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."
• "My penis hates me."
• "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

• Anthropic bias
• Anthropomorphism
• Reification

External links

• Of the Pathetic Fallacy by John Ruskin