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“We continue to conceive of the universe as consisting of things and forces that act on things.

My son’s ninth grade English class were given an essay question that instructed them to name the “qualities�� “in�� a certain character in a novel. We say that a person “has�� courage, or pride, or arrogance, or “a�� temper—as though these were substances like salt. Innumerable students are asked to write about “historical forces�� or “movements.�� Was Blake or Beethoven “a romantic��? Such is our deeply ingrained linguistic habit of reifying relationships and activities into things that you can “have.��

[...] “It is nonsense to talk about ‘dependency�� or ‘aggressiveness�� or ‘pride,�� and so on. All such words have their roots in what happens between persons, not in some something-or-other inside a person.�� (Bateson, 1979)”