Reification

Reification is making something real, bringing something into being, or making something concrete.

Reification may also refer to:

• Reification (Gestalt psychology), the perception of an object as having more spatial information than is present
• Reification (Marxism), the consideration, in Marxism, of an abstraction or an object as if it had living existence and abilities (also sometimes called "objectification", but see below)
• Reification (computer science), the creation of a data model
• Reification (fallacy), the fallacy of treating an abstraction as if it were a real thing
• Reification (knowledge representation), the representation of facts and/or assertions
• Reification (linguistics), the transformation, in natural-language processing, of a natural-language statement such that actions and events represented by it become quantifiable variables
• Reification (statistics), the use of an idealized model to make inferences linking results from a model with experimental observations

See also

• Concretization
• Objectification, the treatment of an entity (such as a human or animal) as an object