What is proposed is that by a vertical process of abstraction or concept lorrnation, a collection of objects or constructions at lower, pre-existing levels of a personal concept hierarchy become ‘reified’ into an object-like concept, or noun-like term.
Skemp refers to this ‘detachability’, or ‘the ability to isolate concepts from any of the examples which give rise to them’ (skemp, 1971, page 28) as an essential part of the process of abstraction in concept formation.
Such a newly defined concept applies to those lower level concepts whose properties it abstracts, but it has a generality that goes beyond them.
The term ‘reification’ is applied because such a newly formed concept acquired an integrity and the properties of a primitive mathematical object, which means that it can be treated as a unity, and at a subsequent stage it too can be abstracted from, in an iteration of the process.