Reification is the apprehension of human phenomena as if they were things, or something other than human products (Berger and Luckmann 1967:89). Institutions, social roles, norms, and other social processes often come to assume a greater than human authority through this process. Reification entails a certain amount of mystification as the human roots of phenomena are veiled (see Taussig 1980; Freund and McGuire 1995:205). SICK ROLE The sick role is a social role: a way of acting out society's expectations. The sick role therefore describes those expectations and not necessarily the actual behavior of the ill individual (see Parsons 1951).

Translating a complex set of phenomena into a single entity such as a number. IQ test scores are an example.

regarding something abstract as a material thing

Literally 'making an object of'. Applied here to the process of capturing discussion and re-using as a new kind of courseware.

a kind of fallacy where we avidly discuss something which cannot be shown to exist

Reification in knowledge representation is sometimes used to represent facts that must then be manipulated in some way; for example, to compare logical assertions from different witnesses to determine their credibility. The message "John is six feet tall" is an assertion of truth that commits the sender to the fact, whereas the reified statement, "Mary reports that John is six feet tall" defers this commitment to Mary. In this way, the statements can be incompatible without creating contradictions in reasoning.

The collective projection onto an object of a level of reality it does not actually possess, yet the people themselves are not aware that it is their own collective cognitve process accomplishing this. The object invariably appears in cognition as a completely separate entity with its own qualities independent of the cognizers, even though the cognizers have been active participants in the construction of the experience, shaping the form, content, and meaning of the object.