Surely they've considered the difference between metaphor and actual speaker attribution of states? The large difference in naturalness between the sentences
(1) Old books hate moisture.
(2) Old books hate asparagus.
has nothing to do with my attribution of mental states to books, but rather to only (1) having an analogy with sentient beings sufficient to license a metaphor. (Sentient beings would feel hate toward things that would cause them a level of physical damage comparable to how much moisture damages old books.)
The obvious control for the "Enchanted Chair" cases would be to see how people respond to a scenario in which the sorceress magically endows Acme Corporation with a mind, and people start calling it "Enchanted Acme Corporation." Would people be willing to say Enchanted Acme Corporation can "feel happy" or "feel upset"? My guess is that they would — but this is a question about fairytale metaphysics, not folk metaphysics, and there is no reason to suppose facts about the former automatically carry over to the latter.
(Of course, it isn't obvious that fairytale metaphysics is any less philosophically important than folk metaphysics — indeed, I suspect it may even be more important.)
Surely they've considered the difference between metaphor and actual speaker attribution of states? The large difference in naturalness between the sentences
(1) Old books hate moisture.
(2) Old books hate asparagus.
has nothing to do with my attribution of mental states to books, but rather to only (1) having an analogy with sentient beings sufficient to license a metaphor. (Sentient beings would feel hate toward things that would cause them a level of physical damage comparable to how much moisture damages old books.)
The obvious control for the "Enchanted Chair" cases would be to see how people respond to a scenario in which the sorceress magically endows Acme Corporation with a mind, and people start calling it "Enchanted Acme Corporation." Would people be willing to say Enchanted Acme Corporation can "feel happy" or "feel upset"? My guess is that they would — but this is a question about fairytale metaphysics, not folk metaphysics, and there is no reason to suppose facts about the former automatically carry over to the latter.
(Of course, it isn't obvious that fairytale metaphysics is any less philosophically important than folk metaphysics — indeed, I suspect it may even be more important.)