Reification 141
Sometimes objects have consequential attributes, in their
arrangement, perhaps. We commit reification if we suppose that
these attributes are as real as the objects they depend upon.
It [the Cheshire Cat] vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of
the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the
rest of it had gone.
(Alice could see it because she had sharp eyes. After all, she had seen
nobody on the road, while the Duchess had difficulty enough seeing
somebody.)The fallacy occurs because our words have not the power to
conjure up real existence. We can talk about things which do not
exist at all, and we can talk of things in one form which actually
might exist in another. 'Redness entered the sky' says roughly
the same as 'the sky reddened', but the words denote different
activities. Our words are not evidence for the existence of things;
they are devices for talking about what we experience.
There is a school of philosophers which believes that if we can
talk about things they must, in a sense, exist. Because we can
make sentences about unicorns and the present king of France,
they claim that there must actually be unicorns and a present
king of France (with the latter presumably riding on the back of
the former).
Yet another school elevates the fallacy into an art form, by
talking about the 'essences' of things. They claim that what
makes an egg into an egg and nothing else is its 'eggness', or the
essence of egg. This essence is more real and more durable than
the actual egg, for ordinary eggs disappear into quiche lorraine,
but the idea of an egg goes on. The obvious objection, that this is
just silly, is a commanding one. We use words like labels, to tie
onto things so we do not have to keep pointing at them and
communicating in sign language. Little can be inferred from this