Abstract
The relationship between empathy, understood here as a cognitive act of imaginative transposition, and reasons, has been discussed extensively by Stueber (Rediscovering empathy: folk-psychology, agency, and the human sciences, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2006; South J Philos 49(11):156–180, 2011; Emot Rev 4(1):55–63, 2012; in: Maibom (ed) The Routledge handbook of philosophy of empathy, Routledge, New York, pp 137–147, 2017). Stueber situates his account of empathy as the reenactment of another person’s perspective within a framework of folk psychology as guided by a principle of rational agency. We argue that this view, which we call agential empathy, is not satisfying for two main reasons that we will examine consecutively. First, agential empathy cannot satisfactorily account for the case of emotional actions, which requires to take into account the phenomenal dimension of the mental states they stem from. We argue that Stueber overlooks this aspect, which is not reducible to understanding the reasons behind an agent’s behavior. We introduce the notions of experiential empathy and phenomenal insight to account for the imagined representation of the subjectively felt dimension of the target’s experience. Second, in virtue of his restrictive view of empathy, Stueber partly misconstrues this process: action explanation is not all there is to say about empathy. We argue that we have to go beyond the scope of agential empathy to do justice to the epistemic richness of empathy. Experiential empathy can in principle be available independently from reasons explanations: the main epistemic achievement of empathy can be indeed a matter of phenomenal insight only.
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Notes
Even a newcomer in the study of empathy is aware that a considerable amount of research about it is concerned with the issue of its very definition. Entering the debate about how to rigorously conceptualize empathy would take us too far from the purpose of this paper and require an extensive discussion of its own. That is why we will rely on an account of empathy which is broad enough to be easily relatable to a large family of formulations, while at the same time being specific enough to allow for conceptual clarity and straightforward individuation of our critical targets. For some comprehensive overviews of the concept, see Coplan (2011), Goldie (2011), Decety (2012) and Maibom (2017).
We believe that his approach is a good representative of a widespread tendency in debates about social cognition and mindreading which usually tend to overlook such aspects of human mutual understanding.
Other similar quotes can be found in Stueber (2006, pp. 59; 120; 193).
This belief-desire couple is what Davidson (1963) calls a “primitive reason”.
This position is derived from the famous Humean stance that reason (understood here as beliefs, in a weaker sense) is the slave of the passions (here, desires).
From now on, when we will refer to cases of mutual understanding, we will always imply empathic understanding or at least a form of mutual understanding that can be in principle accomplished through empathic perspective-taking.
Even more, Hursthouse also questions the very desire to express the emotion: she finds it quite dubious that it can be held independently of the emotion, for it is demanding further justification.
The most sophisticated and exhaustive account of arational actions to date is provided by Scarantino and Nielsen (2015). They argue that such actions would admit of reasons, though the latter do not take a Humean form. For instance, Jane gouging holes in the photo of Joan should be explained as the symbolic satisfaction of the goal associated with hatred, which is to harm the hated one.
We thank our two anonymous reviewers for pressing us on this point.
More precisely, both perceptions and emotions fulfil this role thanks to them being intentional states irreducible to other mental states due to their specific phenomenology. Similarly to perceptions, emotions are representational states which give us access to evaluative properties at the level of their content.
In this sense, Döring’s view substantially differs from non-cognitive feeling theories of emotions, which reduce emotions to their phenomenological dimension. For instance, Charland (1995).
One way to be convinced of this is to examine the case of recalcitrant emotions such as phobias, where emotional experience and belief diverge.
Döring’s view has been criticized by Scarantino (2014) and Scarantino and Nielsen (2015). They raise the concern that her view is incomplete for she does not truly explain the motivational role of emotional feelings. Döring states that their function is to motivate the subject to act, being related to what is of import for her (2003, pp. 225–226). Yet, she does not seem to explain much the nature of their connection with the evaluative component of emotions, leaving it open to how they could be intrinsically motivating. The response to this criticism is addressed in Döring (2007), where she proposes a more integrated view of emotional feelings in this sense, which encompasses both their intentional and motivational dimension. This is a definite step forward, but we do not think it is enough since it dissociates emotional feelings from other kinds of feelings, such as bodily feelings (i.e., pangs or twinges). We believe that her view should be complemented in this sense to provide an integrated account of emotional phenomenology. However, for the sake of this article, we can rest content with the account presented above for the concerns that we raise do not put into question the role of the emotional phenomenology in understanding emotional actions.
We thank an anonymous referee for pressing us on this point.
In his 2017 article, Stueber deepens this point of view to account for the elucidation of normative reasons as another epistemic achievement of empathy. We will not enter into such considerations here since they imply that we develop a definite stance on the difficult issue of the ontology of reasons. Moreover, motivating and normative reasons can sometimes be conflated, as Broome shows: “Sometimes a person does what she ought to do and does it for the reasons that explain why she ought to do it. When that happens, her normative reasons are also her motivating reasons.” (2013, p. 47).
One could argue here that screaming out in pain falls within the category of expressive phenomena that are automatically correlated with an underlying affective state, such as smiling when one is happy or crying when one is sad. In such cases, our expressive behaviors have a large degree of automaticity and are not under the constraints of our voluntary control (Green 2007). That is to say, we do not have any genuine motivating reason for crying or smiling. So, in the case of such expressive phenomena, reenacting motivating reasons might be precluded out of principle, rather than being merely epistemically uninteresting. One might counterargue that we have some control over our expressive behaviors, so that we can to some extent be accountable for expressing them. Think of the stoic ideal of retaining one’s own tears among certain cultures—ours included (Lutz 1999). In any case, however one wants to solve the dispute, our arguments remain untouched at their core.
It comes naturally to link these considerations to the exciting debate about the function of narratives in human mutual understanding (see Gallagher and Hutto 2008; Hutto 2008; Stueber 2008). Indeed, several scholars in the mindreading debate (e.g. Gallagher and Zahavi 2008; Hutto 2008) regard folk-psychological narratives as essential tools for human social cognition: they are indeed supposed to allow us to make sense of other agents’ behavior by embedding it in a unitary and coherent developmental structure, i.e. by constructing narratives about the relevant episode. Unfortunately, assessing the role of narrative construction in human social cognition and, more specifically, its interaction with empathic understanding, would require a paper of its own. Therefore, we will postpone these intriguing questions to another occasion.
For similar considerations, see Paul (2017).
Episodic memory is usually conceived as the capability to recollect and mentally reconstruct a past experience we personally had (Michaelian et al. forthcoming).
For a comprehensive overview on the philosophy of memory, see Bernecker and Michaelian (2017).
For similar considerations, see Matravers (2017).
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers whose insightful and constructive comments helped us to significantly improve the paper. We are grateful to Jérôme Dokic for wisely advising us throughout the making of the article. This work has been made possible by grants ANR-17-EURE-0017 FrontCog, ANR-10-IDEX-0001-02 PSL, funding from EHESS and FINO Consortium—University of Eastern Piedmont—Compagnia di San Paolo.
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Boisserie-Lacroix, C., Inchingolo, M. Empathy for a reason? From understanding agency to phenomenal insight. Synthese 198, 7097–7118 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02511-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02511-3