ABSTRACT
Reification is perhaps the most common pitfall in reasoning about social processes. In speaking of high and low status, rigid customs, breakdowns, explosions, growths, or the right and the left, people often implicitly assume that the attributes of the spatial relations from which these terms have been derived - such as linearity, additivity and transitivity - also characterise the cumulative results of multiplex human interactions to which they are metaphorically applied. The other possible way of making sense out of the metaphorical labels the right and the left is to take them as referring to attitudes to the established privileged classes, or more broadly as indicating an approval or disapproval of the existing pattern of inequality of wealth and other privileges, with the right being in the favour of preserving or accentuating them while the left wants to level them.
