Things are reified out of sensory experience of the world (though note that “sensory” is redundant here), and the world is the unified non-thing
Okay, but the tabley-looking stuff out there seems to conform more parsimoniously to a theory that posits an external table. I assume we agree on that, and then the question is, what’s happening when we so posit?
Yep, so I think this gets into a different question of epistemology not directly related to things but rather about what we care about, since positing a theory that what looks to me like a table implies something table shaped about the universe requires caring about parsimony.
(Aside: It’s kind of related because to talk about caring about things we need reifications that enable us to point to what we care about, but I think that’s just an artifact of using words—care is patterns of behavior and preference we can reify call “parsimonious” or something else, but exist prior to being named.)
If we care about something other than parsimony, we may not agree that the universe is filled with tables. Maybe we slice it up quite differently and tables exist orthogonal to our ontology.
This seems straightforward to me: reification is a process by which our brain picks out patterns/features and encodes them so we can recognize them again and make sense of the world given our limited hardware. We can then think in terms of those patterns and gloss over the details because the details often aren’t relevant for various things.
The reason we reify things one way versus another depends on what we care about, i.e. our purposes.
Okay, but the tabley-looking stuff out there seems to conform more parsimoniously to a theory that posits an external table. I assume we agree on that, and then the question is, what’s happening when we so posit?
Yep, so I think this gets into a different question of epistemology not directly related to things but rather about what we care about, since positing a theory that what looks to me like a table implies something table shaped about the universe requires caring about parsimony.
(Aside: It’s kind of related because to talk about caring about things we need reifications that enable us to point to what we care about, but I think that’s just an artifact of using words—care is patterns of behavior and preference we can reify call “parsimonious” or something else, but exist prior to being named.)
If we care about something other than parsimony, we may not agree that the universe is filled with tables. Maybe we slice it up quite differently and tables exist orthogonal to our ontology.
I’m asking what reification is, period, and what it has to do with what’s in reality (the thing that bites you regardless of what you think).
This seems straightforward to me: reification is a process by which our brain picks out patterns/features and encodes them so we can recognize them again and make sense of the world given our limited hardware. We can then think in terms of those patterns and gloss over the details because the details often aren’t relevant for various things.
The reason we reify things one way versus another depends on what we care about, i.e. our purposes.