Reified

Reified is a term used to describe something that has been made concrete or object-like from an abstraction. The verb reify means to treat or render something abstract as a material or substantial thing. The word derives from Latin res, meaning thing, and facere, to make.

In philosophy and sociology, reification refers to treating social relations, processes, or ideas as things with independent existence, rather than as actions or abstractions. It is central in Marxist thought through commodity fetishism, where social relations of production are experienced as relations between objects. Critics argue it obscures human agency.

In linguistics and grammar, reification can refer to nominalization — turning verbs or processes into nouns — and to the broader tendency to treat processes as objects, sometimes yielding essentialist explanations.

In computer science and information modeling, reification is a design technique in which a relation or process is represented as a first-class entity, typically as an object or a table. This allows attributes and metadata to be attached to the relationship.

Reified concepts may be contrasted with abstract or hypothetical constructs; the precise sense of reification depends on the field of study.

See also: hypostatization, commodity fetishism, nominalization, metamodeling.