Pathetic fallacy - Definition and Overview

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 coined this phrase 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.

The fallacy is sometimes used in literature. For example, in a drama or novel, the weather might seem to be in tune with the characters' feelings.

See also

• Anthropic bias
• Anthropomorphism
• Reification

External links

• Of the Pathetic Fallacy (http://www.ourcivilisation.com/smartboard/shop/ruskinj/) by John Ruskin