Abstract
Empathy has become a hot topic in philosophy and more generally, but its many uses haven’t yet been recognized. Empathy has epistemological applications beyond its ability to put us directly in contact with the minds of others, and its role in ethics has been underestimated: it can, for example, help the present-day sentimentalist make sense of Francis Hutcheson’s idea of a moral sense. Most notably, perhaps, empathy also plays an important role in speech acts that speech act theorists have completely ignored: for example, felicitous assertion and questioning both depend on the empathic conveying of emotion.
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Notes
Naming and Necessity, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980. Incidentally, the account of moral meaning that MS offers is naturalistic (and realist) inasmuch as it identifies moral goodness roughly with empathic caringness. But that doesn’t mean that it can’t account for the normativity (motivating and reason-giving force) of moral claims. Sharon Street (in “Reply to Copp: Naturalism, Normativity, and the Varieties of Realism Worth Worrying About,” Philosophical Issues 18, 2008, pp. 207–28) has argued that David Copp’s naturalism cannot account for moral normativity, but my naturalistic account of moral meaning does allow for this because empathy neatly straddles the supposed divide between fact and motive. In empathizing with the distress of another person, we both cognitively register that mental state and identify with it in a way that constitutes motivation to help that other person. On this point see my A Sentimentalist Theory of the Mind, NY: OUP, 2014, p. 226. Moreover, a compassionate person may empathize with the self-regarding practical reasons of the distressed other and therefore also have a practical moral/altruistic reason to help that person. (See my forthcoming “A Sentimentalist Theory of Practical Reasons.”)
See, inter alia, Grice’s “Meaning,” Philosophical Review 66, 1957, pp. 377–88; and his “Utterer’s Meaning and Intentions,” Philosophical Review 78, 1969, pp. 147–77.
Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970, esp. pp. 234 ff. I assume that when the child takes in parental fear of bears, they don’t do it via an argument or inference from the reliability of their parents. Reid argues that God has implanted a tendency to speak truth and also to believe what one is told in all human beings and holds that “testimony” therefore has an intrinsic authority among us humans irrespective of considerations of reliability. Reid clearly thinks belief in what one is told occurs in a direct non-inferential manner, and so his take on assertion treats it as working in something like the non-inferential direct way that I shall argue empathy works in the context of assertions. But unlike Reid, I shall claim that the so-called authority of testimony is not a separate epistemic principle of justification, but works in non-inferential justificatory terms via direct empathy with the certitude or confidence of others when they assert things to us.
Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969, pp. 64 ff.
This uses Grice’s original analysis of (non-naturally) meaning something to give an analogous account of assertion. I am indebted here to Peter Pagin, who makes just this sort of move in his account of Grice-type assertion in his article “Assertion” in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. However, even those (like Pagin) who recognize that assertion may well express the speaker’s certitude and not just mere belief, don’t mention the fact that the speaker may be attempting to get the hearer to have similarly strong confidence and not merely belief.
In his article on “Speech Acts” in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Mitchell Green states that loudness is not relevant to speech acts, but on the present view, tone of voice and even loudness can be very relevant. The rising tone characteristic of yes/no questions tends to undercut the making of assertions, for example, causing the speaker to seem less than confident about what they are saying and empathically conveying that lack of confidence to the hearer. And a certain level of loudness—but not shouting—may actually serve to convey confidence (in both senses of “convey”) and thereby make a speech act of assertion more effective in its purpose. (Women tend to speak more softly than men, and this raises some interesting moral and linguistic issues.) If empathy is relevant to speech act theory for all the other reasons I have mentioned, then tone of voice and actual loudness can certainly be relevant to (the felicity or success conditions of) speech acts.
One can take in one’s parents’ attitude to bears or to Aunt Tilly without their ever asserting or telling one that bears are dangerous or Aunt Tilly trustworthy: one may (and children are good at this) simply feel, empathically feel, what one’s parents feel about bears or Aunt Tilly. But such cases are actually closer to cases of assertion than one might think. Confidence can be empathically conveyed or infused via an assertion, and assertion as a speech act is (among other things) fundamentally characterizable as a conventional way to get people to take in our confidence about some subject matter. So assertion facilitates and makes socially available what can happen without speech acts in the family: the empathic transmission of belief and confidence. And no argument from reliability need operate in the mind of someone who takes in beliefs or confidence in this way. The child doesn't need it, and neither, in parallel, does the person who hears an assertion. Since the usual speech act theories of what happens do at least implicitly rely on the idea that the hearer of an assertion needs to be able to make some kind of argument in their own mind in order for the speech act of assertion to achieve its purpose, this shows you how far speech act theory has been from actually capturing what is involved in assertion as a speech act, from capturing what happens when assertion works the way typical asserters hope or assume it will.
“The Emotive Meaning of Moral Judgments,” Mind 46, 1937, pp. 14–31.
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Slote, M. The Many Faces of Empathy. Philosophia 45, 843–855 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-016-9703-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-016-9703-1