MachineMachine /stream

In the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, one commits the fallacy of misplaced concreteness when one mistakes an abstract belief, opinion or concept about the way things are for a physical or 'concrete' reality.

Whitehead proposed the fallacy in a discussion of the relation of spatial and temporal location of objects. Whitehead rejects the notion that a concrete physical object in the universe can be described simply in spatial or temporal extension. Rather, the object must be described as a field located in both space and time.

"...among the primary elements of nature as apprehended in our immediate experience, there is no element whatever which possesses this character of simple location. ... [Instead,] I hold that by a process of constructive abstraction we can arrive at abstractions which are the simply located bits of material, and at other abstractions which are the minds included in the scientific scheme. Accordingly, the real error is an example of what I have termed:"