reification
From Wiktionary, the free dictionary
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See also: réification
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Etymology
First attested around 1846; a macaronic calque of German Verdinglichung, using -ification (“making”) for ver- + -lich + -ung, and Latin rēs (“thing”) for Ding (“thing”)
Pronunciation
Noun
reification (countable and uncountable, plural reifications)
- The consideration of an abstract thing as if it were concrete, or of an inanimate object as if it were living.
- 2002, Timothy Bewes, Reification: Or The Anxiety of Late Capitalism, Verso, →ISBN, page 146:
- The reification of art and religion, a symptom of their historical obsolescence, takes the form of their instrumentalization, their reduction to a mere use value. At this point they become ‘cultural goods’, writes Adorno, and ‘are no longer taken quite seriously by anybody.’
- 2022 September 20, Danielle Carr, “Mental Health Is Political”, in The New York Times, →ISSN:
- Reification swaps out a political problem for a scientific or technical one; it’s how, for example, the effects of unregulated tech oligopolies become “social media addiction,” how climate catastrophe caused by corporate greed becomes a “heat wave” — and, by the way, how the effect of struggles between labor and corporations combines with high energy prices to become “inflation.”
- The consideration of a human being as an impersonal object.
- (programming) A process that makes a computable/addressable object out of a non-computable/addressable one; or a concrete class out of a generic one.
- 2020, Marco Faella, Seriously Good Software: Code that works, survives, and wins, Simon and Schuster, →ISBN, page 251:
- Contrary to Java, C++ and C# implement generics via reification, meaning that each specific version of a generic class, like
List<String>is converted into a concrete class, either at compile time (C++) or at runtime (C#).
- (linguistics) The transformation of a natural-language statement into a form in which its actions and events are quantifiable variables.
Synonyms
Derived terms
Derived terms
Translations
Consideration of an abstract thing as if it were concrete, or of an inanimate object as if it were living
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Consideration of a human being as an impersonal object
programming: Process that makes out of a non-computable/addressable object a computable/addressable one
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