16: The pitfalls of abstraction and reification

Abstraction

Abstraction as process

Abstraction simplifies complex things by focusing on the most important aspects while ignoring details.

What we do: simplify and generalise.

Example: making a map of the London Underground system.

Abstraction as product

An abstraction is something that exists only as an idea. A construct.

An imperfectly defined explanatory notion — Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind.

What results: the conceptual or symbolic outcome.

Example: the map itself or the idea of a system.

The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, seek simplicity and distrust it.

Alfred North Whitehead, mathematician and philosopher

It is important to maintain the awareness that the systems view itself is also just another map that, as Alfred Korzybski put it, should not be confused with the territory. We can reduce the world to a whole just as easily as we can reduce it to a collection of parts.

Daniel Christian Wahl, [6 Key Questions in] Whole Systems Thinking, an excerpt from this book, Designing Regenerative Cultures

Please refer to Slide 11 notes: The map is not the territory.

Reification

Reification is the act of treating an abstract noun as a concrete thing that can be created, acquired, altered, improved, managed or otherwise manipulated.

Alfred North Whitehead called it The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness.

In assigning fixed labels we commit the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. According to Whitehead, by mistaking abstractions, beliefs or mental constructs for physical or “concrete” reality, we hypnotise ourselves.

Larry G. Maguire, The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness

Reification (also known as concretism, hypostatization, or the fallacy of misplaced concreteness) is a fallacy of ambiguity, when an abstraction (abstract belief or hypothetical construct) is treated as if it were a concrete real event or physical entity. In other words, it is the error of treating something that is not concrete, such as an idea, as a concrete thing. A common case of reification is the confusion of a model with reality: “the map is not the territory”.

Source: Wikipedia entry for Reification (fallacy)

Some no-things that cannot be created or manipulated

Read more

Abstract nouns are seductive but dangerous, by Valerie Iles

Beware the abstract noun, on the Vernacular website

The Paradox of Immersion and Abstraction (download) by Chris Rodgers,
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