reification

noun reifications

1. countable, uncountable The consideration of an abstract thing as if it were concrete, or of an inanimate object as if it were living. The reification of art and religion, a symptom of their historical obsolescence, takes the form of their instrumentalization, their reduction to a mere use value. At this point they become ‘cultural goods’, writes Adorno, and ‘are no longer taken quite seriously by anybody.’
2. countable, uncountable The consideration of a human being as an impersonal object.
3. countable, uncountable A process that makes a computable/addressable object out of a non-computable/addressable one; or a concrete class out of a generic one. Contrary to Java, C++ and C# implement generics via reification, meaning that each specific version of a generic class, like List<String> is converted into a concrete class, either at compile time (C++) or at runtime (C#).
4. countable, uncountable The transformation of a natural-language statement into a form in which its actions and events are quantifiable variables.

Similar: hypostatization, materialization, objectification, pathetic fallacy, thingification