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] thus, "emotional misrepresentation", not "contemptible illogic".

Noun
Examples

pathetic fallacy (plural pathetic fallacies)

  1. 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, London: Smith, Elder and Co., […], →OCLC, part IV (Of Many Things), § 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.

See also

References
  1. 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.”
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