The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy

Heidi Maibom

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367254933
• eBook ISBN: 9781315281995
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Empathy plays a central role in the history and contemporary study of ethics, interpersonal understanding, and the emotions, yet until now has been relatively underexplored. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy is an outstanding reference source to the key topics, problems and debates in this exciting field and is the first collection of its kind. Comprising over thirty chapters by a team of international contributors, the Handbook is divided into six parts:

• Core issues
• History of empathy
• Empathy and understanding
• Empathy and morals
• Empathy in art and aesthetics
• Empathy and individual differences.

Within these sections central topics and problems are examined, including: empathy and imagination; neuroscience; David Hume and Adam Smith; understanding; evolution; altruism; moral responsibility; art, aesthetics, and literature; gender; empathy and related disciplines such as anthropology.

Essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy, particularly ethics and philosophy of mind and psychology, the Handbook will also be of interest to those in related fields, such as anthropology and social psychology.

PART I

Core issues

1

COGNITIVE EMPATHY

Shannon Spaulding

1. Introduction

Cognitive empathy is the capacity to understand another person’s state of mind from her perspective. Consider the following real-life example, which I will return to throughout this chapter. Edward Snowden is a former subcontractor for the National Security Agency (NSA), the United States intelligence agency responsible for global monitoring of data for foreign intelligence and counterintelligence. Snowden began subcontracting for the NSA in March 2013. Two months later, Snowden flew to Hong Kong where he subsequently released many thousands of classified documents to journalists. These documents included information on global and domestic spying programs, military capabilities, operations, and tactics. In June of 2013, the US Department of Justice charged Snowden with violating the Espionage Act and stealing government property, and the US Department of State revoked his passport. Shortly thereafter, Snowden flew to Russia where he is now a resident.

Many people, including most in the US Government, have condemned Snowden’s behavior as treasonous. His release of classified documents about military capabilities, operations, and tactics compromises military missions and endangers military personnel. Moreover, the journalists who received these classified documents often lack the capacity to protect the documents so that they do not end up in the hands of enemies of the US. For example, on January 27, 2014 the New York Times published one of these leaked documents but failed to properly redact classified information in the released PDF. As a result, the newspaper exposed the name of the NSA agent and the group that was the target of the operation (see http://nyti.ms/MluMBk). Though Snowden professes to have acted out of patriotism, many accuse Snowden of being a traitor.

Others, however, praise him as a courageous whistleblower. Snowden has said that his goal in releasing classified documents to journalists was to expose the NSA’s spying programs so that Americans understand the extent to which their government monitors its own citizens and therefore can make an informed choice about whether they want their government doing these things. It is widely acknowledged that the American public would not have known that the NSA is collecting data on ordinary citizens’ communications if not for Snowden’s actions. Many regard Snowden as a hero for shedding light on these spying programs.

Understanding why Snowden judged that it was best for him to release thousands of classified documents to journalists is a difficult, real-world challenge of cognitive empathy. There are two main accounts of how we understand another person’s perspective. One is based on theorizing and the other is based on mental simulation. In the next section, I will use the Snowden example to illustrate how these two accounts are meant to work. I shall argue in section 3 that we use both theorizing and mental simulation, but these strategies are not equally effective in all cases. I shall discuss a third underexplored pattern of reasoning in cognitive empathy. Self-serving goals, such as anxiety reduction, self-esteem, and confirmation of one’s worldview, distort cognitive empathy. Finally, in section 4, I offer some concluding remarks on how to improve hybrid theories of cognitive empathy.

2. Theory Theory and Simulation Theory

The two main accounts of how we understand others’ perspectives are the Theory Theory (TT) and the Simulation Theory (ST). Theory theorists argue that we understand others’ perspectives by employing a folk psychological theory about other minds. For an overview of the TT, see the following collected volumes: Carruthers & Smith (1996); Davies & Stone (1995a). According to this view, we explain and predict behavior by theorizing about how mental states inform behavior. With our folk psychological theory, we infer from another person’s behavior what his or her mental states probably are. And from these inferences, plus the psychological laws in the theory connecting mental states to behavior, we predict the next behavior of the other person.

When the TT was first proposed, proponents of the view argued that we understand others by employing a literal theory of mind, which involves folk psychological laws that connect mental states, unobservable theoretical entities, to behavior. Understanding others’ perspectives, it was argued, consists in employing these folk psychological laws, along with auxiliary assumptions about the relevant circumstances, to deduce explanations and predictions of behavior. Theory theorists argued that we use our theory of mind just like, for example, physicists use the theory of gravity to explain and predict the behavior of physical objects. Jerry Fodor, for example, argues that theory of mind explanations “are frequently seen to exhibit the ‘deductive structure’ that is so characteristic of explanation in real science. There are two parts to this: the theory’s underlying generalizations are defined over unobservables, and they lead to its predictions by iterating and interacting rather than by being directly instantiated” (Fodor, 1987, p. 7).

Contemporary theory theorists reject the idea that understanding others’ perspectives literally involves applying folk psychological laws and deriving explanations and predictions from these laws. Instead, they characterize our capacity to understand others as underwritten by information-rich, interpretive processes (Nichols & Stich, 2003). More loosely conceived, theories may include models, heuristics, and a body of assumptions. A more general and modern way of characterizing the TT is in terms of an information-rich inference to the best explanation.

An example of a modern version of the TT is the Model Theory Theory, an account proposed by Heidi Maibom (2007, 2009) and Peter Godfrey-Smith (2005). Scientific theorizing, some argue, is best understood as a practice of constructing and applying scientific models (Giere, 1999). These models consist in a general structure or schematic pattern that can have many specific instantiations, and they can be elaborated in various ways to generate specific hypothetical systems to deal with particular empirical cases (Godfrey-Smith, 2005, pp. 2–4). According to Model TT, understanding another agent is analogous to this kind of scientific theorizing. There is a single, core folk psychological model, which consists in a distinction between beliefs and desires, the idea of sensory input and behavioral output, and characteristic dependence of action on perceptions, memories, goals, and temptations. This core folk psychological model can be elaborated in various ways with particular knowledge of social structures, institutions, and social roles, knowledge about a particular person’s history and personality, etc. On this account, cognitive empathy is best described as facility with folk psychological models.

According to the TT, understanding Edward Snowden’s perspective requires knowledge of the NSA, current laws relating to domestic spying, protections for whistleblowers, and the political environment. It also requires understanding the moral tension between liberty and safety. Crucially, understanding his perspective involves understanding the psychology of those who put their own safety (and to some extent others’ safety) at risk for what they take to be a greater cause. On this view, understanding Snowden’s perspective consists in sophisticated inference to the best explanation. Basically one must understand all the main factors that influenced his moral calculus.

In contrast to the TT, simulation theorists argue that we do not need to employ a theory about folk psychology to understand others. To understand a target’s perspective, all we need to do is imagine what we would think, feel, and do in the target’s situation, and on that basis we come to understand what the target thinks, feels, and will do. For an overview of this theory, see Davies and Stone’s (1995b) collected volume on the ST. According to the ST, we use our own minds as a simulation of the other person’s mind, putting ourselves in another’s shoes, so to speak, and imagining what our mental states would be and how we would behave if we were that agent in that particular situation.

The basic idea of the ST is straightforward and intuitive, but the details of how this happen are quite nuanced (Spaulding, 2012, 2015). First, we retrodictively simulate to figure out what the target’s mental states could have been to cause the observed behavior. Then we take the target’s mental states in the form of pretend beliefs and pretend desires as input, run them through our own cognitive mechanisms, take the resulting conclusion and attribute it to the target in order to explain and predict the target’s behavior.

In contrast to the TT, ST is sometimes characterized as an information-poor cognitive empathy process. It does not require access to large bodies of information about folk psychology. Simulation requires an ability to mentally put oneself in a target’s position and figure out what one would feel, think, and do. One simply redeploys one’s own cognitive mechanisms for the purpose of understanding the other person’s perspective.

Despite the overall consensus that we understand others through mental simulation, there is considerable disagreement amongst simulation theorists about the nature of simulational mindreading. These disagreements concern whether we use high-level practical reasoning to figure out what it would be reasonable for us to think, feel, and do in the target’s situation (Heal, 1996), whether the simulation heuristic requires introspective awareness (Gordon, 1995), and the extent to which simulation can be explained in simple reenactment or resonance terms (Goldman, 2006).

According to the ST, in order to understand Edward Snowden’s perspective you need to imagine yourself in his position. Imagine that you have discovered at your new job that the government employs top secret programs that, unbeknownst to American citizens, allow the monitoring of ordinary Americans’ phone calls, emails, texts, internet searches, etc. Imagine that you face the following dilemma: stay silent and let these secret programs continue illegally monitoring Americans’ personal communications or give information to journalists that proves the extent of this monitoring and let them publicize these programs. Imagining facing this dilemma, you understand the difficult choice Snowden faced. According to ST, to understand Snowden’s perspective you do not need to understand every significant factor that influenced his decision. Rather, you just need to mentally simulate being in his situation.

The TT and the ST offer different accounts of how we understand another’s perspective. With respect to the Snowden example, the central difference is that the TT relies on consolidating a broad range of information about spying, whistleblowing, morality, and psychology whereas the ST relies on imagining oneself in Snowden’s position facing the dilemma he faced. These are very different strategies for understanding another’s perspective. I shall argue in the next section that we successfully use both the theorizing and simulational strategies, but we do so under different conditions.

3. A pluralist picture

The TT and the ST propose different strategies for cognitive empathy. As is well known in this field, both accounts are inadequate on their own. The TT – at least in its traditional formulation – faces a serious computational worry. Theoretical explanation requires categorizing observable behavior, applying general principles that link observable behavior to mental states, and mental states to other mental states, and mental states to behavior. One must figure out which of many principles could apply, whether appropriate background conditions hold, whether there are countervailing factors, and, for predictive purposes, the implications of the principle one chooses to apply. Combine this with the fact that many of our social interactions involve a range of people whose behaviors and mental states are interdependent, and you have an extremely computationally demanding and extended process of deriving a stable set of beliefs which will allow one to successfully take part in social interactions (Bermúdez, 2003, pp. 31–3).

A theoretical limitation of the ST is what is known as the “threat of collapse” (Davies & Stone, 2001; Heal, 1998). Theory theorists hold that we understand others via a tacit theory of other minds. Simulation theorists reject the idea that we understand others via a theory of other minds, tacit or not. They argue instead that we simply have to imagine ourselves in the other person’s situation and figure out what we would think, feel, and do in that situation. This kind of simulation is successful to the extent the simulator’s mental processes mirror the target’s mental processes. The difficulty is that given a certain plausible account of tacit knowledge, the simulation process described above is indistinguishable from the employment of a tacit theory of other minds. But if that is right, then there would be no predictive differences between the ST and the TT, and the ST would simply collapse into the TT.

A related objection, which precedes the threat of collapse, is offered by Dennett (1987). To retrodictively simulate a person, I observe her behavior, imagine myself in her situation, generate hypothetical beliefs and desires that would explain why I would behave as she did if I were in that situation, and then attribute those mental states to her. A problem related to the threat of collapse is that there are indefinitely many mental state combinations that would explain the observed behavior. If we were to try to figure out, with simulation resources only, what our mental states could have been to cause us to behave like the target, our retrodictive simulation would have no way to decide between radically different belief-desire combinations that would explain the behavior. Moreover, there would be no stopping point for the retrodictive simulation. The simulation itself provides no way to determine when we have landed on a good-enough explanation of the observed behavior and can stop simulating. Retrodictive simulation reveals some of the possible mental states that a target may have, but it cannot, all by itself, provide knowledge of other minds. Theoretical information is required to move from identifying possible mental states to knowing a target’s mental states. See Spaulding (2015) for more on this objection to ST.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of contents
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction to philosophy of empathy
• Part I Core issues
• Part II History of empathy
• Part III Empathy and understanding
• Part IV Empathy and morals
• Part V Empathy in art and aesthetics
• Part VI Empathy and individual differences
• Index