#thingifying

[mentalisttraceur]

Thingifying

To thingify a word or concept is when we start thinking about the word or concept as a discrete "thing", as designating some concrete category or boundary from other distinct and different things.

As opposed to thinking of it whenever possible as an independent dimension of description, a combining force, a pattern that can overlap, or an area or direction in the space defined by one or more of the many factors that make up and ultimately contribute to discrete "things" being what and how they are.

Thingifying is the typical, casual, and normal way to think, but it's utterly awful for really understanding anything more complex or nuanced than, well... concrete, very different things.

Thingifying a word or concept drains abstraction and composability out of it, reducing it to labeling a rigid and fixed thing in our mind. It actively harms our ability to notice and use whatever more useful, general, or fundamental idea was there.

[mentalisttraceur]

@astranemus  replied to "Thingifying vs Reification":

Reification is a fallacy; not really used to mean something deliberate, conscious and truth-preserving.

Then in that sense it overlaps with thingifying. Perhaps is exactly thingifying.

But that is not the only sense I have seen it used in. In fact, the most common sense I have seen it used in has been as a positive conscious decision in programming language or software design.

Like I described in that post you are replying to, in that sense, we reify deliberately in order to improve reasoning or clarity in some manner.

Even if "reifying" had that meaning first, and thus started out intended as what I am now using "thingifying" to mean, this is clearly a case of a space where terms for these two different distinctions is useful.

Given the balance of connotations and intuitiveness of each word, I am inclined to stick with my chosen assignments of these two words to these two distinct ideas, but I could be convinced otherwise.

[mentalisttraceur]

Thingifying vs Reifying

Thingifying is different from reifying both in the exact cognition I have in mind, and in connotation.

I am deliberately aiming for the clumsy, crude, lessening feel that "thingifying" invokes.

Reifying sounds too much like something really smart people do. People in the abstract branches of mathematics and computation. People who know how and when to abstract. People who we hope have good taste for when not to reify.

In so far as thingifying is maybe sometimes a type of reifying, one of the defining features of the subtype is that the right move was to not reify in that case. I suspect there is some thingifying that is not reifying. There is definitely some reifying that is not thingifying.

Reifying is something you do when you already have a mental feel of an abstract concept, and you are turning it into a thing with purpose. Giving it a concrete representation that can be handled, because it improves or clarifies reasoning.

Thingifying is something we usually slip into accidentally, or when we haven't yet grasped the better underlying decomposition of ideas that make up the thing.

[mentalisttraceur]

I need a government or governance tag.

Except of course I am held back by a desire to first properly define governance or government in a way that I find satisfying.

Mostly because the idea of "government" is too often thingified in casual usage and thinking.

[mentalisttraceur]

See also "discreteness limitation of human intuition" and that post's tag for a couple years older take on the same general idea as "thingifying words", but generalized beyond just meaning of words.