This week at The Junkyard, we’re hosting a symposium on Epistemic Uses of Imagination, a recently published volume edited by Chris Badura and Amy Kind (Routledge 2021). See here for an introduction from Chris and Amy. Commentaries will appear Tuesday through Friday.

A post by Olivia Bailey

My aim in this entry is to raise (or re-raise) a question about the limits of a particular imaginative activity that often travels under the name of empathy, and to voice one possible answer to that question.

Adam Smith tells us that the emotionally “live” imaginative activity at the center of his moral theory involves a kind of exchange of character: “But though sympathy is very properly said to arise from an imaginary change of situations with the person principally concerned, yet…[w]hen I condole with you for the loss of your only son, in order to enter into your grief I do not consider what I, a person of such a character and profession, should suffer, if I had a son, and if that son was unfortunately to die: but I consider what I should suffer if I was really you, and I not only change circumstances with you, but I change persons and characters” (TMS, VII.iii.1.4). Following Smith, it is common, in the literature on what is now known as empathy rather than sympathy, to distinguish between two forms of imaginative engagement with others’ perspectives: 1) imagining being oneself in the other’s position 2) imagining being the other in the other’s position, where only the latter counts as true empathy. Oftentimes, imagining being the other in the other’s position is understood to involve the imagined adoption of not just the other’s history and/or material characteristics, but also their sensibility. By “sensibility,” I mean a characteristic pattern of feeling and concern, centrally including tendencies to apprehend things in a particular evaluative light. Different people, the thought goes, have different sensibilities (he is timorous, she is bold, they are hot-headed and apt to see insult everywhere). And if we want to get a real grip on another’s experience, such that we can accurately appreciate and assess their perceptions, their choices, their actions, we need to empathize in this latter sense: we need to imaginatively view the other’s circumstances as if through the filter of their sensibility.