This week at The Junkyard we’re hosting a symposium on Heidi Maibom’s recent book The Space Between: How Empathy Really Works (OUP 2022). Today we begin with an introduction from Heidi. Commentaries and replies will follow Tuesday through Friday.

What do we mean when we say “take my (his/her/their) perspective?” In The Space Between, I set out to explore this question. Whereas it is often assumed that a person’s perspective reflects their comprehensive way of seeing the world as a result of their unique backgrounds and personalities, I argue that a first-person perspective represents a relatively invariant way of seeing the world common to all people and other organisms. It is, if you like, the form of our perspectives which, of course, also have contents (though those contents are themselves affected by their form). Such a perspective involves a distinctive way of seeing the world in relation to ourselves, and as a reflection of our interests as the beings that we are. This means that our pre-reflective way of seeing others is, in fact, in terms of the significance those people—their thoughts, feelings, and actions—have to us. Following the literature in psychology, I call our pre-reflective way of experiencing and thinking about the world, an ‘agent perspective’ and our pre-reflective way of experiencing and thinking about others, when we are not directly interacting with them, an ‘observer perspective.’ The empirical literature shows that there are subtle, but significant, differences between the way we think of ourselves and “our” world (from an agent perspective) and how we think of others and their world (from an observer perspective). The philosophical literature, particularly that grounded in the phenomenological tradition, gives us further reasons to believe that we are situated in the world, not primarily as epistemological consumers—or thinkers, to put it more simply—but as actors. I focus mainly on agent and observer perspectives because a) they are the best documented in the empirical literature and my aim is to provide an empirically adequate account, and b) they are the most relevant when it comes to perspective taking. It should not be ignored, however, that when we interact with others, we do not do so as observers, nor do we do so from a pure agent-perspective because their very presence affects our own perspective. I discuss this phenomenon, but acknowledge here that much more work needs to be done in this area.

A post by Heidi Maibom

It is common in the empathy literature to distinguish between cognitive and affective empathy. The former is based mainly on cognition, the idea goes, and is aimed at providing knowledge of other minds. The latter is based in affect, and its main purpose is to foster prosocial behavior and interpersonal connection. Perspective taking is usually placed in the cognitive empathy camp, as it is thought to be a purely cognitive exercise whereby we transpose ourselves into another’s situation. Some have argued that this method is particularly apt to produce affective empathy as a result, but that doesn’t really alter its cognitive status. I think this way of thinking is a mistake. Affective empathy is as well, if not better, placed to yield interpersonal understanding. How?

A post by Heidi L. Maibom.

In my last post, I criticized the distinction made in social psychology between imagine-self and imagine-other perspective taking. The problem is this. Imagine-other perspective taking, as described, does not actually have to involve perspective taking at all. Why not? Because all you are asked to do is to consider more closely the other person’s situation. But to do so one does not have to take on the other person’s perspective at all. If you, like me, believe that there is no God’s Eye perspective or perspective from nowhere, you should agree that we usually consider others from our own perspectives. I call this perspective on others a ‘third-person perspective.’ To take the other person’s own perspective, we have to consider the other person’s situation as if it were our own. We have to consider it from what I call a ‘first-person perspective.’

A Post by Heidi Maibom.

Recently, various objections have been raised against empathy in what seems to be a serious backlash against Panglossian attitudes to the construct, whether in its affective or cognitive form. We are told not only that empathy is not necessary for morality, but that it actually is bad for it (Jesse Prinz and Paul Bloom). Moreover, in his provocatively titled article “Anti-Empathy” the late Peter Goldie insists that we can never fully succeed in taking another person’s perspective because we would have to represent her background beliefs, moods, attitudes, and other features of her personality. This would obviously be impossibly cognitively onerous. However, even if it were possible we would now explicitly represent what is normally implicitly represented, and that, he maintains, would make a substantial difference to these states’ functional role. Instead of influencing the person’s thoughts and actions in the background or, if you like, unconsciously, such psychological features would have to be factored in consciously in any simulation of another. In other words, even if we could amass knowledge of all the various beliefs a person might have, we would never be able to make them play the functional role in our cognitive economy that they would in the target’s. This obviously raises serious concerns about the entire enterprise. I think this way of thinking about how and why we imagine being in someone else’s situation is wrongheaded, and below I outline why. More details will be found—apologies for this shameless bit of self-promotion—in my upcoming book “Knowing Me, Knowing You”.