>[!abstract] >William James (the "Father of American psychology") used the notion of "vicious abstractionism" and "vicious intellectualism" in various places, especially to criticize Immanuel Kant's and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's idealistic philosophies. In *The Meaning of Truth*, James wrote (Williams, 1909): > > >Let me give the name of "vicious abstractionism" to a way of using concepts which may be thus described: We conceive a concrete situation by singling out some salient or important feature in it, and classing it under that; then, instead of adding to its previous characters all the positive consequences which the new way of conceiving it may bring, we proceed to use our concept privatively; reducing the originally rich phenomenon to the naked suggestions of that name abstractly taken, treating it as a case of "nothing but" that concept, and acting as if all the other characters from out of which the concept is abstracted were expunged. Abstraction, functioning in this way, becomes a means of arrest far more than a means of advance in thought. ... The viciously privative employment of abstract characters and class names is, I am persuaded, one of the great original sins of the rationalistic mind. > >("Reification", 2025). ## References - William, J. (1909). *The Meaning of Truth, A Sequel to Pragmatism*. Harvard University Press. Pp. 135-136. - Reification. (2025, February 14). In *Wikipedia*. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Reification_(fallacy)&oldid=1271183805 ## Related - [[Reification]]