Agenticity in language

Many times people speak about the world as if the objects within it have agency. "Be careful around that lamp, it wants to fall over." "My car is very fussy, she doesn't like the rain." This kind of talk is part of the ubiquity of metaphor in speech. Neither of my examples posit some kind of animism, or point at my own softheadedness; they both explain something about an object.

The first sentence uses agent like language to warn my house guest that the lamp is unstable. And the second sentence is something I could say of my car even if I knew what the electrical problem was and could describe it. The fact that "agent talk" and narrative description make easy sense to our very social brain does not mean that when we use this kind of talk that we have totally lost our wits.

It can be dangerous thinking, one can fall in for some kind of animism because "the car really does seem fussy". But it bothers me when I hear critiques of peoples thinking when all that is being critiqued is a manner of description.

And let’s not miss the advantage of agent like description. My lamp might look sturdy but fall over easily, so describing it as an agent that desires to fall over tells the listener how to interact with the lamp in a way that "that lamp's center of gravity is too high for size of its base" wouldn't obviously convey. And telling someone about the wires in my car doesn't tell you what to look out for. Bad wiring can do almost anything in a car, so the "fanciful" description of my car as a stuck up little princess who won’t start in the rain is, for the person interacting with my car as a driver, more informative than the formal diagnosis.

Metabeliefs?

I have given up caring what people believe. I now only care about their meta-beliefs (and their behavior). That is to say that, basically, I now care if people are willing to change their minds or not.

Most people's beliefs are so poorly informed that even taking them at their own word is problematic. This may be controversial, but consider what evidence your coworkers have for the following list of beliefs if they hold them: "the force of gravity is inversely proportional to the square of the distance", "evolution is true", "e=mc²", or "Jesus is the son of god". The point here is that most people, most of the time, have never seen first hand evidence for most of what they "know". What they Do have is judgement and experience, it is that judgement that I now consider my litmus test.

I want to get away from considering peoples beliefs, that's not whats difficult. What's hard is knowing how to choose what to believe. Did we evolve to be monogamous? Are people inherently good, whatever that might mean? Should we have a higher marginal tax rate? How to decide these kinds of things strikes me as enormously more interesting, and actually worthy of consideration.

What are your meta-beliefs? How do you decide what to believe?