For an example- art, plants, stuffed animals, and other inanimate objects. I was thinking about this earlier and am curious to know why!
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Humans have an overweening pack-bonding instinct. We project aspects of ourselves onto all sorts of things, even things that aren’t even *alive* or even *motile.* By self-ifying entities in the world around us, we bind ourselves to them, make them familiar, comfortable, cognizable.
We are a social species so naturally we enjoy the presence of another member of the species. And culturally we have created cultural and social lanes for how we express that enjoyment. Our enjoyment of specific objects came later so instead of creating new social lanes we used the same ones. Naming things personifys these objects in a way, and lets us more naturally express and experience that enjoyment of the presence of said object.
So similar to the fact that there are a lot of people, but I am best friends with Steve, and so I enjoy being around Steve and I know him specifically out of all the other humans because he is Steve. Giving our cherished objects names allow us to say there are a lot of other objects like this one but I really like this one in particular it is not just a plant it is an individual that I enjoy.
In reality the plant or stuffed animal doesn’t have all of the nuance that individual humans have between each other when compared to other similar plants or stuffed animals so we don’t have a real way to express that specific admiration and enjoyment other than giving it a name, It is the Human way of setting specific objects apart from other objects for our own social human reasons!
To refer to something i think
If i write a story about two guys fighting, and without them having names you can easily get lost in who is who.
This made me think of Helen Keller, who, once she broke through and understood that a certain sign meant ‘water’, had an insatiable desire to learn the names of things. She later said it was as if she owned them, once she knew the names of things.
Well, if I say, “I went to a building in France and saw a nice painting”, it’s not really the same as, “I went to France and saw da Vinci’s Mona Lisa in the Louvre”, now is it?
That’s why. It provides description and context to any conversation.
We’re the most social species on the planet by far, unless you count hive superorganisms like ants. We’ve bonded with other species and integrated them into our lives, turned tribes of a few dozen into cities of a million, countries of a billion, all living and working together (mostly). I think that social instinct is more important to our success than individual “intelligence”, personally.
And that insane sociality makes us form emotional bonds with just about anything that vaguely looks like it has a face ^-^
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