140 How to Win Every Argument
so, you attack the case, showing how it could not possibly be
valid. The case of a family produced to show that bus drivers' pay
is too low can be attacked with great merriment by asking
whether they have a colour television and how much the hus-
band spends on beer. Even if you cannot undermine the example
in apparent destruction of the assertion it supports, you can
probably widen the talk to a more general discussion about what
constitutes poverty, and cast doubt on whether the original
statement means anything at all. This is called 'linguistic analysis'.
Reification
The fallacy of reification, also called hypostatization, consists in the
supposition that words must denote real things. Because we can
admire the redness of a sunset, we must not be led by the exist-
ence of the word into supposing that redness is a thing. When we
see a red ball, a red table, a red pen and a red hat, we commit the
fallacy of reification if we suppose that a fifth object, redness, is
present along with the ball, the table, the pen and the hat.
In SKYROS we have extracted the blueness of the summer sky and
inserted it in a bar of heavenly soap.
(Since the 'blueness' of the summer sky is not an object, it cannot be
processed like a material thing.)Turning descriptive qualities into things is only one form of
reification. We can also make the mistake of supposing that
abstract nouns are real objects.
He realized that he had thrown away his future, and spent the rest of the
afternoon trying to find it again.
(If you think that sounds silly, you should watch Plato searching for
justice.)