What Is Thingification?
Thinking about: Thinking More and Better
I taught critical thinking for decades before I realized that critical thinking was only half of the intellectual equation, that it was also important that we keep an open mind. I then started telling students that although the class title was “Critical Thinking,” I was really teaching open-minded critical thinking. This phrase kept coming up in lectures—“I want to transform you into open-minded critical thinkers”—but the phrase felt awkward. It dawned on me that I could simply refer to open-minded critical thinkers as Thinkers, written with a capital T. Not long thereafter, a student came up and announced that she wanted to become a thinker, and to make herself clear, she added “with a capital T.” I smiled. It was evidence that my attempt to thingify open-minded critical thinking might actually be working.
To better understand thingification, consider sporks, those utensils that combine the bowl of a spoon with the tines of a fork. The people who manufactured them could have sold them as “a utensil that combines the bowl of a spoon with the tines of a fork,” but they knew that this would be a difficult sell. They could instead thingify them by referring to them simply as sporks, a marketing maneuver that succeeded brilliantly.
Sporks are physical things, but cultural phenomena can also be thingified. We can invite someone to a meal and specify that it will be later than breakfast but earlier than lunch—or we can instead invite them to brunch. We can likewise thingify the related incidents of armed conflict that took place between 1939 and 1945, and refer to them as World War II.
Have you ever been talking to someone only to see them glance at their cell phone as you speak? This action has been thingified as a phub, short for cell phone snub. Thingification of this kind can have an impact on our behavior. We might become more likely to take note of it and as a result might become more sensitive to it: “He phubbed me while I was telling him about the death of my dog.” It can also make us more careful not to phub other people, even though we want ever-so-badly to peek at our phone. Along more serious lines, the #MeToo movement owes some of its success to its thingification of a woman experiencing a series of incidents involving sexual harassment and abuse.
In this substack, I am attempting to thingify open-minded critical thinkers: They are Thinkers, with a capital T. I am also attempting to thingify Feelers. My hope is that by doing so, I will simultaneously make people aware of these two patterns of intellectual behavior and thereby increase the chance that they will alter their own behavior. Whether this “marketing strategy” succeeds remains to be seen. My fingers are crossed!
Love the way you answered the “what is thingification” at the meta level. By using it - not explaining - to write another beautiful thingy!
I feel like thingification has been a underlying phenomenon that we use satirically or among friends as an inside joke — the idea of it can only be see in an unserious context because it simply looks like the joining of two physical objects or unrelated words. But when we look at real world anecdotes of a seemingly silly matter like thingification, we notice it’s frequency and realize it has gone unnamed. It’s an idea that at first seems so far fetched but, upon studying it’s legitimacy in the real world, encourages us as readers and writers to pay attention to the intention of words and how they’re used; It encourages us to be Thinkers. How many events in history have been thingifyed, and how many times have we seen events/objects that have been thingifyed without realizing it?