What Is The Fallacy Of Hypostatization?

S. Morris Engel

Thanks to the work and contribution of critical thinking these last several decades with its social and global concerns and not merely epistemic ones, we have come to realize that how we talk about a thing--how we describe it--determines how we come to see it, what we come to believe about it, and as a result, how we come to react to it. In short, we have come to learn that the reality we live in is largely erected by the language with which we describe it to ourselves:that such products of language or culture as half-breed, wop, wasp, etc., are, despite appearances, intellectual phantoms, products of our own creation--and hardly innocuous ones at that.

Now, interestingly enough, in the past, such intellectual abstractions (if we may glorify such abusive and insulting terms by way of such an elevated designation) have gone by the name of hypostatization and used to be discussed regularly by informal logicians. In fact, as we will soon see, this fallacy of hypostatization has had a long textual history. But somehow it vanished from the standard, traditional logic texts. Considering the seriousness of the logical lapse it identifies, it seems strange that this has come to pass. In what follows, I should like to trace a bit of the long history of this fallacy, explore what might have caused it to disappear from logic texts, and why it still deserves our serious attention.

But first a brief description of the fallacy. The fallacy of hypostatization results when we regard an abstract word as if it were a concrete one (and go on, sometimes, to ascribe human-like properties to it). We hypostatize when we say such things as "the state can do no wrong," "nature decrees what is right," and so forth. These are fallacies, for neither the state nor nature are capable of thought, intention, or design.

I.

That the fallacy of hypostatization continues to be invoked despite its relatively poor showing in more recent discussions is clear from the following typical references to it:

1. I hope you will by now feel that in postulating the existence of a super-ego, I have been describing a genuine structural entity, and have not been merely personifying an abstraction, such as conscience. (Freud. New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. Lecture 31)

2. The English language as now used by philosophers offends by provoking erroneous metaphysical beliefs. Syntax induces misleading opinions concerning the structure of the world (notably in the attribution of ontological significance to the subject-predicate form), while vocabulary, by promotlng the hypostatization of pseudo entities, encourages false beliefs concerning the contents of the world. (Bertrand Russell. The Analysis of Mlnd. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1921, p. 192).

3. The essential function of language is to reveal reality. Language functioning properly does this...But language often functions in just the opposite fashion, by serving as an instrument of falsehood and self-deception. It may do this in a number of ways: for example, through misstatement of fact; through interpretations or theories that distort the relationships and the implications of facts; through reifying the symbolic constructions of imaginations, as if they had objective existence of their own; through language whose primary associations are radically incongruent with the realities designated. (Robert W, Gardiner. The Cool Arm of Destruction: Modern Weapons and Moral Insensitivity. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1974, pp. 71-2).

4. Plato believed that it is possible to discover real meanings because, for him, a definition is not a definition of a word, but of a thing. However, when he claimed to have discovered the real, or essential, meaning of justice, he was doing nothing more than putting forward his own ideas about what he considered desirable in the organization of society. He was trying to make a persuasive definition pass for a statement. It seems clear that all such questions as 'What is the real meaning of...?' are based on the mistaken belief that definitions are of things. People who talk of the real meaning of 'religion', or 'democracy', or 'freedom', or other abstract words of this kind, are trying to conceal the fact that they are giving these words their own private meanings. There is no special knowledge, or insight, which will enable us to discover the real characteristics of democracy, for the simple reason that there is no thing to which the word refers. (F. Vivian. Thinking Philosophically. New York: Basic Books, Inc. 1969, p. 15).

And here are two exploitations of it:

5. "Love. Being in love. Yuck!" Val poured more wine in their glasses.

"Val hates love," Iso explained, a wicked smile on her face.

Mira blinked at Val. "Why?"

"Oh, shit." Val sipped her wine."I mean, it's one of those things they've erected, like the madonna, you know, or the infallibility of the Pope or the divine right of kings. A bunch of nonsense erected--and that's the crucial word--into Truth by a bunch of intelligent men--another crucial word. What the particular nonsense it, isn't important. What's important is why they did it." (Marilyn French. The Women's Room) .

6. Ronald Reagan's best friend is freedom. It did most of the work for him in Geneva. It was on his shoulder when he was walking Mikhail Gorbachev down toward the lake. It was tiptoeing around the room in the Chateau Fleur d'Eau and may even have whispered in Gorbachev's ear. (Time magazine. Dec. 2, 1985).

Why, then, did this fallacy of hypostatization fall into such relative neglect in the hands of informal logicians? Why is there so little reference to it in their writings? And if, indeed, it is a fallacy (as the first five of the six references to it seem to suggest that it is), what sort of fallacy, exactly, is it?

II.

Hypostatization is not one of the fallacies that Aristotle lists and discusses in the Sophistical Refutations.. Figure of Speech, however, is, and what he says of that fallacy indicates that it almost certainly had its roots in it. Figure of Speech is committed, Aristotle says there, when one infers similarity of meaning from similarity of word construction. It comes about when "what is really different is expressed in the same form, e.g., a masculine thing by a feminine termination, or a neuter by either a masculine or feminine."

But, of course, it need not be confined to constructions turning on gender; and neither Aristotle nor subsequent writers did so construe it. Here, for example, is the way it is described in a modern logic text. The fallacy of figure of speech is committed, this text explains, "when one argues from the form of one word to the form of another":

Thus a person might argue: since the meaning of 'insecure' is the contradictory of 'secure', the meaning of 'invaluable' must also be the contradictory of 'valuable'. Similarly, if 'flammable' means that something is capable of being easily ignited, 'inflammable' must mean that something is not capable of being easily ignited; if 'habitable' means that a place is fit for habitation, 'inhabitable' must mean that a place is unfit for habitation; and if 'loosen' means to set free or untie, 'unloosen' must mean to bind or tie. (Bittle, p. 368).

Although when seen in this light and by way of such examples the fallacy does seem worthy of study and attention, this was not always its fate. Other writers either resorted to illustrating it by way of Mill's now-famous blooper on the terms audible/visible/desirable as Freeman, for example, did:

The fallacy of figure of speech occurs when words or expressions that are similar in form are understood to be similar in meaning. The argument that, because something is audible when capable of being heard and visible when capable of being seen, therefore something is desirable when desired, derives its apparent force from the similar structure of the words audible, visible, and desirable, overlooking the shift from being capable of in the first two instances to ought to be in the case of what is desirable. (David Hugh Freeman. Logic: The Art of Reasoning. New York: David McKay Co., 1967, p. 278).

Or described it in the way Castell, for example, did:

Suppose we said that a letter-writer was a person whose business was writing letters. We could go on to say that therefore a typewriter was a person whose business was writing types. A man who catches fish may be a fisher. But it does not follow that a man who catches flies is a flier. To argue so would be to involve oneself in a fallacy of Figure of Speech. (Alburey Castell. A College Logic. New York: Mcmillan & Co., 1941, p. 18).

Although such illustrations make it understandable why the fallacy fell into disuse and came to be noted only rarely by logicians, the more important reason seems to have been that it was finally absorbed and replaced by the fallacy of hypostatization. When precisely this happened is not clear. The change or transformation seems to have been gradual, proceeding from its perception as a problem turnlng on constructions involving linguistic inflection, to one involving figures of speech or systematically misleading expressions, to one stemming from our predisposition to identify language with reality. This last stage was one that was reached, finally, by Mill in hls System of Logic. The short section devoted to this fallacy in that work runs, in part, as follows:

We pass to another a priori fallacy or natural prejudice

....originating...in the tendency to presume an exact correspondence between the laws of the mind and those of things external to it. The fallacy may be enunciated in this general form--Whatever can be thought of apart exists apart; and its most remarkable manifestation consists in the personification of abstractions. Mankind in all ages have had a strong propensity to conclude that wherever there is a name, there must be a distinguishable separate entity corresponding to the name; and every complex idea which the mind has formed for itself by operating upon its conceptions of individual things was considered to have an outward objective reality answering to it. (Vol. Il, Chapter III, Sec. 4).

Mill's account, unfortunately, does not stop here. In a way that remarkably anticipates both Russell and Wittgenstein--as well as explains why the fallacy fell into neglect--Mill goes on to trace some of the "havoc," as he puts it, that "metaphysicians trained in these habits" wrought upon philosophy. It was enough, he says, "to put an end to all intelligible discussion." He ends by saying that "this misapprehenslon of the import of general language constitutes Mysticism."

Whether in the Vedas, in the Platonists, or in the Hegelians, mysticism is neither more nor less than ascribing objective existence to the subjective creatlons of our own faculties, to ideas or feelings of the mind; and believing that by watching and contemplating these ideas of its own making, it can read in them what takes place in the world without. (Ibid.)

The blow levelled here by Mill against metaphysics was to prove fatal not only to metaphysics but to hypostatization as well. By becoming closely associated in people's minds as the tool that undermined or perhaps even destroyed metaphysics, its status as a neutral tool of analysis became more and more suspect. It led others to wonder how objective a logical category this supposed fallacy of hypostatization indeed was and whether it did not itself harbor its own metaphysical bias. Falling under these suspicions, authors of logic texts came more and more to reject it until it gradually vanished almost entirely from their accounts of the informal fallacies.

This was a sad fate for an important logical tool. For no other fallacy in the traditional list deals as directly as it does with our important insight regarding language's cultural bias--that far from being a neutral medium of communication, a language embodies and reflects a culture's values and attitudes, its biases, prejudices and superstitious beliefs.

III.

This is not to say that the fallacy is free of problems, or easy to teach.

Generally, we commit the fallacy when we regard an abstract term as if lt were a concrete one (and go on, on occasion, as in the case of personification, to ascribe human-like properties to it). In short, it is to forget that some of our words have a connotation but not a denotation-- as in our standard example of a unicorn. The following are some typical examples:

--Nature might stand up and say to all the world "This was a man."

--The State is the march of God in History.

--The State can do no wrong.

--Science makes progress.

--Nature decrees what is right.

Since Nature, the State, and Science are incapable of thought or intention, it is absurd, as we might say, to suppose that such abstractions can have the activities attributed to them in these statements. Only persons, not Nature or the State, can stand up and speak, can be said to do right or wrong, utter decrees, etc.

As we can see from these examples, hypostatization is to concepts what personification is to animals or things. But we need to distinguish words or terms hypostatized for poetic purposes from those hypostatized for logical ones. No danger is posed in Antony's remark: we are not likely to take the remark literally. We understand its meaning well enough. Such, however, is not the case with a statement such as the following:

Nature produces improvements in a race by eliminating the unfit and preventing them from polluting the gene pool of the fit. Therefore, it is only right for us to eliminate these unfit people.

Here we do have a statement that can mislead and deceive and needs to be challenged. For, unlike Antony's remark, which is merely a poetic salute to Brutus and exemplifies the expressive use of language, this remark about nature producing improvements in a race makes a claim. It purports to describe a certain state of affairs and, as such, requires a different response from us. How accurate is that claim? No such questions arise in the case of the expressive use of language.

Nor should we question other metaphoric uses of language that also seem to exemplify this fallacy of hypostatization:

--The law commands.

--Facts call us to bethink ourselves.

--Actions speak louder than words.
--Love is blind.

We know that the law does not, literally, command; that facts cannot call us; that actions do not speak; that people, not love itself, are blind, etc. These are simply abbreviations for more involved thoughts and ones not likely to mislead anyone. The same is true of such headlines as:

--Los Angeles County, reacting to rolling sickouts...

--Ottawa Announces

--The United States government has gone on record to state...

All of these are simply abbreviations for the appropriate administrative bodies or officials involved. They ~ too, therefore, should not be taken as examples of the fallacy. On the other hand, a headline announcing that "The city is aroused" is very different it is not simply an abbreviation, nor something simply metaphoric. It makes a certain claim and invites certain beliefs or conclusions on our part. These need to be probeds does that mean that everyone in the city was aroused? That the city was of one mind? What is the evidence for this rather large claim?

It may be tempting to dismiss such an example as this on the ground that it is, first of all, just a figure of speech, and, secondly, that it seems to exemplify more the fallacy of personification than hypostatization. To do so would be to overlook the potential seriousness of the deception that such a statement, with its implied claims, might succeed in perpetrating. The following, from a fundrasing letter sent to 300,000 Republican loyalists by Richard Perkins on life in France (and Paris in particular) under Socialist President Francois Mitterand, is a close and instructive parallel example:

"As I write this letter to you, I imagine my eyes still burning from the clouds of tear gas that seem to be a regular occurrence...Today the air seemed charged with rage. The entire city felt as though it was going to explode with anger."

Although both express their author's own feelings, their design is not simply to communicate such feelings to their readers but to persuade them about the character of certain existing states of things. As factual than simply emotive, they are very much unlike the following passage from Sir Wilfred Grenfell's Romance of Labrador, which is purely expressive and, as such, more clearly an example of personification:

Fog hangs low and heavy over rock-girdled Labrador. Angry waves, paled with rage, exhaust themselves to encroach up her stern shores, and, baffled, sink back howling into the depths. Winds shriek as they course from crag to crag in a mad career, and the humble mosses that clothe the rocks crouch lower still in fear (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1934, p. 322).

The danger in hypostatization is that we will forget that terms like nature, truth, freedom are just abstractions that do not exist in the real world. To speak of them as we do about existing things is to live in a delusional world, like the insane, who hear voices and see things that aren't there. It is good that sometime we ourselves catch ourselves at this and sense the danger. Here, for example, is Antoine de Saint-Exupery doing so in his Flight to Arrass

What we call a nation is certainly not the sum of the regions, customs, cities, farms, and the rest that man's intelligence is able at any moment to add up. It is a Being. But there are moments when I find myself blind to beings--even to the Being called France. (Airman's Odyssey. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1942, p. 297).

We can learn to depopulate that sort of world by a process of substitution. Whenever a term appears suspicious, it should be traced back to the thing it seems to signify and a new term should be substituted for the suspicious one. Sometimes the abstraction simply has to be changed from a noun to an adjective. Thus, we can replace "The truth shall make you free," with "Truthful statements shall make you free," and "The State can do no wrong," with "The President (or the Congress) can do no wrong." With this kind of analysis, many statements that seem deeply profound often prove not to be profound at all.

Once we recognize what hypostatization is, we come to see how widespread and commponplace it is. It is easy to get carried away then and challenge every appearance of it--whether potentially misleading or not, dangerous or not. I find myself constantly reminding my students, when we come to deal with this fallacy, to resist this; that not all uses of it need to be questioned; that some uses of it are perfectly understandable and quite innocent. A good test of whether this is so, I sometimes tell them, is to see whether it is possible to rephrase the passage so that it no longer commits the fallacy without destroying its basic message. This is not always an easy thing to do. At times the results are quite striking, as in the case of the Reagan example quoted earlier. The following are several such student rewordings:

--The ideal of freedom was uppermost in Reagan's thought during the summit. It was Reagan's ability to express this ideal that helped him in his work. It was also this ideal that was very much on the mind of both men during their walk towards the lake and it was probably this ideal, expressed by Reagan, that influenced Gorbachev.

--Ronald Reagan's smile, his benevolent attitude and personality helped him in his conference with Gorbachev. What Reagan brought with him was a feel of the Western world--his breezy, light manner of conducting himself, and his sense of liberty. These benefits of freedom not only were an inspiration to the President, but appeared to have some positive effect on Gorbachev as well.

--What inspired Reagan during his meeting with Gorbachev in Geneva was his love and unshakeable faith in freedom. Reagan's genuine belief in and love for freedom had a profound effect on Gorbachev, leading him to reflect on its advantages.

Not all passages will lend themselves so well or so easily to rephrasing. The temptation to accuse such passages of the fallacy can be great. A striking example of this is Robert J. Ringer's analysis of John F. Kennedy's famous inaugural appeal. Here is how Ringer analyzes that famous passage in Kennedy's speech:

Governments, of course, are the masters of intimidation through slogan, simply because they have the money, the manpower and, if needed, the guns to back them up. My candidate for the most intimidating government slogan ever tossed at the American public was John F. Kennedy's emotion-grabber: ''And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." The face was handsome, the personality pleasing, the smile captivating, but the words terrified me.

Let's analyze this brilliantly conceived slogan carefully and logically. First or all, what is a country? It's a geographical area composed of-in the case of the United States over 200 million individuals. I've never asked 200 million people to do anything for me, except not to interfere with my right to live a peaceful life. Ask what you can do for your country? Does this mean asking each of the more than 200 million individuals what you can do for him?

No, individuals are not what Kennedy or any other politician has ever had in mind when using the word country. A country is an abstract entity, but in politicalese, it translates into "those in power." Restated in translated form, then, it becomes: "Ask not what those in power can do for you; ask what you can do for those in power." You wouldn't respond quite so eagerly if it were phrased in its true form, would you? On the contrary, you might laugh in disbelief. (Looking Out for #1, pp. 79-80)

Was Kennedy guilty of committing the fallacy of hyspostatization? Or is Ringer, perhaps, purposely misunderstanding the call and trivializing it? There are grey areas here: a country, we might respond on behalf of the appeal, need not have the status in our eyes of a "Being" (in Saint-Exupery's sense) yet nevertheless be something more than simply a collection of geographic areas and individuals. Of course we can sense what Ringer's fear is really about: such slogans do often turn into rallying calls--as in the case of the appeal to freedom. And much grief might have been spared in the past had those who responded to it stopped to ask such deflating questions as: freedom for whom? freedom from what? freedom to do what?

IV.

Hypostatization, as we can see, is neither a simple nor a straightforward fallacy. Nor have we yet accounted for all its various ramifications. One in particular remains to comment on, namely, the case where we make conscious use of it, fully aware of what we are about, yet feeling completely justified in doing so. Christopher Stone's environmentalist work Do Trees Have Standing? is an excellent example of this.

For a very long time, as we all know, those who have tried to preserve the environment from abuse have not had an easy time of it--especially not with the arguments with which they have gone to court. Owners of forests and lakes have been able to make short shrift of the standard appeals: We are not to cut down our own forests because once a year you come driving through them? We are not to dispose of our industrial waste in our lakes because you like to fish in them? We need the pulp from those forests to produce the newspapers, magazines, and books which sustain our way of life, and we need our factories and their production to ensure jobs and goods for our people. And besides, the forest is our property.

What Stone offers in his little book is a radically different argument--and a far more powerful one. Put very plainly, what he says is this: Do not cut down that tree or pollute that lake, not because your action will spoil the pleasure others take in these beautiful, natural objects, but rather because the tree does not like being cut down or the lake polluted. In short, trees too have rights--and they belong to them because they are beings in their own right and not simply the possessions of possible sources of pleasure for other beings. How egocentric it was of us, Stone argues, to assign to things moral significance purely on the basis of their use to us. We must try to reorient our attitude to nature, cease to view it as our toy or possession to do with whatever we like, and come to regard it as an entity having a value in itself worth protecting.

In his preface to this widely read and admired book, Stone tells the reader that if the view he is advancing (that natural objects have inalienable rights) appears absurd, it will be useful to remember that not very long ago such groups as women, Blacks, and Indians were also denied basic human rights on the ground that they were not quite human. Perhaps in time the argument that trees have rights will not seem as strange as it may at the moment.

From the point of view of the fallacy of hypostatization what we might say that Stone is doing here is inventing a new fiction, pretending that trees are like persons (or, at least, like corporations) and have rights. He is, in short, personifying natural objects. But, as Garret Hardin, in his foreword to Stone's book, points out, so do the owners of forests and lakes who have claimed those things as their "property":

The most rigid defenders of the momentary legal definition of "property" apparently think "property" refers to something as substantive as atom and mass. But every good lawyer and every good economist knows that "property" is not a thing but merely a verbal announcement that certain traditional powers and privileges of some members of society will be vigorously defended against attack by others. Operationally, the word "property" symbolizes a threat of action; it is a verb-like entity, but (being a noun) the word biases our thought toward the substantive we call things. But the permanence enjoyed by property is not the permanence of an atom, but that of a promise (a most unsubstantial thing). Even after we become aware of the misdirection of attention enforced by the noun "property," we may still passively acquiesce to the inaccuracy of its continued use because a degree of social stability is needed to get the day-to-day work accomplished. But when it becomes painfully clear that the continued unthinking use of the word "property" is leading to consequences that are obviously unjust and socially counterproductive, then we must stop short and ask ourselves how we want to re-define the rights of property. (Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural 0bjects. Los Altos, CA: William Kaufmann, Inc., 1974, pp. 6-7)

Unlike Ringer, Hardin is not necessarily condemning the practice or process of hypostatizing he describes. He is merely urging us to recognize it for what it is. "Property" is a fiction, a notion we have devised or invented. It doesn't stand for some concrete thing we discover that has an existence independent of us or our wishes. As long as we find the concept useful and helpful we can continue to embrace it; if the notion starts to prove otherwise, let us remember that we ourselves brought it into being (defined it), and nothing therefore should prevent us from banishing it (redefining it) should we decide to do so.

We return thus once again to the basic lesson this fallacy teaches us, namely, that the reality we live in is largely created by the language with which we describe it.

In short, what this fallacy teaches us is that a term such as half-breed doesn't merely identify some independently existing fact of the world; it doesn't merely mean "a person of mixed heritage"; what it means and says is: "how disgusting!" And the same is true of all the other terms of this nature. They people the world with our own distorted creations, creating in the process immeasurable harm and suffering. Becoming enshrined in words, and looking like all the other words of our vocabulary, they deceive us into thinking that they name things that actually exist, rather than merely ideas of our own creation. I have been urging here that this important lesson can still be best taught the traditional way--through the fallacy of hypostatization with all its epistemic considerations.