reification

Noun

reification (countable and uncountable, plural reifications)

1. The consideration of an abstract thing as if it were concrete, or of an inanimate object as if it were living.
   • The reification of art and religion, a symptom of their historical obsolescence, takes the form of their instrumentalization, their reduction to a mere use value. At this point they become ‘cultural goods’, writes Adorno, and ‘are no longer taken quite seriously by anybody.’2002, Timothy Bewes, Reification: Or The Anxiety of Late Capitalism, Verso, →ISBN, page 146
   • Computer scientists found out how functional reification is in programming languages: they call it ‘object-oriented programming’ […].2018, Pieter Seuren, Saussure and Sechehaye […] , BRILL, →ISBN, page 209
2. The consideration of a human being as an impersonal object.
3. A process that makes a computable/addressable object out of a non-computable/addressable one; or a concrete class out of a generic one.
   • Contrary to Java, C++ and C# implement generics via reification, meaning that each specific version of a generic class, like List<String> is converted into a concrete class, either at compile time (C++) or at runtime (C#).2020, Marco Faella, Seriously Good Software: Code that works, survives, and wins, Simon and Schuster, →ISBN, page 251
4. The transformation of a natural-language statement into a form in which its actions and events are quantifiable variables.