No one sets out to reify.
It begins innocently — with observation.
1. The First Step: Noticing Recurrence
We examine texts.
We observe that certain contextual configurations tend to align with certain semantic and lexicogrammatical tendencies:
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Experimental activity aligns with technical nominalisation.
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Storytelling aligns with temporal sequencing and material processes.
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Institutional argument aligns with modality and citation practices.
These are patterns of actualisation across the cline.
We describe them.
So far, nothing is ontologically unstable.
2. The Second Step: Naming the Pattern
To teach, to compare, to theorise — we give the pattern a name:
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Report
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Narrative
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Explanation
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Discussion
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Research Article
The label is a shorthand for a region of patterned probability.
Again, this is not yet problematic.
Naming is an analytic convenience.
But notice what has already shifted.
We have moved from:
recurrent tendencies in actualisation
to
something that can be named as if it were a unit.
The label begins to stabilise the pattern.
3. The Third Step: The Slide to Category
Once named, the pattern becomes teachable.
Once teachable, it becomes pedagogically regularised.
Once regularised, it becomes expected.
And once expected, it becomes normative.
Now the construal changes:
The question shifts from:
How is potential being actualised here?
to:
Does this text realise the defining features of the type?
This is the moment when recurrence begins to harden into essence.
4. The Fourth Step: Ontologising the Label
At this point, something subtle but decisive occurs.
The label ceases to be understood as an abstraction from instances.
It begins to function as if it referred to something that exists independently of them.
But where, in the architecture of the system, do these entities reside?
They are retrospective generalisations.
Yet discourse about them increasingly treats them as ontological givens.
The drift is complete.
5. What Has Actually Happened
Let us reconstruct the process in ontological terms:
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Instances actualise potential.
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Recurrence across instances is observed.
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Recurrence is labelled.
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The label stabilises the pattern.
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The stabilised pattern is construed as a category.
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The category is treated as an essence.
At no point did a new ontological unit emerge.
Only construal shifted.
What began as patterned probability became categorical membership — not because the system changed, but because perspective did.
6. The Cost of Reification
Why does this matter?
Because once types are treated as essences:
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Boundaries must be drawn.
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Hybridity becomes anomaly.
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Variation becomes deviation.
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Innovation becomes misclassification.
The cline of instantiation disappears behind taxonomic decisions.
Texts are forced into boxes.
The gradient becomes binary.
Reification therefore misrepresents the ontology of meaning.
7. A Quiet Diagnostic Question
When we say:
“This is a narrative.”
Are we describing:
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A region of potential being actualised in patterned ways?
Or are we implying:
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That the text instantiates an abstract category with defining properties?
If the second, then recurrence has become essence.
If the first, then we remain aligned with the cline.
In the next post, we will make the contrast explicit:
Cline versus taxonomy.
Gradient versus classification.
Probability versus membership.
Only then will we see clearly why types feel so stable — and why they never quite were.
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