Reification is part of normal usage of natural language, as well as of literature, where a reified abstraction is intended as a figure of speech, and actually understood as such.
[...] apart from any essential reference of the relations of [a] bit of matter to other regions of space [...] there is no element whatever which possesses this character of simple location.
The viciously privative employment of abstract characters and class names is, I am persuaded, one of the great original sins of the rationalistic mind.
[9]In a chapter on "The Methods and Snares of Psychology" in The Principles of Psychology, James describes a related fallacy, the psychologist's fallacy, thus: "The great snare of the psychologist is the confusion of his own standpoint with that of the mental fact about which he is making his report.
For example, the concepts of motivation in psychology, utility in economics, and gravitational field in physics are constructs; they are not directly observable, but instead are tools to describe natural phenomena.
[11] Stephen Jay Gould draws heavily on the idea of fallacy of reification in his book The Mismeasure of Man.
These devices, by definition, do not apply literally and thus exclude any fallacious conclusion that the formal reification is real.
Thomas Schelling, a game theorist during the Cold War, argued that for many purposes an abstraction shared between disparate people caused itself to become real.