reification
See also: réification
English
[edit]
Etymology
[edit]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
[edit]Noun
[edit]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[1], →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
[edit]Derived terms
[edit]Derived terms
[edit]Translations
[edit]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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Categories:
- English terms calqued from German
- English terms derived from German
- English terms derived from Latin
- English 5-syllable words
- English terms with IPA pronunciation
- Rhymes:English/eɪʃən
- Rhymes:English/eɪʃən/5 syllables
- English lemmas
- English nouns
- English uncountable nouns
- English countable nouns
- English terms with quotations
- en:Programming
- en:Linguistics
- English terms suffixed with -ification