This is not a talk about laudable creative and imaginative people/activities, but about the things that philosophers (and others) make up without realising that they are making them up, fictions posing as facts – including entities constructed from abstract nouns (most of Plato!), minds, time, gods . . . quite a lot of things in fact.
The fallacy of reification:
1. creating abstract nouns from adjectives, and then imagining that they refer to mind-independent entities.
examples: properties like redness, justice, consciousness
benefits: quick communication about some issues
drawbacks: imaginative nonsense such as Plato’s forms
2. Creating abstract(ish) nouns from processes or events or features
examples: mind, the self, will, sense data, pain, time, spirit, memory, existence . . .
Why a problem?
Wittgenstein’s warning: the surface grammar of sentences about abstract nouns makes them seem like sentences about the physical world; hence a monumental amount of nonsense (questions and answers) written about, e.g., time and sense data, as though they were entities.
Stone’s warning: eliminate all abstract nouns from philosophical discussion!