectant providers of research grants impatient for results. Whatever be the case, it provides a good example of the dual nature of reification as a persuasive or disingenuous tool.