Title: Empathy, Folk Psychology, and Explaining Behaviour
Abstract: Karsten Stueber’s Rediscovering Empathy: Agency, Folk Psychology, and the Human Sciences is an intriguing, systematic, and careful analysis of empathy: putting ourselves in another person’s shoes. Over the past two decades, empathy as received considerable philosophical attention thanks to the contemporary interdisciplinary debate regarding the development of folk psychology, specifically between theory‐theory and simulation theory. And it’s within this context that Stueber passionately argues that empathy, not theories, play a central role in understanding humans from both a folk psychological and social scientific point of view. Although Rediscovering Empathy offers a wide ranging discussion of empathy, its main thesis states that “empathy must be regarded as the epistemically central, default method for understanding other agents within the folk‐psychological framework” (p. 5). In short, it’s by putting ourselves in another’s shoes that we come to understand human behaviour. In the introduction to his book, Stueber outlines a number of objections against empathy. First, from a Cartesian point of view, there is little reason to suppose empathy will give us accurate knowledge of other person’s mental states if we cannot use knowledge of our own mind to gain knowledge of other minds. Second, empathy is an imperfect method of knowing other mind, especially when radical cultural differences between agents could prevent them from putting themselves into another person’s shoes. And, third, empathy provides little epistemic justification for other person’s actions unless supplemented with general explanatory principles or theories. The result, as Stueber explains, is that “most philosophers of social science would regard betting on empathy as central to gaining knowledge of other minds as the equivalent of betting on a dead horse” (p. 16). Stueber’s ambitious thesis also runs counter to those philosophers and psychologists supporting folk psychology as either theoretical (Churchland
Publication Year: 2008
Publication Date: 2008-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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