Relation To Other Fallacies
Pathetic fallacy (also known as anthropomorphic fallacy or anthropomorphization) is a specific type of reification. Just as reification is the attribution of concrete characteristics to an abstract idea, a pathetic fallacy is committed when those characteristics are specifically human characteristics, especially thoughts or feelings. Pathetic fallacy is also related to personification, which is a direct and explicit ascription of life and sentience to the thing in question, whereas the pathetic fallacy is much broader and more allusive.
The animistic fallacy involves attributing personal intention to an event or situation.
Reification fallacy should not be confused with other fallacies of ambiguity:
- Accentus, where the ambiguity arises from the emphasis (accent) placed on a word or phrase
- Amphiboly, a verbal fallacy arising from ambiguity in the grammatical structure of a sentence
- Composition, when one assumes that a whole has a property solely because its various parts have that property
- Division, when one assumes that various parts have a property solely because the whole has that same property
- Equivocation, the misleading use of a word with more than one meaning
Read more about this topic: Reification (fallacy)
Famous quotes containing the words relation to and/or relation:
“You must realize that I was suffering from love and I knew him as intimately as I knew my own image in a mirror. In other words, I knew him only in relation to myself.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)
“The instincts of the ant are very unimportant, considered as the ant’s; but the moment a ray of relation is seen to extend from it to man, and the little drudge is seen to be a monitor, a little body with a mighty heart, then all its habits, even that said to be recently observed, that it never sleeps, become sublime.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)