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Intellectual Humility and Empathy by Analogy

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Abstract

Empathy can be terribly important when we talk to people who are different from ourselves. And it can be terribly important that we talk to people who are different precisely about those things that make us different. If we’re to have productive conversations across differences, then, it seems we must develop empathy with people who are deeply different. But, as Laurie Paul and others point out, it can be impossible to imagine oneself as someone who is deeply different than oneself—something that plausible definitions of empathy seem to require. How then, can these terribly important conversations take place? I argue that philosophical and psychological work on intellectual humility can show us a way to empathize and have these conversations even when we can’t imagine ourselves as the other.

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Notes

  1. Or, if no one’s perspective other than our own is ever fully accessible to us, then big differences in values make those perspectives even less accessible.

  2. I mean to be inclusive, in my use of alief, of all the sorts of automatic habits of thought or attitudes that are in tension with our explicit or avowed beliefs.

  3. (Hazlett 2012) has some discussion about how awareness of these could help us be intellectually humble. This discussion, though useful, is beyond the current scope.

  4. I’m using perception and see in he loose and popular sense rather than in the strict philosophical sense. If you like, I’m invoking what Shelly Taylor (Taylor 1982) and Miranda Fricker call “social perception” (Fricker 2007).

  5. More on this worry in the next section.

  6. (De Vignemont and Jacob 2012) offers a helpful and empirically based explanation of the variety of ways in which an agent might experience the affective state of another, only some of which are rightly called empathetic.

  7. (Michael 2014) offers a really helpful exposition of the conflict detailed in this section.

  8. If a defender of the phenomenological account were to insist that their account captured all the interesting phenomena relating to empathy, I’d point out that if the phenomenological account of empathy implies that empathy cannot be learned (after all, it’s not clear that we can learn to directly perceive), then there is no way around Paul’s challenge. If an agent does not empathize with another, no strategy will help her to do so—there would be, in other words, no way to develop empathy. I think this would be a strike against the phenomenological account, especially given the evidence (previously mentioned) that empathy can be learned.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Connecticut, Storrs, USA

    Casey Rebecca Johnson

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  1. Casey Rebecca Johnson
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Correspondence to Casey Rebecca Johnson.

Additional information

Work on this paper was made possible by Humility and Conviction in Public Life, a project at the University of Connecticut generously funded by the John Templeton Foundation.

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Johnson, C.R. Intellectual Humility and Empathy by Analogy. Topoi 38, 221–228 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-017-9453-0

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