Thingification — UNNATURAL

Working notes, not prose. This page is a research packet for drafting the chapter: the brief, source material, questions, examples, reader perspectives, and the earlier draft.

Brief

Must: Show how repeatable cuts become followable “things” (objects, roles, money, diagnoses, institutions) that enable coordination and loop back to reshape what they describe.
Serves: It shows the information world hardening into social furniture: real in effect, made in origin.

Quote options

“Reification is the apprehension of human phenomena as if they were things, that is, in non-human or possibly supra-human terms. […] Reification implies that man is capable of forgetting his own authorship of the human world.” — Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (1966), Part II, “Society as Objective Reality.” [verified: https://archive.org/details/BergerSocialConstructionOfReality_201901] Why: The chapter’s thesis in one line: made in origin, then forgotten as made.
“There are portions of the real world, objective facts in the world, that are only facts by human agreement. In a sense there are things that exist only because we believe them to exist. I am thinking of things like money, property, governments, and marriages.” — John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (1995), ch. 1, p. 1. [verified: https://archive.org/details/the-construction-of-social-reality-john-rogers-searle_202512] Why: Names the chapter’s own examples (money, institutions) and states “real in effect, made in origin.”
“If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” — W. I. Thomas and Dorothy Swaine Thomas, The Child in America (1928), p. 572. [verified: https://archive.org/details/childinamerica00thom] Why: The Thomas theorem: the shortest statement of a cut looping back to reshape the world.
“In some cases, that is, our classifications and our classes conspire to emerge hand in hand, each egging the other on.” — Ian Hacking, “Making Up People,” in Reconstructing Individualism (1986), p. 165. [verified: https://serendipstudio.org/oneworld/system/files/Hacking_making-up-people.pdf] Why: The looping effect: the category and the thing it describes shape each other.
“Its basis is that a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a ‘phantom objectivity’, an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people.” — Georg Lukács, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” History and Class Consciousness (1923), §I.1, trans. Rodney Livingstone. [verified: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/hcc05.htm] Why: The origin of “thingification” as a concept; the social furniture hides the relations it is made of.

Research

Core argument

Start from the handoff from Chapter 9. A cut that is made once is a gesture. When the same cut is made again and again, by many people, it becomes a groove, and eventually it becomes something we can point at, name, count, trade and argue about. Thingification is what we call that hardening of a repeated cut into a followable handle.
Thingification is an achievement before it is a mistake. Handles let strangers coordinate without renegotiating the world each time. A price, a surname, a diagnosis code, a job title or a property line packs a pile of context into something portable. The chapter should give real credit here, because a grocery list, a pharmacy and a train timetable are impossible without it.
There are layers of thinghood. The book can lay them out as a ladder: (a) perceptual objects (the chair, the apple); (b) named kinds (fish, weed, planet); (c) roles and statuses (parent, referee, patient); (d) institutional facts (money, marriage, borders, corporations); (e) whole institutions and “imagined communities” (states, nations, markets). Each rung rests more on shared recognition and less on physics. Searle’s formula, “X counts as Y in context C”, is the working mechanism from rung (c) upward.
Real in effect, made in origin. Institutional things are not illusions. The line of stones really does stop people, and the banknote really does buy bread. But they keep working only as long as people keep recognizing them. The test: take away every mind that recognizes it and see whether the thing still does anything. A tree keeps doing tree things. A dollar turns back into paper.
Forgetting is part of how it works. A handle works best when nobody notices it is a handle. Berger and Luckmann’s “objectivation” and Lukács’s “phantom objectivity” name this. Whitehead’s “fallacy of misplaced concreteness” names the thinker’s version of the same slip. The furniture feels like nature, so questioning it feels like questioning gravity.
The loop. Things made from cuts act back on what they cut. Scott’s “fiscal Heisenberg principle” covers objects: houses got rebuilt with fewer windows to dodge a tax on windows. Hacking’s looping effect covers people: a new kind of person and the category for it “emerged hand in hand”. The loop makes the category more true over time, which then looks like proof that it was always there.
Who gets to thingify, and for whom. States, clinics, platforms and schools make many of the handles we live inside. Legibility serves the viewer first: the tax office, the insurer, the algorithm. The cost falls on whatever the simplified view left out, as in Scott’s poisoned forests and Filipino surnames. This ties back to Chapter 9’s cost of the blade.
Holding things well. The practical stance is not to “see through” everything, which cynicism mistakes for wisdom. It is to hold things as tools with authors, dates and purposes. Ask of any piece of social furniture: who made it, what does it make easy, what does it make invisible, and what would it take to change it?
Bridge to the Act II close. Only humans carry this process so far: we cut, name, stabilize, then stack new things on top of the old (a derivative on a mortgage on a deed on a survey on a field). That is the “unnatural in distinction” that the act close names.

Key questions

When does a pattern become a thing? How many repetitions, how many people, and how much writing does it take?
(Child) If everyone forgot what money was overnight, where would the money go?
(Child) Is a chair still a chair if nobody ever sits on it? If a dog sleeps on it?
(Child) Who decided Pluto isn’t a planet any more, and did Pluto notice?
(Cynic) If money, nations and marriages are “just agreements”, why can’t I agree my way out of my debt?
(Cynic) Isn’t “social construction” a fancy way of saying “made up”, which the powerful then use to dismiss things they don’t like, or to insist on things they do?
Which things would still be there if every human vanished, which would decay, and which would disappear at once?
Can animals thingify? Is a vervet monkey’s “leopard” call a thing, or only a reaction? Is a dominance rank a role?
What is the difference between a classification that changes the thing it classifies (a psychiatric diagnosis) and one that does not (a star’s spectral class)? Why does it matter that people can read their own labels?
Why does a thing feel most natural exactly when it is most useful and least visible?
When a thingification helps someone (a diagnosis that opens access to treatment), is the loop still a cost?
Who has the authority to make new things stick, and how did they get it? What counts as a valid signature, stamp or vote?
(Cynic) Institutions claim to serve people, but what happens when the institution becomes the thing being served (paperwork for its own sake)?
Can you refuse a thing without losing access to what it coordinates? What does it cost to live off-grid of a category (no ID, no bank account, no diagnosis)?
How do things die? What happened to the Holy Roman Empire, the shilling or “hysteria”?
(Child) Why do I have a last name? Did my great-great-grandparents have one?
Is the self a thingification, a handle made from a stream of experience (setting up Chapter 18’s strange loop)?
What is the right attitude toward furniture you did not choose but must use: reverence, suspicion, maintenance?
If thingification is how coordination scales, is a less thingified society possible at all, or only a differently thingified one?

Examples

Termite and ant stigmergy (animals, pre-symbolic). Pierre-Paul Grassé coined “stigmergy” in 1959 for insects coordinating through traces left in the environment: a pheromone trail or a mud pellet cues the next worker. It is coordination through a marked world, but nobody holds the mark as a thing. It is a useful baseline for what humans add. (Grassé, Insectes Sociaux 6, 1959.)
Vervet monkey alarm calls (animals, proto-categories). Seyfarth, Cheney and Marler (1980, Science 210:801–803) played recorded alarm calls to vervets in Amboseli. Leopard, eagle and snake calls each produced a different escape (running into trees, looking up, looking down). These are shared categories that work like early handles, but they cannot be stacked into institutions.
Searle’s line of stones (thought experiment). A tribe’s wall decays into a line of stones, yet neighbors still treat it as a boundary. The function now runs on collective recognition, not physics. This is the cleanest picture of a thing that is real in effect and made in origin. (Searle 1995, pp. 39–40.)
The stone money of Yap (civilization). On Yap in Micronesia, large carved limestone discs (rai) served as money. Ownership changed without the stones moving. William Henry Furness III (The Island of Stone Money, 1910) reported a family whose huge stone sank in the sea during transport and yet still counted as their wealth. Milton Friedman retold the story in 1991 (“The Island of Stone Money”, Hoover working paper E-91-3). The example shows money as a record of recognized claims, not a physical good.
Nixon closes the gold window (civilization, 15 August 1971). The dollar’s convertibility to gold ended and money became openly fiat. Nothing physical changed on the day, yet the “thing” money was redefined for the whole world.
Surnames by decree (people and states). On 21 November 1849, Governor Narciso Clavería ordered Filipinos to take permanent Hispanic surnames from an official catalogue, so that the tax and labor rolls would be legible. Many Filipino families still carry those names. (Scott 1998, ch. 2, “The Creation of Surnames”.)
The door-and-window tax (objects looping back). France taxed dwellings by their number of doors and windows from the Directory period until 1917. People built and renovated houses to have fewer openings, and Scott notes the health effects on the rural population lasted more than a century. England’s window tax (1696–1851) had the same effect and gave rise to bricked-up windows you can still see. (Scott 1998, pp. 47–48.)
German scientific forestry and Waldsterben (ecosystems). Forests were reduced to timber yield and replanted as even-aged monocultures of Norway spruce. The first rotation did well. Later generations lost one or two site classes, a 20–30% production loss, and a new word, Waldsterben (“forest death”), entered German. The map remade the territory and then failed it. (Scott 1998, ch. 1.)
Homosexuality leaves the DSM (diagnosis as thing). In December 1973 the American Psychiatric Association’s board voted to remove homosexuality from DSM-II, and the membership upheld the decision in a 1974 referendum. The people did not change on the day, but their legal, medical and social position changed. Pair this with Hacking’s claim that the “homosexual” as a kind of person was a 19th-century category.
Rosenhan, “On Being Sane in Insane Places” (1973). Eight pseudopatients reported hearing voices, were admitted, then behaved normally. They stayed for an average of 19 days, and staff read ordinary behavior through the label (one note recorded “patient engages in writing behavior”). (Science 179:250–258.) The study’s methods were heavily criticized later (Susannah Cahalan, The Great Pretender, 2019), which makes it a good case for Counterarguments too.
Pluto, 24 August 2006 (an indifferent kind). The International Astronomical Union’s vote created “dwarf planet” and moved Pluto into it. The category changed and Pluto did not, because Pluto cannot read. This is the contrast case for Hacking’s “interactive kinds”.
The day of two noons, 18 November 1883 (time as a thing). North American railroads replaced dozens of local solar times with standard time zones. Towns reset their clocks at noon. “What time it is” became a coordinated artifact, and Congress made it law only in 1918 with the Standard Time Act.
Robert Moses’s low bridges (artifacts with politics, contested). Langdon Winner (1980) retold Robert Caro’s claim that the roughly two hundred low overpasses on Long Island parkways were built to keep buses, and the poorer riders who depended on them, away from Jones Beach. Bernward Joerges (“Do Politics Have Artefacts?”, Social Studies of Science, 1999) disputed the evidence. Use it as a demonstration of how a physical thing can carry a social cut, and also of how a good story can harden into a “fact”.
The corporation as a person (institutions). In Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819) the US Supreme Court treated a corporate charter as a protected contract. Chief Justice Marshall described a corporation as “an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law”. Legal persons now own property, sue and are sued, which makes this an extreme case of a handle that acts. [Marshall quote unverified; check the opinion text before use.]
The scene from the earlier draft: a clinic and a name. Keep and sharpen the opening in which a person receives a diagnosis. The name works as a handrail (other people have this, there is a treatment, there is a form) and as a groove (it starts to explain too much). This one personal scene carries the whole chapter.

Source material

“There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things.” — Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (1867), ch. 1, §4, “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof”, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (1887). [verified: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm] Use: The ancestor of Lukács’s reification (already among the quote options). It is the plainest statement that prices and commodities are relations between people that look like properties of objects.
“There is an error; but it is merely the accidental error of mistaking the abstract for the concrete. It is an example of what I will call the ‘Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness.’” — Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (Lowell Lectures, 1925; New York: Macmillan, 1925), ch. III, “The Century of Genius”, p. 72 (p. 51 in the Free Press edition). [verified: https://archive.org/details/sciencemodernwor00whit] Use: The thinker’s version of thingification. Whitehead aims it at scientific abstractions, not social ones, which shows the slip is not only a sociological one.
“The line of stones now has a function that is not performed in virtue of sheer physics but in virtue of collective intentionality.” — John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (1995), ch. 2, pp. 39–40. [verified: https://archive.org/details/the-construction-of-social-reality-john-rogers-searle_202512] Use: Anchor for the “real in effect, made in origin” section and for the thought experiment in Example 3.
“The rules come in systems, and the rules individually, or sometimes the system collectively, characteristically have the form “X counts as Y” or “X counts as Y in context C.”” — John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (1995), ch. 2, p. 28. [verified: https://archive.org/details/the-construction-of-social-reality-john-rogers-searle_202512] Use: Gives the reader a tool they can use: any piece of social furniture can be rewritten as X counts as Y in C. This drives Exercise 1.
“The institutional world is objectivated human activity, and so is every single institution. In other words, despite the objectivity that marks the social world in human experience, it does not thereby acquire an ontological status apart from the human activity that produced it.” — Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (1966; Penguin ed.), Part II, §1 “Institutionalization”, p. 78. [verified: https://archive.org/details/BergerSocialConstructionOfReality_201901] Use: A companion to the Berger and Luckmann quote option. Here the claim is the positive one: made things become objective without stopping being made.
“Certain forms of knowledge and control require a narrowing of vision. The great advantage of such tunnel vision is that it brings into sharp focus certain limited aspects of an otherwise far more complex and unwieldy reality.” — James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State (1998), ch. 1, “Nature and Space”, p. 11. [verified: https://archive.org/details/seeing-like-a-state-how-certain-schemes-to-improve-the-human-condition-have-failed-james-scott] Use: Grants the achievement before the cost. Thingification is tunnel vision that pays for itself until it doesn’t.
“The shorthand formulas through which tax officials must apprehend reality are not mere tools of observation. By a kind of fiscal Heisenberg principle, they frequently have the power to transform the facts they take note of.” — James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State (1998), ch. 2, p. 47. [verified: https://archive.org/details/seeing-like-a-state-how-certain-schemes-to-improve-the-human-condition-have-failed-james-scott] Use: The looping effect for objects and buildings. It pairs with Hacking’s loop for people and leads into the door-and-window tax.
“My claim about making up people is that in a few interesting respects multiple personalities (and much else) are more like gloves than like horses. The category and the people in it emerged hand in hand.” — Ian Hacking, “Making Up People”, in Heller, Sosna and Wellbery (eds.), Reconstructing Individualism (1986), p. 165. [verified: https://serendipstudio.org/oneworld/system/files/Hacking_making-up-people.pdf] Use: The gloves-and-horses image is memorable and different from the “egging” quote option. It lets the chapter sort things into made-to-fit (gloves) and found (horses).
“It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.” — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (1983; rev. ed. 1991), ch. 1, “Introduction”, p. 6. [verified: https://archive.org/details/imagined-communities-reflections-on-the-origin-and-spread-of-nationalism-by-bene] Use: The top rung of the ladder. A nation is thingification at a scale where no one can check it directly, yet people die for it.

Not in the references file but worth adding: Anderson, Whitehead’s SMW (listed), Grassé and Seyfarth/Cheney for the animal baseline.

Counterarguments and limits

“Everything is constructed” overreach. If chairs, planets, money and depression all count as “thingification”, the word stops cutting. The chapter needs Searle’s line between brute facts and institutional facts, and Hacking’s line between indifferent and interactive kinds. Otherwise it drifts into the vague constructivism Hacking mocks in The Social Construction of What? (1999).
Natural kinds push back. Water is H2O and a virus replicates whether or not we name it. Many categories “come from nature” (Hacking concedes this in “Making Up People”). Thingification describes how we handle reality, not what reality is made of. Chapter 8’s hunt for counterexamples applies here.
Realists about mental illness. Critics of labeling theory argue that diagnoses track real suffering and biological differences, and that stressing the loop can lend weight to stigma or to denial of treatment. The example of Rosenhan’s study cuts both ways, since its data are now doubted (Cahalan 2019).
Constructed is not the same as optional. The cynic’s line, “it’s just an agreement, so ignore it”, is false in practice. Institutions are backed by force, sunk investments and other people’s expectations. The chapter must not suggest that seeing a thing as made gives you power over it.
Contested stories. The Moses bridges and some Yap details (Furness’s sunken stone) are secondhand or disputed. Present them as stories with a provenance, or drop them.
Marxist baggage. Lukács and Marx tie reification to capitalism specifically. The book uses the idea more broadly (tribes, bees, clinics), so it should say plainly that it is borrowing the concept, not the whole theory.
Overlap with Chapter 9. Labels becoming destiny and measures replacing purposes belong to Chapter 9. This chapter should focus on the construction and function of things and point back to Chapter 9 for the costs, so the same Goodhart and labeling material doesn’t appear twice.

Connections

Ch. 6 (Reality and Representation): thingification is representation looping back into the physical world at social scale. A decree reshapes houses and a catalogue reshapes names.
Ch. 7 (Good, Bad): institutions survive like organisms. Ask why a piece of social furniture persists separately from whether it is good.
Ch. 8 (What Is Not a Cut?): brute facts versus institutional facts, and interactive versus indifferent kinds, are the test pairs to carry forward.
Ch. 9 (The Cost of the Blade): labels as destiny and legibility’s costs. This chapter explains the mechanism behind those costs.
Act II close (Unnatural in Distinction): stacking things on things is the most “unnatural” use of the blade.
Ch. 11 (Knowledge): ontology asks “what exists?”, and this chapter gives a layered answer for social existence.
Ch. 18 (Loops): the looping effect is a feedback loop. The self as a handle points toward Hofstadter’s strange loop.
Ch. 19 (Knowledge Staying Alive): how things persist, drift and die, such as “hysteria” or the shilling.
Ch. 20 (Raising the Floor): institutions judged by what they do for everyone, and program theory as a way to make an institution’s assumptions explicit.
Preface: “minds that make portable handles” is picked up directly here.

Exercise ideas

Rewrite your wallet. Take out five items from your wallet or phone (a banknote, an ID card, a loyalty card, a transit pass, a receipt). For each one, write one line in Searle’s form: “X (this physical thing) counts as Y (this status) in C (this context)”. Then write who would have to stop believing for it to become just X again. Notice: How little of the item’s power sits in its physical stuff, how many strangers’ recognition you are relying on, and which items fail the fastest outside their context C (a transit pass in another city). Why: It makes the claim “real in effect, made in origin” something you can hold in your hand, and gives the reader a reusable tool.
Trace a loop. Pick one label that has been applied to you (a school stream, a job title, a diagnosis, “the organized one” in your family, a credit score). Draw three boxes: the label → what others did differently because of it → what you did differently because of it. Then draw an arrow back to the label and ask whether your changed behavior made the label look more accurate. Notice: Whether the loop tightened or loosened the label, whether it helped you (access, identity, community) or boxed you in, and whether you could tell the label apart from the behavior at all. Why: It turns Hacking’s looping effect from theory into autobiography. It also brings out the ambivalence the chapter needs, since handles are both handrails and grooves.
Find the fossil cut. Walk around your street or building for ten minutes and list three physical features that exist because of a rule, category or record rather than physics alone: a bricked-up window, a property fence, a parking line, a zoning-driven height, a street name. For one of them, find out when and why it was made. Notice: Social furniture leaves physical traces, and most of those traces go unnoticed until you look for them. Why: It shows the loop going from information back into matter (Scott’s fiscal Heisenberg principle) in the reader’s own neighborhood, and replaces the unclear “Shared garden” practice with something checkable.

Open questions for the author

The word itself. Keep “thingification” (vivid, a little clunky) and state its lineage (Lukács’s Verdinglichung, often rendered “thingification”)? Or use “reification” in the text and “thingification” as the chapter’s plain-English gloss?
Scope of “thing”. Does the chapter cover perceptual objects (the chair) as well as institutions, or begin at roles and statuses? Covering the whole ladder is more ambitious but risks the “everything is constructed” objection.
Value tone. Is thingification mainly an achievement with side effects, or mainly a hazard with benefits? The earlier draft balances them. Decide which way the chapter should lean, given that Chapter 9 already carries the costs.
Marx and Lukács. Cite them openly as the origin of the concept, or keep the political economy in a footnote so general readers don’t read the chapter as partisan?
Anchor scene. The clinic scene, the stone money of Yap, or Searle’s line of stones? One vivid anchor would serve better than three.
Contested cases. Keep Rosenhan and Moses as cautionary “sticky stories”, which would itself illustrate thingification, or drop them to avoid weak evidence?
The practice. Replace the “Shared garden” practice with Exercise 1 or 3 above, or rebuild the garden practice around Searle’s X/Y/C form?
Animals. How much animal material (stigmergy, alarm calls, dominance ranks) to include in order to show where humans depart from the rest of nature, which the Act II close needs?

Reader perspectives

Curious young child

First reactions:

“Thingification” is a funny made-up word, and they’d love it. “Can I thingify my brother?”
The idea that money isn’t really a thing would blow their mind and also seem wrong: “Money is a thing, I have some in my piggy bank!”
The clinic opening, a person hearing a name for their trouble, would feel sad and grown-up. They’d rather start somewhere playful.
“Without things, a grocery list would be a lyrical disaster” is funny to a grown-up. A kid wouldn’t get “lyrical.”
The queue line (“change the shared rule, and bodies immediately move differently”) is great. Every kid knows the lunch line and the fury of someone cutting in.

Questions they’d ask:

“If money is just paper we all agree on, what happens if everyone stops agreeing? Does it turn back into paper?”
“Is ‘base’ in tag a real thing? It’s just a tree, but when I touch it I’m safe.”
“When does a bunch of sand become a sandcastle? When does a pile of LEGO become a car?”
“Pluto was a planet and then it wasn’t. Did Pluto change, or did we?”
“Is my birthday a thing? It’s just a day, but I get presents.”
“Is a ‘best friend’ a real thing? What if she says I’m not hers anymore?”
“If I name my teddy, is he more real than a teddy with no name?”
“Is school a thing or a building? If the building burns down, is there still school?”
“Is a country a thing? Where is the line? Is it painted on the ground?”
“If you call someone a bully, do they become more of a bully?”
“Who made up the first thing? Did cavemen have things?”
“Is ‘dibs’ a real rule? Why does it work?”

Where they’d get lost, bored, offended or unconvinced:

The brief lists objects, roles, money, diagnoses and institutions. The draft spends its emotional weight on diagnoses (the clinic) and on a community garden with plot numbers and rotas. Diagnoses feel heavy and the garden feels like a council meeting. Money and roles are the fun ones, and they’re underused.
“Institutional facts,” “phantom objectivity” (Lukács) and “apprehension of human phenomena” (Berger and Luckmann) are dense. Searle’s line, “things that exist only because we believe them to exist,” is the one a kid can hold, and it reads like a fairy-tale rule (Tinker Bell).
The “gifted” teenager example might sting a kid who’s been called gifted. It could also make sense to them, as in “I don’t want to try the hard puzzle in case I’m not smart.”
Unconvinced moment: “A chair is a thingification of wood, joints, weight…” “No it isn’t, it’s a CHAIR.” The chair needs a demonstration: turn it upside down and it’s a fort, push two together and it’s a bed. Is it still a chair?
The ending question (how can marks make a physical difference?) was a bridge to the old Information/Physical chapter, which now comes before this one. The kid wouldn’t notice, but the draft’s order is stale.

Examples they’d bring:

Base in tag, dibs, “no take-backs,” pinky promises: playground institutions. They’re real only because everyone playing agrees, and they change what bodies do immediately. This is Searle’s point, kid-sized.
Pluto: the International Astronomical Union’s 2006 definition of “planet” reclassified Pluto as a dwarf planet. Nothing happened to Pluto, but textbooks, posters and kids’ memories changed. It’s a clean real-world case of a category shifting while the object stays the same.
Monopoly money versus real money: both are printed paper. One works only inside the game box, and the other works at the shop because more people agree.
The sandpile: when does sand become a pile? This is the ancient heap puzzle (the sorites paradox, attributed to Eubulides of Miletus). It’s a great bridge from “cut” to “thing.”
Naming a pet or a stuffed animal: once it has a name, it can be lost, missed and searched for. The name makes it followable.
Line leader and class jobs: roles that make kids act differently the moment they’re assigned.

What would win them over:

Start with a game they already play (tag base, dibs), then reveal that money, schools and countries work the same way, only bigger.
The Pluto story as proof that grown-ups can change what a thing is without touching it.
The “Tinker Bell rule” (it’s real because we clap) set beside the honest correction: a tree keeps growing even if nobody claps. Some things need believers and some don’t. That is the draft’s own counterargument, and kids would find it satisfying.
Letting them “thingify” something live: invent a club with a name, a rule and a secret handshake, and watch it start bossing them around.

Cynical adult

First reactions:

“Money, nations and corporations are shared fictions” is Harari’s Sapiens, which half the airport has read. The chapter needs to say how it differs or it’ll feel secondhand.
“Thingification” is a coinage. Berger and Luckmann and Lukács already said “reification.” Why invent a new word, other than branding?
The looping examples (“gifted” teenager, “difficult” person) ring true. They also overlap almost exactly with Chapter 9. What’s the division of labor?
The garden example is pleasant and low-stakes. Show me thingification with something at stake: debt, citizenship, a psychiatric diagnosis.
I like “real in effect, made in origin.” It’s a tight, checkable claim. Build the chapter around it.

Questions they’d ask:

What’s the difference between thingification and reification? If there isn’t one, why the new word?
Is a chair a thing in the same sense as money? The draft puts both in one paragraph, and I suspect the argument lives in that blur.
If money is “made in origin,” can I opt out? What happens if I stop believing in my mortgage? Is “made” doing any work if I can’t unmake it?
Who does the making? “We” didn’t make the tax code. Doesn’t “we made it” hide the fact that particular people made it for particular reasons?
Is a diagnosis a thing in this sense? If so, does the chapter risk implying mental illness is “just a label”? That would offend a lot of people.
The Lukács quote is Marxist theory. Is the book making a political argument about capitalism? Say so if it is.
How is this different from Harari’s “imagined orders”? What does the chapter add?
The draft ends by asking how “a pattern of marks” makes a physical difference, which Chapter 6 already covered. Is this looping back or repeating?
When is thingifying good? The draft praises grocery lists. Give me the case where refusing to make something a thing does harm.
Can a thing be un-thinged? Show one institution that was dismantled and what happened.
The Thomas theorem, “if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences”: isn’t that also how bank runs and witch hunts work? Where’s the dark side?

Where they’d get lost, bored, offended or unconvinced:

“Without things, a grocery list would be a lyrical disaster.” Charming, but a joke is standing in for an argument.
“Real in the way a queue is real” is good. Then the paragraph lists money, laws, corporations, marriages and nations without showing a single mechanism.
The community-garden paragraph leans on “quietly favor people with flexible work hours, money for tools, confidence in meetings.” It’s accurate, but the tone turns preachy, and I can predict the moral.
The counterargument paragraph (“A tree continues growing…”) is settled too easily. The hard cases are in between: race, disease categories, species, nationhood. They have a real basis and a made overlay. That’s where I’d want the chapter to live.
Heavy overlap with Chapters 6 and 9 (certificates, labels, loops). By Chapter 10 I’d feel I was reading the same idea a third time.

Examples they’d bring:

Money. Zimbabwe’s hyperinflation in the late 2000s, when the dollar lost its value as belief collapsed. Or cryptocurrency, where you can watch people try to thingify a new money in real time, with booms and crashes.
The limited liability company. A legal person that can own property, sue and be sued, and outlive every founder. The purest “made in origin, real in effect” thing I deal with.
Homosexuality removed from the DSM (1973). The American Psychiatric Association voted to change a diagnostic category. A classification un-thinged by committee, with huge real consequences. This is the diagnosis example with stakes.
Borders and passports. The Schengen Area erased some internal border checks for millions of people; Brexit redrew one. Same land, different thing.
Credit scores (FICO, introduced 1989). A number made into a thing that landlords, employers and banks treat as a fact about a person. It loops: a bad score raises the cost of borrowing, which makes the score worse.
Job titles. “Senior” or “Principal” can change pay and treatment without changing the work. Every office worker knows title inflation.

What would win them over:

One paragraph admitting the lineage (Berger and Luckmann, Searle, Hacking, Harari) and stating exactly what the chapter adds.
A mechanism instead of a list: what it takes to make something a thing (repetition, a name, a record, enforcement) and what it takes to un-make one, shown with a real case like the 1973 DSM change.
Direct engagement with “who made it and who benefits,” which the Berger and Luckmann quote invites and the draft avoids.
Clear boundaries with Chapters 6 and 9 so it doesn’t feel like a rerun.

Believer / spiritual reader

First reactions:

“Real in effect, made in origin” will make a believer ask at once whether the book files churches, sacraments and God under that heading. The brief lists “institutions” and the earlier drafts lean on “marriages.” They’ll read the chapter braced for a debunking.
They’ll notice the Lukács quote and its Marxist lineage. Marx called religion “the opium of the people” (Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 1843–44). A reader who knows this will suspect the chapter is Marx’s critique of religion in quieter clothes.
Surprise, if they know it: Peter Berger, co-author of the Berger and Luckmann quote, was a lifelong Lutheran. He also wrote The Sacred Canopy (1967) and A Rumor of Angels (1969). The book’s key source on reification was a believer who thought social construction and faith were compatible. That is a gift for the chapter.
The clinic-diagnosis opening will move them. Pastors and chaplains see the handrail-and-shackle effect of a name at every bedside.
Martin Buber’s I and Thou (1923) is the obvious religious counterpart. Turning a Thou into an It is thingification of persons, and Buber’s answer is relational, not better categories.

Questions they’d ask:

Is God a thingification? If so, say it plainly. If not, where does the book draw the line between a made social thing and a discovered reality?
Is a church “social furniture,” or the Body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12:27)? Can the chapter allow that both descriptions might be true at different levels?
Buber says we can meet the world as It or as Thou. Is thingification simply the I–It stance? Does your book have an equivalent of I–Thou?
Idolatry is making a thing and then worshipping it. Berger and Luckmann say reification is “forgetting his own authorship.” Isn’t that the same insight? Will you credit Isaiah 44:9–20, where a man burns half a log to cook his food and carves the other half into a god?
Money: “Ye cannot serve God and mammon” (Matthew 6:24). Islamic law forbids riba (interest). Aren’t these religious rules exactly about stopping a thingification from running away?
Leviticus 25 commands a Jubilee in which land returns and debts are released. Isn’t that a ritual for periodically un-thingifying property? Does secular society have anything like it?
Marriage: you treat it as a queue-like arrangement. My tradition says it’s a covenant before God. What is lost if the book only describes the institutional side?
Can a sacrament be both “real in effect, made in origin” and truly holy? Why does the chapter make “made” sound like a demotion?
Heschel called the Sabbath “a palace in time.” Is a holy day a thing? If the Sabbath is thingified time, is that a cost or a blessing?
Diagnoses: in the past, some conditions were called possession or sin, and now they’re called illness. Was that an improvement of the label, or a replacement of one thingification with another?

Where they’d get lost, bored, offended or unconvinced:

Offended: Any line that places churches, rites or scripture beside money and nations as “organized practices, records, expectations” without also asking what they might point to. “Made in origin” reads as a verdict on their deepest commitments.
Unconvinced: The chapter says thingification “does not claim that reality depends on our labels” (the tree example). Good. But it never offers a test for telling a thingified social fact from a discovered one. The believer will say faith is discovery and will want the book to show how it would decide.
Bored: The community-garden exercise. It’s fine, but this chapter touches marriage, money, diagnosis and belonging, and ends on plot rotas.
Lost: “Thingification” and “reification” are used almost interchangeably, while Lukács, Berger and Luckmann, Searle and Hacking each mean something slightly different. Pick one working definition.
Uneasy: The looping-effect example “a person called ‘difficult’…” is good. But the chapter doesn’t notice that religions have used looping on purpose, for example calling people “saints” or “children of God” (1 John 3:1) so that they become so.

Examples they’d bring:

Isaiah 44:9–20: a carpenter uses one half of a tree for his fire and bread, carves the other half into an idol, and prays to it: “Deliver me; for thou art my god” (44:17, KJV). It is the clearest ancient account of forgetting your own authorship.
Leviticus 25:23, the Jubilee: “The land shall not be sold for ever: for the land is mine; for ye are strangers and sojourners with me” (KJV). A legal institution designed to stop property from hardening into permanent fact.
Martin Buber, I and Thou (1923): the distinction between treating another as It (an object to use and classify) and meeting them as Thou. This is the moral centre of the chapter’s worry about people being thingified.
Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath (1951): Judaism as a religion that sanctifies time instead of things, with the Sabbath as “a palace in time.” It is a counter-practice against a civilization that thingifies everything in space.
The Islamic prohibition of riba: a centuries-old institutional attempt to stop money, itself a thingification, from begetting more of itself without shared risk. It shows religious law regulating thingification rather than merely being one.

What would win them over:

Cite Berger’s own position: a sociologist of reification who stayed a believer. That shows “made in origin” doesn’t have to mean “therefore false,” and it disarms the reader’s fear.
Give idolatry and I–Thou a paragraph each, as older names for the same harm. Religion then appears on the side of the critique as well as under it.
Offer a test, even a rough one, for when a thing is a social artefact and when it points to something beyond itself. Or say honestly that this book can’t settle that for religious objects.
Include one religious counter-practice (Jubilee, Sabbath, the ban on riba) as a model of how a society can build in periodic un-thingifying. That also serves the brief’s “loop back” theme.

Skeptical scientist

First reactions:

The chapter lumps together two very different processes. One is perceptual object segmentation: infants treat cohesive, bounded, continuously moving things as objects long before language (Spelke & Kinzler 2007, Developmental Science, “Core knowledge”). The other is social reification: money, offices, diagnoses. The first is largely built in and shared with other animals. The second is cultural. Calling both “thingification” hides the most interesting question: which of our things come pre-cut, and which we cut ourselves?
Hacking’s looping kinds are the right anchor. But the draft’s examples (“gifted” teenagers avoiding ordinary work, “difficult” people becoming guarded) come with no evidence. There are measured looping effects in diagnosis. Use them.
“Real in effect, made in origin” is a good formula. A scientist will want it applied to scientific categories too (species, planets, genes), not only social ones. Otherwise the chapter suggests science is exempt.
The counterargument paragraph (“A tree continues growing when no one has named it”) is right, and it’s the most important sentence in the draft. Give it more room.

Questions they’d ask:

Is a chair “thingified” in the same way money is? One is a physical object segmented by perception, the other a status function. Aren’t those different mechanisms?
Do non-human animals thingify? Pigeons learned to categorise photos as containing people or not (Herrnstein & Loveland 1964, Science, “Complex visual concept in the pigeon”).
When a diagnostic category changes, how much of the change in prevalence is the world and how much is the label?
What happened to Pluto when it was reclassified in 2006? Nothing, physically. So what exactly changed?
What would a looping effect look like in data, and how would you separate it from the label just being accurate?
Is “gene” a thing? The concept has fragmented as molecular biology found overlapping transcripts and regulatory elements. Does science thingify too?
What makes a thing “followable”: naming, measurement, institutions, or the ability to intervene? Hacking’s criterion for entities in Representing and Intervening (1983) was manipulability.
Are there cases where a thing was wrongly thingified and science had to un-thingify it? (Phlogiston, the ether, “hysteria.”)
How fast do looping effects run: months, a generation?
Is the garden example doing work that a documented case couldn’t do better?

Where they’d get lost, bored, offended or unconvinced:

The “gifted” and “difficult” claims will make an evidence-minded reader think of mindset research, whose effects shrank a lot in large studies (Sisk et al. 2018, Psychological Science, meta-analyses on growth mindset). Don’t lean on anecdotes where the literature is shaky.
The chair, meeting, grocery list, money and nations run together in one paragraph. The reader can’t tell which features make each one a “thing.”
The community-garden vignette is an invented illustration that makes the same point as Chapter 9. Swap it for a documented case to avoid repetition.
The closing question (“How can a pattern of marks make a physical difference?”) was answered in Chapter 6. Asked again, it suggests the chapters haven’t been reconciled.

Examples they’d bring:

Autism prevalence and diagnostic change (King & Bearman 2009, International Journal of Epidemiology, “Diagnostic change and the increased prevalence of autism”). A substantial share of California’s caseload rise came from children earlier diagnosed with intellectual disability being reclassified. Thingification visible in epidemiological data.
Relative age and ADHD (Morrow et al. 2012, CMAJ; Layton et al. 2018, NEJM, “Attention deficit–hyperactivity disorder and month of school enrollment”). An administrative cut-off date shapes who gets a diagnosis. A looping kind with a natural experiment behind it.
Pluto, 2006 IAU resolution: a scientific category redrawn by vote, with public, educational and funding consequences, while the object stayed exactly the same. A clean demonstration of “made in origin, real in effect” inside science.
Homosexuality removed from the DSM (1973): a diagnosis unmade, with measurable legal and social loops afterwards.
Standard time: railway time zones (adopted by US railroads in 1883) turned a continuous solar gradient into discrete, coordinated “things” that now organise billions of schedules.
Core knowledge of objects (Spelke; Baillargeon, Spelke & Wasserman 1985, Cognition, “Object permanence in five-month-old infants”). Some thingification is there before any culture. The chapter should mark where the built-in version ends and the made one begins.

What would win them over:

Separating perceptual objecthood (innate, shared with animals) from institutional and diagnostic thingification (cultural, looping), and saying which the chapter is mostly about.
Looping effects shown with epidemiological or natural-experiment data, not vignettes.
Examples of scientific thingification and de-thingification, so the reader sees that the book applies its lens to science as well.
Keeping and expanding the “reality doesn’t depend on our labels” paragraph as the chapter’s hinge.

Earlier draft

From “Thingification”

At the clinic, a person hears a name for the trouble they have been living with. The name may feel like a handrail: there are other people, there may be treatment, there is a form to fill in that makes the next step possible. It may also begin to follow them around, explaining too much.

That is thingification. We take a shifting spread of events and treat it as one followable thing. A chair is a useful thingification of wood, joints, weight, function, and a place in a room. A “meeting” gathers people, time, agenda, expectation, and a video link into something we can attend or cancel. Names let us return to a pattern, reason about it, share it with strangers, and build plans around it.

The accomplishment is easy to underestimate. Without things, a grocery list would be a lyrical disaster. Without categories, a pharmacy could not coordinate medicine; without roles, a group dinner would never learn who bought the ice. Money, laws, corporations, marriages, and nations are not rocks. They are organized practices, records, expectations, and permissions. They are real in the way a queue is real: change the shared rule, and bodies immediately move differently.

But classifications do more than describe. They can enter the lives they classify. A teenager called “gifted” may begin to avoid work that risks looking ordinary. A person called “difficult” may receive less patience and become more guarded. Hacking called this a looping effect: the label helps shape conduct, and the conduct then appears to confirm the label. This does not make diagnoses or identities fake. It makes their use consequential.

Consider a community garden. A plot number, a work rota, and a rule about water turn open ground into a shared project. They may make access possible. They may also quietly favor people with flexible work hours, money for tools, or confidence in meetings. The important question is not “Is the garden really a thing?” It plainly organizes real labor and food. The question is which arrangements it holds still, and who is asked to adjust themselves to them.

There is a fair counterargument. Some things are not mere convenient cuts. A tree continues growing when no one has named it, and an illness can damage a body despite a bad diagnosis. Yes. Thingification does not claim that reality depends on our labels. It names the additional work labels do: making a part of reality portable through thought and social life.

Try the Shared garden. Change one rule about access, work, or water and watch which needs become easier to meet and which become harder. A rule is never only a sentence.

The garden rule is words on a page, yet it changes who carries water and who eats. How can a pattern of marks make a physical difference?