Abstract
In recent years, there has been a great deal of controversy in the philosophy of mind, developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience both about how to conceptualize empathy and about the connections between empathy and interpersonal understanding. Ideally, we would first establish a consensus about how to conceptualize empathy, and then analyze the potential contribution of empathy to interpersonal understanding. However, it is not at all clear that such a consensus will soon be forthcoming, given that different people have fundamentally conflicting intuitions about the concept of empathy. Thus, instead of trying to resolve this controversy, I will try to show that a fair amount of consensus is within reach about how empathy can be a source of interpersonal understanding even in the absence of a consensus about how to conceptualize empathy. As we shall see, the main controversy concerns a few phenomena that some researchers view as necessary conditions of empathy, but which others view either as merely characteristic features or as consequences of empathy. My strategy will be to try to show how empathy can generate interpersonal understanding by virtue of these phenomena—regardless of whether one chooses to conceptualize them as necessary conditions of empathy.
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Notes
There is broad agreement that a conceptual model of empathy should make it possible to distinguish empathy from these related phenomena. One may of course also legitimately wonder how empathy relates to pity, compassion or other associated phenomena, but since the focus on the literature has been on the relations among empathy, sympathy, contagion and mindreading, I will limit myself to these phenomena here as well.
One may reply that the affective component may actually be the same here but more intense for Peter than for Sue. However, Jacob has acknowledged that it may be different in such a case. Moreover, it is likely that some other case can be constructed in which the affective states are more clearly distinct, so, for the sake of argument at least, I propose to take the objection at face value.
I thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.
This is no accident: in conceptualizing empathy, both theorists appeal to the engaged understanding that narratives enable, i.e. in which we make sense of others’ actions, judgments and emotions by relating them to patterns of actions, emotions and judgment that are typical in our culture.
At noted above, in Sects. 2.2 and 3.2, Zahavi is not explicit about how he takes empathy to relate to mindreading: he may regard empathy as a kind of mindreading (namely perceptual mindreading), or as a foundation for mindreading (namely by identifying other people as possible targets for mindreading). The proposal being made here (in the following two paragraphs) follows directly from the latter interpretation, but it is not clear how it could be integrated with the former interpretation.
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Michael, J. Towards a Consensus About the Role of Empathy in Interpersonal Understanding. Topoi 33, 157–172 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-013-9204-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-013-9204-9