A colleague once made a comment to the effect of, "If you give something a name, it becomes a thing."
Is that a quote, or similar to a quote, from some philosophical work. If so, what is the process my colleague was describing.
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1The process is called "nominalization" in linguistics, but the quote has it exactly backwards, nominalizing some perceived commonality does not make it a thing. At best, it starts an inquiry into it, see Cocchiarella, On the Logic of Nominalized Predicates and Its Philosophical Interpretations. Scholastics, and later Perice, called what comes out of nominalization (under the right conditions) ens rationis, beings of reason, see Novotny's book.– ConifoldCommented Oct 24, 2022 at 4:49
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1How can you give it a name if it isn't already a thing? What is the name being applied to?– David GudemanCommented Oct 24, 2022 at 6:00
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1It depends of what is "a thing"... if we mean an existing object, the answer is no: humans are accustomed to speak of non existing objects.– Mauro ALLEGRANZACommented Oct 24, 2022 at 6:53
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3"The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth. The named is the mother of ten thousand things." -TaoTeChing. The cognitive bias of 'chunking' phenomena is discussed here philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/70930/…– CriglCraglCommented Oct 24, 2022 at 23:34
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4Its called reification. Can be a fallacy. Can be the foundation of Platonism. The etymology of reification is exactly your question– RushiCommented Jun 15 at 4:57
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2 Answers
Sigmund Freud argued for the names of things when publishing his thoughts concerning the thing he called psychoanalysis. He tried to convince his readers that psychoanalysis did not simply consist of the naming of things and then treating those things as real. He argued that the body makes efforts to govern action in the sensory context. Technically the body is the thing or material object of the senses. The ego, the conscious and unconscious biological effort to govern action in the sensory context, is not a material thing, it is a function we experience and express incorporated into the structure of the mammal body. In the same way the id (biological source of inner drives) and the superego (observer, ego ideal, and conscience) are not things. And yet a whole industry of so-called psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and mental health workers speak and act as if these "things" exist as functions of the body. It appears that in human minds the functions or attributes of things are given names such that the function or attribute is like a distinct thing.
I had a professor in graduate school who taught Fuzzy Logic and Neural Networks. His theory is that brains (neural networks) generate knowledge. Experts in some domain of knowledge recognize more names of things in their field of study. I think of the many names for snow conditions in the Inuit language or the hundreds of names with attributes of God in the Hebrew language.
Does a sick ego exist, or does the body perform actions in the sensory context, and we judge those actions to be the character or expression of a healthy or sick ego? In Freud's own model his judgment of a healthy or sick ego would reduce to the experience and expression of his own ego ideal and conscience. I think Freud was right that we can invent names for functions and we often treat those names as things instead of functions. But the names for things do not apply strictly to material objects they are concepts to communicate about our experience and expression of life in the moral, social, and natural world.
It is false. You need to distinguish between things and predicates. The word "unicorn" is the name of a predicate that is not true when applied to anything. The predicate exists, but it is still not a thing. Otherwise if you accept such predicates as things then...
Let R be the predicate "predicate that is not true when applied to itself", namely such that for every thing x we have that R(x) is true iff x is a predicate and x(x) is not true. Then R is a thing (by the false assumption), and so R(R) is true iff R is a predicate and R(R) is not true. Contradiction.
Conclusion: Not every predicate can be a thing. In foundation of mathematics, we say that not every predicate is reifiable. You cannot escape this, since you cannot artificially restrict what "predicate" means, otherwise you are excluding concepts that are completely sensible (assuming your other notions are sensible to begin with).
