Pagan Propaganda: The Other Attack on Christmas

[Jude Bloom]

Deification I'm on top of, but I had to do the google on reification... I
supposed that it had something to do with king-making -- rei or roi -- but I
don't think so.  Here's what the internet tubes report:

Wikipedia
Reification may refer to:

• Reification (computer science), making a data model for a previously
abstract concept
• Reification (fallacy), fallacy of treating an abstraction as if it were a
real thing
• Reification in Gestalt psychology, where an object is perceived as having
more spatial information than is actually present in the original stimulus
• Reification (knowledge representation), used to represent facts that must
then be manipulated in some way
• Reification (linguistics) in natural language processing, where a natural
language statement is transformed so actions and events in it become
quantifiable variables
• Reification (Marxism) (German: Verdinglichung), the consideration of an
abstraction or an object as if it had living existence and abilities; at the
same time it implies the thingification of social relations; sometimes
called objectification
• Reification (statistics), the consideration of a ‘perfect’ model which is
used to make inferences connecting (imperfect) model results with
experimental observations



If I'm going to be a proper Pynchon reader -- I got the invitation late -- I
suppose I should know what it is that I'm up to.  Is it quantification (CS,
knowledge representation, etc.) or pretending the books are real or.... ??



On Fri, Dec 25, 2009 at 11:16 AM, Keith <keithsz at mac.com> wrote:
> Now let us return to the deification and reification of all things
Pynchon.
>
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