Reification is a process by which abstract concepts or ideas are turned into something tangible, concrete or real. The antonyms of reification are concepts like abstraction, idealization, or generalization. Abstraction involves the concept of taking a complex idea or issue and simplifying it down to a more basic form. Idealization is the process of taking something and representing it as better or more perfect than it actually is. Generalization refers to the practice of extending an idea or concept to wider spheres, or broader contexts. Thus, the antonyms of reification represent a way of thinking that is less focused on the material or visible aspects of the world and more attentive to the underlying principles that govern human affairs.

What are the antonyms for Reification?

• n.

  • embodiment
  • exclusion
  .

Famous quotes with Reification

• Life is simply the reification of the process of living.

  Ernst Mayr
• Gould's argument on reification purports to get at the philosophical foundation of the field. He claims that general intelligence, defined as the factor common to different cognitive abilities, is merely a mathematical abstraction; hence if we consider it a measurable attribute we are reifying it, falsely converting an abstraction into an “entity” or a “thing”—variously referred to as “a hard, quantifiable thing,” “a quantifiable fundamental particle,” “a thing in the most direct, material sense.” Here he has dug himself a deep hole.… Indeed, this whole argument is fantastic. The scientist does not measure “material things”: He measures properties (such as length or mass), sometimes of a single “thing” (however defined), and sometimes of an organized collection of things, such as a machine, a biological organ, or an organism. In a particularly complex collection, the brain, some properties (i.e., specific functions) have been traced to narrowly-localized regions (such as the sensory or motor nuclei connected to particular parts of the body).

  Stephen Jay Gould
• The intellectual origins of literary theory in Europe were, I think it is accurate to say, insurrectionary. The traditional university, the hegemony of determinism and positivism, the reification of ideological bourgeois “humanism,” the rigid barriers between academic specialties: it was powerful responses to all these that linked together such influential progenitors of today’s literary theorist as Saussure, Lukács, Bataille, Lévi-Strauss, Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx. Theory proposed itself as a synthesis overriding the petty fiefdoms within the world of intellectual production, and it was manifestly to be hoped as a result that all the domains of human activity could be seen, and lived, as a unity. ...

  Edward Said
• Psychology is familiar with the “eternal victim,” who exploits this position for disguised aggressions. Also belonging to this category, in a broader sense, are those permanent losers as well as medical and political hypochondriacs who lament that conditions are so terrible that it is a great sacrifice on their part not to kill themselves or emigrate. On the German Left, not least of all under the influence of the sociologized schema of the victim, a certain type of renegade has emerged who feels that it is a dirty trick to have to live in this land without summer and without oppositional forces. Nobody can say that such a viewpoint does not know what it is talking about. Its mistake is that it remains blind to itself. For the accusation becomes bound to misery and magnifies it under the subterfuge of unsuspecting critical observations. With the obstinacy of a Sophist, in aggressive self-reification, many a “critical” consciousness refuses to become healthier than the sick whole.

  Peter Sloterdijk

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parroquet

Synonyms:

parakeet, paraquet, paroquet, parrakeet, parroket, parrot, parrot, parakeet, paraquet, paroquet.