Abstract
There is a diffuse sentiment that to anthropomorphize is a mild vice that people tend to do easily and pleasingly, but that an adult well educated person should avoid. In this paper it will be provided an elucidation of “anthropomorphism” in the field of common sense knowledge, the issue of animal rights, and about the use of humans as a model in the scientific explanation. It will be argued for a “constructive anthropomorphism,” i.e., the idea that anthropomorphism is a natural attitude to attribute human psychological features to other individuals, no matter they are actually rational agents, or not. If we know the “grammar” of this attitude, we can avoid the risks in overestimatinasg the environmental inputs toward anthropomor-phism and, at the same time, take the heuristic advantages of anthropomor-phism in the use of human mind as a model for both everyday circumstances and scientific enterprise.
Highlights
There is a diffuse sentiment that to anthropomorphize is a mild vice, nothing really harmful, that people tend to do and pleasingly, but that an adult well educated person should avoid
We suggest that common sense knowledge is to be considered as a two-fold creature (Perconti, 2013)
Hinde (1982, p. 76) complained that “Fear of the dangers of anthropomorphism has caused ethologists to neglect many interest phenomena.”. This rebellion grew during the encounter of ethology with cognition inside comparative cognition, as in the words of Griffin (1992, p. 152): “When one carefully examines such charges of anthropomorphism, it turns out that whatever it is suggested that the animal might do, or think, really is a uniquely human attribute
Summary
There is a diffuse sentiment that to anthropomorphize is a mild vice, nothing really harmful, that people tend to do and pleasingly, but that an adult well educated person should avoid. This paper tries to inquire why it is so, and some limits of this latter statement Note that this question would be ill posed, if anthropomorphism had been a plain logical mistake, as if people when anthropomorphize posit an identity between human nature and the other entity. In thinking about a spaceship one assumes similarity between crossing world’s open ocean and wandering in the wide space, that implies, for example, being equipped for long term self-sufficency It is out of the scope of this paper to review psychological theories of why people tend to anthropomorphize. Arbilly and Lotem (2017) argue for a similar claim by their “constructive anthropomorphism.” With their words: “We believe that the natural tendency of using our human experiences when thinking about animals (i.e., the tendency to anthropomorphize) can be harnessed productively to generate hypotheses regarding cognitive mechanisms and their evolution” The rationale of our proposal is to sketch out the main advantages to extend to possibility of this idea to the three areas above mentioned
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
