Theme One dealt extensively with the linguistic methodology of reification. Theme Two presented the biogenetic theory of evolutionary motivation underlying the emergence of reification. This concluding chapter will attempt to syncretise the two themes together into the unitary Theory of Evolutionary Reification, ending with a suggestion and a plea for a greater understanding between those sympathetic to what is often referred to as continental philosophy and the empiricist-materialist division.

                             The claim made by the Theory of Evolutionary Reification is as follows:

Some areas of transcendental philosophy have ossified and become the study and discussion of historical givens - rather than the careful re-investigation of unattested reificational suppositions. Volume after volume offers different interpretations. Reams of apodictically derived, revelatory-style truths derived from ancient sources flood the market, whilst projects that attempt to discover whether this or that problem actually exists in the first place, or is merely a useful fiction are seldom encountered. Even the German Nazi thinker Heidegger, a man described  by some as the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century, who still commands a huge following within academia and among Western intellectuals, embarked on his great investigation of Being, by abandoning any attempt at a prior questioning of whether there is such a question of being to be answered in the first place.

The introductory paragraphs of Heidegger's famous Being and Time and the sub-section, The Necessity, Structure, and Priority of the Question of Being contain no questioning of the question of Being as a viable question - being is characterised as a commonplace accepted by all.

In his nondiscoverability of the 'is' he was also defeated and walked away from the question of /is/. For him /is/ was beyond his powers of understanding. After struggling with the concept he finally decided that such an enquiry is not required:

We  might forgiven for pointing out that there are manifold hosts of reifications that everybody uses and that most of the users also think that they already understand what they mean. But that does not mean that the concretised generalisations of those manifold instances exist to be questioned rather than or in place of the individual entities upon whose activities those abstracted common properties of instances are extrapolated and based. The Western media abounds with such thingification as, Islamic terrorism, or euphemistic reifications like: the Third World. Complexities consisting of swathes of non- specific generalisation are compressed and concretised into a single blurred identifier.

Occasionally whole races, the whole population of a country, or millions of members of a world religion are tarred with the some uncouth reificatory broad brush-stroke. It will not be sufficient to simply repudiate such a threat, or merely suggest an ethical stance of renunciation, or adopt a patient acquiescence culled from the aporia of Socratic indetermination. Anthropologically human cultural differentiation can be explained as being due to the diversity of the geographical and climatic regions in which different human groups live. What is more problematic is to address the domain of human association and response we might call non-material acculturation, and customs characterised by moral sanctions, prescriptive ethics and religious and tribal laws requiring conformity, fetishisms and taboo systems.

The area is a quagmire of reification.

Part of the explanation for long-term uniformity, is the tendency to stick with proven traditional methods that provide food and shelter and an acceptable level of security. This helps to explain the persistence over time of patterns of behaviour considered safe and in order to protect such traditions and perpetuate tribal or societal customs, laws, marriage customs, rituals and mores which have been reified in the service of social rigidity. There exist potentially significant semantic implications, to the extent that our abstract thinking is often driven by reificatory container metaphors.

What is much more interesting are the confines of periphrastic and perlocutionary translatability (where contexts and situations are equivalent). What are the implications of this for intercultural communication?

In addressing the first section of Richard Sansom's view of the non-ontic, non-existential status of number (prime or otherwise) and all the rest of the abstractive compendia of useful, non-existent reificata, I conclude that we are in agreement in our opposition to Penrose and his ilk, as well as with regard to the wider proliferation and implications of deleterious reificative language.

For that reason, before I address the more interesting second section of his text- an area in which our thinking has in the past somewhat diverged, I will not go into any great detail here as to how abstraction developed, how its use proved to be a dynamic force in the intellectual development of human societies, or how early on in man's history it was hijacked by the governance of religious theocracies and ascendant social minorities as a useful mechanism of domination and social control in the shrewd or devious exertion of a subjective acceptance of selected natural or God-given presumptions especially for their own advantage.

Over the years Richard Sansom and I have often discussed and reached a general measure of agreement regarding how, in this modern age of mass movements and economies controlled by burgeoning or degenerative capitalistic, theocratic (and latterly socialistic and fascistic systems) pumping out a manipulative reificative Orwellian-type double-speak, aided and influenced to a large extent by a mass media mainly controlled by a comparatively small majority with their own agenda with allegiances and associations with the establishment, the reification of abstraction has become something of a dangerous liability in the domain of competitive religious and political systems, some of which, being armed with weapons of mass destruction, and/or believers willing to destroy their own bodies in order to destroy others adhering to competing reificative systems, are fighting for world dominance.

Sansom believes that:

This is true, for by rejecting reificative patterns of thinking then analytically and epistemologically we can think more clearly in order to discover essential features or meanings with regard to our own experiential biography, the way we interface with others, and the way the world is the world the world we perceive it is.  The anti-reificativist employs abstraction and reification instrumentally (for convenience and sometimes stylistically, for textual or rhetorical decoration) but that does not mean that he/she meaningfully concretises the non-existent into a putative pseudo-entitic presence, but simply that whilst he/she takes advance of its benefits for brevity of understanding and communication.  We openly deny, reject and denounce any suggestion that such instrumental abstractive word-forms refer to any actual denotata that can be found, identified, deictically indicated, modally characterised, sensorially evidenced or can in any way be proved to exist in the world.

We should rightfully glory and rejoice in our development and use of reificative abstraction - it is after all one of the greatest achievements of our species. But to treat it in any other way than as a vitally important evolutionary abstractive tool is to abuse it and ignore its inherent dangers.

To promote its useful ontological contrivance of an ontological duality to a quasi-secondary existential status, to concretise by instantiation, to bastardise it into the very warp and weft of religious cults and mass ecclesiasticisms, is similar to the abuse of many other beneficial creations and advantageous behaviours of man - the drugs that ease our pain, cure our ills and enhance our well-being, the alcohol that relaxes us and promotes good fellowship, the excitement and thrill of a harmless wager, the joy of sex, the pride in our family, tribe, society race or nation, the drive for commercial or professional success etc.

Like all excess and the forgetfulness of the damage that immoderate thought and behaviour can wreak as a consequence of going beyond sufficient or permitted limits, so too we must be aware that reification is a tool of mankind and that man must not allow himself to become a tool of reification. Abstraction the onetime friend of mankind has become a potential foe. In the same way that it helped lift us from the caves of the way the world was, it can just as easily in this time of the way the world is - return us to that dank place from whence we came.

The translation of reificatory terms into a foreign tongue must be addressed with care. The suppositions of perfect translatability can be perilously deceptive. Nothing can be left to abstractional chance. If translation can be accomplished without resorting to needless abstraction and the use of gerundial obfuscation then the chance of achieving an isomorphical similarity of worldviews is increased. If, however, explanation or metacommunication is couched in reificatory terms then no accordance in worldviews can be assumed. Learning a foreign language involves learning a culture's reificatory hidden meanings.

Finally I seek to offer recommendations whereby an understanding and concord might be reached, regarding the standardisation, employment and ontological import of the various uses and nuances of the verb /be/ and its conjugates. I propose a new unambiguous functional, reading of the lexically and semantically equivocal /be/ and its cognates, in which any entititive reading of /be/ is eliminated completely. In its place I suggest a functional reading, in which the tensing and numbering operation is denoted and the ontologically confusing aspects of /be/ avoided.

Such an agreement might help clarify and reconcile the present misunderstanding and inauthentic usage of language that preoccupies and mars discourse, not only between the two great traditional wings of philosophy, but concerning the ontological imbroglios that drive a wedge between different civilisations.

It is not the purpose of this treatise to recommend the wholesale elimination of our reificatory terminology. Much of it remains vital to our traditional discourse. The agenda here is to suggest more care in the selection of such useful fictions and to promote an instrumental rather than a transcendentalist approach to such semantic shortcuts. Caveats should be issued concerning the current disregard for ontological clarity, which the profligate use of abstraction, drags in its wake. Such florid abstractional philosophical, scientific, legal, political and diplomatic writing may add verve and vitality to discourse, and often elevate philosophical writing to levels of literary and poetic sublimity, but if such reificatory references lack any true nominata in the real world, has such communicative content any value other than literary merit?

Such writing may not be meaningless, but it will be certainly ontologically imprecise, and to be ontologically inaccurate is not to reveal one's true import or intentions. In our confrontation with the present threat we need to understand and address the entities that exist and not allow ourselves to be bogged down in debilitative aporia. Thus for the West to simply rest content with reificatory prejudices will not suffice.

I have long been aware, that by analysing what people say and the texts they write, it soon becomes obvious that by the naming (or magicking) of virtual-world pseudo substantives and abstract nouns into existence by transcendentalists, including idealists, realists, phenomenologists, semi-physicalists and
I-think-I-am-an-analytic-philosopher varieties of thinkers, they are neurologically trapped in a fuzzy virtual domain of nominatively entititive fictions that falls short of entiatic physicalist reality.

In effect they have almost the same amount of reality-contactedness as young children who rapidly become totally absorbed with virtual activity and environment of the avatars, the roles of which  they assume and whose actions they manipulate when they enter the virtual world of their play-stations. To live in the virtual world (unknowingly) inhabited by most philosophers since their infancy, or to enter the virtual world of computer gaming as a modern child does not cause any questioning of the virtual reality of that world, nor of the existential rules or terminological lingua franca of their alternative mental domain. The socio-linguistic, behaviour, the semantics, the syntax and emotive communicative *feel* of that  *inner* world does not appear to be ontologically ambiguous, enigmatic or multivalent.

Whereas in The Matrix, or Alice in Wonderland, credibility is only temporally suspended - in the case of most philosophers, ontological credibility was suffocated and permanently suspended by parentally and societally induced internalisation and habituation in infancy.

I define the term: *entiatic reality* or *reality-contactedness,* as one decribing the corporeal complex of matergic environmental concrecities with which we are surrounded, rather than with the conceptually compiled, iconised or fictively entititive nominalisations of: *virtual substantives* with which we have been unknowingly imprinted since infancy.

This act of populating the transcendentalist psychosphere with reification is not only created by turning a grammatical expression into a noun or nominal group with the addition of a derivational suffix, but by even more blatantly using the ontological trickery of zero-derivation, where verbs and adjectives are used directly as nouns. Thus is the transcendentalist world of virtual reality created in the mind of the infant-philosopher, by concretising action, interaction and so-called: *states of affairs* as real entiatic objects in the world, rather than as entititive neurological primitive fancies of the human brain.

Thus current philosophical name-gaming, or the God-like creation of virtual nominata from virtual linguistic  dust is no more than the metaphysical manipulation of modified abstract virtualities and potentialities or possible-world existentials copied from the terminological scripts of  the ontological folk farces of the primitive  traditionalist logos.

The majority of modern university philosophy courses are based upon reificative retentivity-contests, where the hallowed views of long-dead philosophical avatars and their modern replicants, where the conceptualised semantic tokens of the dead are ritually  regurgitated by all gamesters like mummers in a medieval folk-play.

The game consists of modifying the precise meanings of an inherited logos in the virtual-domain of discourse-play in order to serve the agendas of various career bandwagons, rather than questioning such tokenised validity or usefulness to twenty-first century humanity.

A discomfiting accommodation and commitment to a new form of thinking is required in order to introduce and bring about ontological concepts more appropriate to the present Zeitgeist. The Platonic and Aristotelian historical side-show with its split into dualistic metaphysics and moral prescription that has been Western thinking for millennia has become enfeebled and has run its course.

We need to re-engage with an ontological reality with which the great Eleatics grappled, a pre-Socratic wonder that was overcome with the stultification of Forms and the ethics of doctrinal and reificatory ought-to-be. The involuntariness of the masses of both East and West to think lucidly increases exponentially, whilst the burden of nescience and stultifying orthodoxy increases daily. Like all human activity, the creation of reificatory reference is a biologically driven process that is ubiquitous in human ideational, communicative and physical intercourse alike. Whilst it is more obvious in philosophy and ontological discourse, it is omnipresent in natural language, logic, mathematics, science, religion, biology and politics and in the very latest manifestations of man's technological genius such as computer programming where it is rife.

The tendency to reification is inescapable in the development of organic life. Organisms require ready-made templates or action patterns for the purposes of optimising self- survival and reproduction. Psychologically reification engenders an alienable distancing, which cloaks individual entities in an anonymousness lacking marked individuality Fromm (1955) wrote of:

It is my belief that the fate of our civilization depends upon a deeper understanding of the reification of language and the damage it wreaks upon the ideation of rational thought, and by extension the communication and understanding in the human societies within which it is nurtured. Reification can no longer be left unchallenged to flourish in the domain of the uninformed. Recognition of its inherent dangers imparts a new vitality and energy and opens up exciting possibilities of human reconciliation based upon a greater understanding of our socio-biological based nature. It is essential in today's dangerous world that our long-held semantic assumptions that are so ubiquitous in our daily communication be overhauled and re-examined.

We are beset by a cancer of instability and religious unrest engendered by the same communicative mechanisms which were originally selected for us by nature as being survivalistically benign rather than detrimental. There is rampant alienation throughout certain sections of our urban youth. There are daily reports of burgeoning gun-crime. Home-grown and international terrorism wreaks disastrous effects on our freedoms and generates the divisive political and social issues of our day. We have reached a critical stage in human history.

The present era is one of great civilisations on a collision course. Conflicting, incompatible systems of ontological values and reificatory meanings are in contention. There are those who claim that we should be patient and take heart. That the ultimate, long-term propensity of the developing human brain is toward a greater reality- connectedness via a constant process of correction, clear thinking and ontological refinement uninfluenced by habituated emotions or internalised personal prejudices.

Mankind has reached the stage where he can physically unravel and intervene in his own biogenic scripts. But can he now also interpose between and adjust the obfuscational communicative inclination to reification? I believe that the time has come lay down our dangerous burden of reificational non-specificity and with it the unstabilising semantic ballast which we no longer need.

Ultimately the genetic imperative operating via  linguistic leverage will select for  semantic change and the  malleability and ephemerality of language will react to the survivalist and procreative rather than philosophical exigencies of useful fiction and pseudo-expedient reification.

The danger for philosophy is that it will remain ontologically trapped in the amber of historic ontological presumptions. What we would call today figurative speech and myth were in ancient times essential to humanity as it saw itself in relation to the world. The capacity to reify and to record through writing that emerged in the dim past and blossomed with the Greeks denied the transience of time and has allowed us to share the thoughts of our ancient forefathers. In a large measure humanity has embraced science and rejected the early myths. We can only hope that philosophy will one day manage to do likewise.

>
Epigenetic Linguistic Conditioning can be described as the neuro-linguistic conditioning imprinted during the developmental period of infancy. The imprinting of ontological dualism is induced as an acceptance of reified abstract concepts as a material things.

Our ability to absorb information is genetic with this knowledge being realised culturally. For example, whilst the psycho-physiological ability to register hunger is genetically actuated and gratified through the local diet, the ability to communicate via language is genetically initiated and realised culturally through exposure to the particular language and its grammar, whether it be English or Hindi. Countless other genetic belief systems are realised through their cultural counterparts.

Another of these genetic predispositional belief systems is transmitted and expressed as a inclination for an acceptance of transcendental dualism and (like religion) it is realised linguistically through the particular system of grammatical syntax and semantics that encode the belief systems to which the growing child is exposed. It is possible that the source of this variable expression as an acceptance of abstract concepts being real must be due to a genetic variant within a regulatory region of the gene itself. Thus forms of language and the beliefs they presuppose are copied, encoded and internalised from parents, family, peer groups and wider society, which are continually reinforced during a child's growth to maturity. A dualistically orientated lexicon and grammar is interiorised in infancy in the form of an illogical reification (concretisation) of abstraction in addition to that which has mass and occupies space. Linguistically inherited socialised ways of thinking and speaking which mitigate against reality contactedness.

>The benefits of the human ability to abstract (to consider apart from a particular case or instance) includes an important neurological dissociation between the capacity to act accordingly in social contexts and knowledge about one's own best strategies for survival.

>An acceptance of hypostasisation descriptively censorious of strangers or human groups perceived as being different results from an instinctual evolutionary inclination to interpret abstract statements in a way that generates group norm compliance. Such correspondence satisfies the evolutionary imperative to conserve group resources for their own survival and provide sufficient nourishment for their progeny.

>Epigenetic Linguistic Conditioning enables individuals and groups to overcome potential empathy for fellow humans considered as "outsiders" and alienate human competitor groups and individuals on the basis of reifications which tag their physical appearance, colour, religion, culture, social class, economic position, sexual orientation and behavioral differentiation.  

>As Barthes was reported to have said: