a question for the academic-types on my friends list

[merchimerch]

In terms of the literature in the humanities, is there really a difference between "accepting the ontology" of something and "reifying" it? The only difference that comes to my mind is that authors give "ontology" a postive valence and "reification" a negative valence, but it seems to function the same way - you are treating something as a separatable thing, a formed concept, etc.

Comments

[sps.livejournal.com]

Surely to reify is to actively construe the, if you will, 'nominance' of a thing, while acceptance of ontology is failure to reject an induced categorisation? To choose a nice hard example, after I have developed number theory, the class of things evenly divisible by seven is already implied, and to recognise it as an entity worthy of independent note is one thing, but to look around in the world and abstract from it the notion of number (as distinct from mere count of, say, chickens, or leaves, or days) is quite another.

Reification, it seems to me, is only a bad thing to those terrified of being accused of innovation - or at any rate, of imposing their own view on things. Indeed, to those of us in maths and computer science, it is a talent for reification, the introduction of new nominalisms, that separates innovation from formula. And what else is there for a thinking being to do?

Of course, we might all be wrong. It's entirely possible we're just being the Patriarchy (a lovely reification if ever there was one).