Gnoseological justification of hypostatisation and reification

Hypostasis and reification are usually considered from a nominalistic position as a semantic error leading to an illegal doubling of the world. Within the framework of this discourse, it is argued that general concepts (ideas, universals) in the Platonic sense do not exist, but only individual things. However, human existence is conditioned not only by the givenness of biophysical reality but also by the givenness of sign-symbolic reality. The reality of constructed, artificial meanings and objects of consciousness has a self-sufficient beginning, which actualizes the need to rethink the problem of doubling the world. Hypostases are not limited to Platonic ideas but are found everywhere where the gnoseological procedure of identifying the entire content of an object with one of its possible features in a certain interval of abstraction occurs. For example, when we see in a specific person as an object exclusively their biological or social role (“father,” “mother,” “husband,” “wife,” “king,” “deputy,” “lawyer,” “teacher,” etc.) or call a stick with a piece of fabric attached to it a flag, we hypostatize and reify general concepts. The article substantiates that hypostatization and reification are a special kind of cognitive practice (often unconscious and not explicated) for the “creation” of social reality, and therefore their use is epistemologically justified and necessary. The latter is determined by the special ontology of objects of psychosocial reality, the mode of existence of which does not presuppose sensory-visual referents but presupposes their construction by our consciousness as superorganic meanings, values, and norms with their subsequent projection (imposition) on biophysical objects in the process of communication. As a result, there is a mutual transformation of symbols into things and things into symbols.