However, I guess the point is that doing this is sometimes useful and sometimes not. I wouldn’t get very far as a bricklayer if I didn’t reify the notion of a brick. In the case of life, it’s useful for biologists to talk about life as a thing, because on the present-day Earth there *is* a very sharp distinction between life and non-life. My point is just that this distinction/reification/whatever is probably not as useful to those who study the origins of life (or astrobiology for that matter), because then you’re likely to be dealing with cases where that nice neat distinction breaks down. Any sharp distinction you do draw will be more or less arbitrary, and thus not particularly helpful.

This is a simple point but a difficult one to get across easily, and for that reason I collect metaphors. My latest one concerns supercritical fluids. It’s (more or less) sensible to teach children that water comes in three “states of matter”: liquid, solid and gas. But if you compress steam to far greater pressures than children ever experience, then cool it down, then release the pressure again, you’ll have gone from steam to water without ever passing a phase change. Liquid water and steam are clearly distinct if you’re concerned with their behaviour at atmospheric pressure, but in the universe as a whole they’re just two different points in the same region of a phase diagram.

Anyway, I prefer the three Fs – I think I could guess most peoples ordering of those with two attempts aswell

Noun:
Full of life.
Is there life on Mars.
Take a life.
Life is special.
Three lives remain. (like ‘three sleeps to christmas’, alive, asleep)
Cats have 9 lives.

Adjective:
Alive and kicking.
ITS…. ALIVE (muhahaha)

It’s definitely used as a noun (some/a life) as well as a property (to be alive), but to argue that it’s been reified I think one needs argue that it 1) is a definitely an abstract concept and 2) not an actual thing, i.e. 3) not just bollocks. I’m no authority on the first two or what constitutes them, so I don’t feel I can say if ‘life’ has unduly become thing-like, but knowing that there are two different words, I expect reification, if it did happen, happened a long time ago.

Actually, this recent discussion of reification has really confused me, the examples on wikipedia make sense to me – as in the sense of saying how I think something works is _actually_ how it works, but I don’t see how this applies directly to Spearman’s g or life any _more_ than it applies to the coffee I’m drinking, the chair I’m sitting on or any other philosophical cliché of a thing one can name.

I guess in science, reification happens, people take things as read, theorize, take as read, theorize etc to the point where they loose touch with the reality of the system they are studying and end up missing (or even outright denying) important facts. I think it probably happens pretty quickly too, can’t say I haven’t caught myself doing it. So it is theories around ‘g’ and around life or around whatever that become reified, not them themselves. In the case of ‘g’ it is its connection to biometric measurements was reified.

Lets not confuse the thing/property distinction with reality/model distinction.

On this note, I think life is more like a thing than, say, the number 42. I started a post on that actually, then I realized that I was going slowly mad and stopped. In one gnarly sentence: Ill-definedness seems to be a property of things we think are real (dare I say analytic… seems I might, even though I know nothing about Kant) and well-definedness seems to be a property of things we don’t (synthetic things… perhaps). So, the fallacy of reification seems to me to be equivalent the assumption that the world, or some portion of it, works in some kind of idealized, well-defined way.

(I just noticed that at the top of this page my post has been juxtaposed with a link to James’ previous post, “just because a thing has a name, doesn’t mean it’s a thing.” Which I suppose is really my point too: perhaps in the wider universe, life’s not a thing.)

People like things to have a purpose.

If you think the 7 signs of life are arbitrary, try this quiz:
http://www.quia.com/rd/3494.html?AP_rand=1435910275
I won first time!!!

Apparently some modern syllabuses have 8 signs of life! http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080918115850AACeH2t