Reification

[frogmarch]

I happened onto this web page last night and found it interesting.

http://www.control-z.com/czp/pgs/reification.html

snip:

Reification (Hypostatization) is a language fallacy that involves ascribing existence, substance, attributes, and behavior to mental constructs or concepts, then talking about these constructs and concepts using language that presupposes them to be real. It is similar to a metaphor, but a metaphor that has been extended too far and taken to a spurious extreme.

When applied to fantastic entities or gods, it is similar to anthropomorphism.

While it is useful to be creative and employ metaphors and abstractions in our language, unless we are mindful of the symbolic (albeit artificial) properties of words we risk the danger of treating abstract entities as 'real' solely through the attributes we metaphorically use to describe them.

How we talk about and discuss things has a great influence on what we believe about them, which means our impression of reality is often structured by the very language we use to describe it. Within time, our descriptions become more meaningful to us than reality itself and we end up believing in the descriptions we use as more real than all the tangible stuff that reality has to offer. Nowhere is this more evident than in the language theists use when talking about God. For example, militant theists are either willing to kill others or allow themselves to be killed solely for the metaphorical descriptions they use and the language they invoke when talking about the needs, desires, and will of their God.