More thoughts on reification for Brian...
Start thinking about the concepts of gender and sexuality, in terms of how these are reified by our society. This will lead you into the wild world of postmodernity and all sorts of representations, ideologies, propaganda, `morality' tracts and the rest of it.
Hopefully that will lead you to a way of how to open the concept of reification and make it meaningful...
I found that most work on reification to be so abstract and jargon laden that they were mostly unintelligible. In many cases, you can just replace the term reification with several other words like ideology, representation, or my favorite, symbolic form. None of these are accurately a replacement, but they do apply to some aspects of the process of reification.
For the math-sci crew, consider there are multiple representations of a finite group. These representations do not superficially appear to be related. But once the representations are recast using group-theoretical methods, one can then `see' the similarities of form, and establish explicit isomorphic, homomorphic, and even automorphic relationships between representat ions. I imagine this process as something like doing a reverse engineering of some prior reification.
For example there seems to be no relationship between a permutation on N, and an N-sided regular polyhedral. Label the vertices and write out the rotations, and volia, there is an identical permutation subgroup...
CG