Social Robots and Sentimentality

In this paper I discuss the objection that we are deplorably sentimental, i.e., we misrepresent the world in order to indulge in certain feelings, whenever we feel affection and act in an affectionate way towards certain social robots. I will focus my discussion on documented behaviors typically of elderly people towards pet robots such as Paro. I begin by engaging the very claim that elderly people are correctly described as being sentimental whenever emotively responding to pet-robots. Doubts to that effect are raised by consideration of the Paradox of Fiction: subjects regularly exhibit apparently genuine emotional responses to characters and situations that they explicitly represent as being merely imaginary. The argumentative strategy is that, if we can admit in a non-paradoxical way of emotional reactions towards fictional objects, we may thereby admit of genuine emotional reactions towards pet robots that are not sentimental. In the final part of the paper, however, I grant that there may be some sentimentality involved in at least some of the cases and examine the alleged wrongness of its nature. I conclude that sentimentality is not always wrong but may at times be vicious. When it is so, it is due to features that go beyond sentimentality itself.