Pathetic fallacy
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The pathetic fallacy is the logical fallacy of treating inanimate objects or conceptual entities such as countries as if they have thoughts or feelings. (Compare to reification.)
For example:
- "Rwanda wants to punish the Congo!"
- "Ah, it is no good. That car just refuses to start!"
- "the moving object, due to its mass, wants to keep going"
- "Being heavier than air, water wants to go down more than air does, so it makes the air go up"
- "X flies up to Y because positive and negative charges like one another"
- "Iron likes a magnet"
- "Nature abhors a vacuum"
(John Ruskin employed this translation of the well-known Medieval saying natura abhorret a vacuo in his work "Modern Painters".)
One particularly common appearance of the fallacy is when dealing with evolution. Specifically, members of an evolving species do not "want" to develop a certain trait (or if they do it is of no evolutionary relevance). Nor can evolution "dislike" a particular subset of the population, though it may be the case that a subset is less likely to breed and hence disadvantaged.
This device constitutes a fallacy only when it is used as a basis for inference; in literature the device is called personification, and is widely employed. For example, in a drama or novel, the weather might seem to be in tune with the characters' feelings.
See also
External links
- Of the Pathetic Fallacy (http://www.ourcivilisation.com/smartboard/shop/ruskinj/) by John Ruskinhe:כזב_פתטי