[Sigia-l] Question about the use of the term 'ontology'

[Ruth Kaufman]

On Apr 1, 2005, at 8:15 AM, Ruth Kaufman wrote:
> What I mean by 'reify' is the process by which something whose natural 
> state is not concrete (e.g., a notion, a cultural generalization, a 
> collective memory, a value, a sense of self, a way of being...) 
> manifests some aspect of itself, or is somehow denoted, in a concrete 
> way (e.g., a term, a picture, a convention...)
>
Oops, correction. Reification is not the same as "manifestation." An 
image that is a reification has a different way of coming into being 
than that which it is reifying. The original thing and the reification 
have 2 different origins. For example, a television sit-com about life 
in the city for 20-somethings reifies an aspect of our society, but the 
way in which the TV show came into being is different from the way the 
situations represented in the story lines came into being.

This is getting off-topic, and I'm fairly new to these concepts, 
myself, so I'll leave it there.

Ruth