Please refer to our Reification - Part One if you want to catch up. I needed two posts to just mention all of the ideas "reification" raises.
This is because taking a close look at abstract words can lead one into the deadly whirlpool abyss of meaning and lack of meaning, and the next thing you know, you wonder whether you yourself are alive and real...and then you wonder what "real" means...and then you go fishing.
Berger and Luckmann, authors of one of my favorite books of all time, The Social Construction of Reality, define reification as:
"the apprehension of human phenomena as if they were things, that is, in non-human or possibly supra-human terms."
Example: I feel like breaking that jerk's nose. Therefore, I have an "angry feeling". No, you don't. You can't "have" a "feeling." Sometimes the reification fallacy is simply turning verbs into nouns.
Abduction is the mechanism of reification. How so? There is a human need to integrate meaning, to find a coherent sense of things. The cognitive mechinism of reification is something called "abduction", which is one way in which the human brain links phenomena into something meaningful to the brain. C.S. Peirce and Bateson considered it a critical function of the brain.
What abduction does (there's the fallacy at work) is to impose what Berger and Luckmann would term a culturally-determined "logico-linguistic" framework on things, so that they will seem to make sense.
Example:
My friend died.
It must be because of God's will (or bad luck, or bad Karma, or whatever). There's the adbuction - the imposition of a prepared format on a phenomenon.
Thus God's Will, Bad Luck, or Bad Karma, or Whatever, act purposefully on the world and on life. There's the reification.
Thus it is difficult to talk about anything to talk about anything without committing some reification fallacy or another. Thus the limits of language and verbal thought. And here we stop, before descending deeper into this black hole from which the only rescue is spiritual and not verbal-logical.
The Wikipedia definition, with good links, here.
