Reification

In my parents' house there's an old Rand McNally book of state road maps published in the 1980s. A few years ago, after having moved to Phoenix and while visiting my parents, I found the book lying on the coffee table, and I opened it to the map of Arizona. The map had an inset for the Phoenix metropolitan area, and the inset showed only three freeways traversing the city: the I-10, I-17, and U-60. I laughed. In the time since that map's publication, the Phoenix area has added five freeways.

If you were to use that old map to navigate Phoenix today, you would see firsthand the general rule that the model doesn't always match reality. In the last few decades, in addition to adding new freeways, Phoenix has added and widened thousands of miles of roads. Some of those roads were unpaved back then but have since become major thoroughfares wider than a football field. Other roads have been decommissioned, closed off, or redirected. Whole new extensions to the city now exist where the map shows a blank emptiness. In short: a real road changes though a printed map does not.

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Anyone who has used an old road map knows this. The map is an example of a leaky abstraction—a type of problem whereby a simplifying model fails to fully capture the complexity of the real thing. A map of Phoenix is an abstraction that's simpler than Phoenix itself. That's why the map is useful. It's easier to plan a route by seeing Phoenix's roads at a glance using a map than it is to try to see them at a glance in actuality—even from a bird's eye view atop Camelback Mountain.

But the price of an abstraction's simplicity is inaccuracy, such as when a map becomes outdated and possibly worse than useless. Simplicity succeeds by leaving out details, and it fails by leaving out details.

Joel Spolsky coined the term leaky abstraction when he lamented this pattern of failure as it happens in software development. In the software world, leaky abstractions abound. But they also abound outside the software world, too, and it's a shame Spolsky's audience didn't extend beyond computer geeks because the rest of the world is missing out on a great term for a common problem.

Though, there is almost another term. A leaky abstraction is an informal analog to what in formal logic is called a reification fallacy. That's the logician's name for the error of mistaking a model for the real thing. But the spell checker in the text editor I'm using to write this blog doesn't recognize either the words reification or reify, and neither does Firefox's spell checker recognize those words, so I presume that logicians' reach isn't much greater than Spolsky's.

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In its most literal interpretation, an example of a reification fallacy is trying to drive your real car on a real printed road map, treating the map as though it is the actual roads. But this is hard to do because those solid red, black, or gray lines on a map denoting roads are tricky narrow—and never mind trying to drive on dashed lines.

A fuzzier and more likely example of a reification fallacy is conflating the information on an old, out-of-date road map with the state of the roads today. This would be the case if I used my parents' map of 1980s Phoenix to find my way around this city in 2012.

Reification fallacies, a.k.a. leaky abstractions, abound in the real world. You can't read a newspaper or news magazine that doesn't sneak in at least a dozen of them—sometimes per page. As an example, keep in mind that nearly anytime you read or hear the phrase the economy in today's parlance, you're being entreated to slip into fallacious thinking. The phrase the economy is shorthand that refers to a complex, worldwide system of innumerable material exchanges involving billions of people that defies the understanding of any one person. But more often we hear simplifying expressions like, The economy is recovering, and, So-and-so's tax policy won't fix the economy. These reifications treat that complex system of exchanges as a simple, singular entity that—even worse—is to be judged on a linear scale ranging from fixed to broken. This is as dangerous as trying to drive your car on a printed road map. The reality is that some people do well for themselves in recessions and some people do poorly during economic expansions, and the notion of an economy is a loose generalization. We'd be more honest if we substituted the status quo for the economy in most cases.

There are countless other reifications in common speech—equality, justice, rights, freedom, good, evil, power, culture, the people, the government, the corporations, the environment, beauty, the relationship, happiness, them, us, and so on. All are ways of simplifying the real world to allow us to talk about things that would otherwise be too complex to talk about. All are sly ways of simplifying away real details. Reification is double-edged.

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So much for explaining what a reification fallacy is. Next week I aim to explain what this has to do with the problem of personal identity.