[MD] reifying carrots

[MarshaV]

Greetings,

I am more and more convinced that conceptualization is the twin reification of self (subject) and other (object).  As such it would say something significant about ALL static patterns from the inorganic level to the intellectual level:  All patterns, all levels - inorganic, biological, social & intellectual - are conventionally, indeed, statically, subject-object oriented.

"Mystification, in the concept of reification, is basic to the sociology of knowledge. Berger and Luckmann (1966, 89f) make a distinction, similar to the Buddhist analysis of self-identity, between two levels of reification, one implicit and unreflective and the other explicit and cultivated. Reification is 

       the apprehension of the products of human activity as if they were 
       something else than human products—such as facts of nature, results 
       of cosmic laws, or manifestations of divine will... Reification is possible 
       on both the pretheoretical and theoretical levels of consciousness... 
       it would be an error to limit the concept of reification to the mental 
       construction of intellectuals. Reification exists in the consciousness of 
       the man in the street and, indeed, the latter presence is more practically 
       significant. It would also be a mistake to look at reification as a perversion 
       of an originally non-reified apprehension of the social world, a sort of 
       cognitive fall from grace. On the contrary, the available ethnological and 
       psychological evidence seems to indicate the opposite, namely, that the 
       _original apprehension of the social world is highly reified both phylogenetically 
       and ontogenetically._ (emphasis added) 

That is to say, consistent with our main thesis, that we know the world by means of our evolved capacities to reify experience into the categories of language and social and cultural life. These are both fundamental and fundamentally obscuring." 

        (Waldron, William, 'Common Ground, Common Cause')