treatment of an analytic or abstract relationship as though it were a concrete entity. (Young, p. l09)
The process of regarding something abstract as a material entity, Whitehead's "fallacy of misplaced concreteness," e.g., the mistake of confusing a
system, which is a
construct, with the physical entity described in its terms (
see general systems theory ). In
social systems reification is encouraged by the use of
language and underlies many processes of constructing social reality. (
Krippendorff )
