Pathetic fallacy
The pathetic fallacy is the logical fallacy of treating inanimate objects or conceptual entities such as countries or groups of people as if they have thoughts or feelings.
(Compare to reification.)
For example:
- "France wants to punish America!"
- "The Israeli people owe it to the Palestinian people"
- "Ah, it is no good. That car just doesn't want to start!"
- "the moving object, due to its mass, wants to keep going"
- "Being heavier than air, water wants to go down more than it does, so it makes the air go up"
- "X flies up to Y because positive and negative charges like one another, or because iron likes a magnet"
John Ruskin coined this phrase in his work "Modern Painters".
The pathetic fallacy with groups of people may overlap with the group attribution error: assuming most group behavior such as that of a disparate body such as a country is mostly situational, and it is difficult for such an entity to have any coherent disposition.
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 disfavored.
It is sometimes used in literary criticism, with reference to the above idea. For example, in a drama or novel, the weather might seem to be in tune with the characters' feelings. Other literary uses for pathetic fallacy would be having a certain character exclaim a fact or opinion which coincides in some way to that character, yet they are unaware of it.
See also
