Gould's argument on reification purports to get at the philosophical foundation of the field. He claims that general intelligence, defined as the factor common to different cognitive abilities, is merely a mathematical abstraction; hence if we consider it a measurable attribute we are reifying it, falsely converting an abstraction into an “entity†or a “thingâ€â€”variously referred to as “a hard, quantifiable thing,†“a quantifiable fundamental particle,†“a thing in the most direct, material sense.†Here he has dug himself a deep hole.… Indeed, this whole argument is fantastic. The scientist does not measure “material thingsâ€: He measures properties (such as length or mass), sometimes of a single “thing†(however defined), and sometimes of an organized collection of things, such as a machine, a biological organ, or an organism. In a particularly complex collection, the brain, some properties (i.e., specific functions) have been traced to narrowly-localized regions (such as the sensory or motor nuclei connected to particular parts of the body).
Stephen Jay Gould