pathetic fallacy
English
Etymology
Coined by British cultural critic John Ruskin in 1856 in his work Modern Painters. Here, fallacy does not refer to a logical fallacy, but should be understood as “a falsehood, something that is untrue”, while pathetic here means “caused by an excited state of the feelings”.[1]
Noun
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pathetic fallacy (plural pathetic fallacies)
- A metaphor which consists in treating inanimate objects or concepts as if they were human beings, for instance having thoughts or feelings.
- 1856, John Ruskin, chapter XII, in Modern Painters, volume III (part IV), London: Smith, Elder, and Co., […], § 2, page 184:
- Taking, therefore, this wide field, it is surely a very notable circumstance, to begin with, that this pathetic fallacy is eminently characteristic of modern painting. For instance, Keats, describing a wave, breaking, out at sea, says of it
Down whose green back the short-lived foam, all hoar,
Bursts gradual, with a wayward indolence.
- 2022 June 14, Ian Bogost, “Google’s ‘Sentient’ Chatbot Is Our Self-Deceiving Future”, in The Atlantic:
- The next generation of AI will put the pathetic fallacy on steroids.
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See also
- personification
- anthropomorphism
- reification
References
- John Ruskin (1856), “Chapter XII. Of the Pathetic Fallacy”, in Modern Painters, volume III (part IV), § 5, page 170: “[I]t is the fallacy of wilful fancy, which involves no real expectation that it will be believed; or else it is a fallacy caused by an excited state of the feelings, making us, for the time, more or less irrational.”