Análisis Económico

Before I begin, I would like to make small point about imagination in reading and in empathy. Throughout this paper I will be presenting many examples that will allow me to fix reference on the phenomenon of empathy. These examples are drawn from my own experience, but I will intentionally present the persons in these examples using gender- neutral terms, and I will not describe their physical appearance. I have not done this so to sidestep the issue of gender parity in my research (or any other issue). Rather, I have done so for us to more easily notice the types of informationally-laden imaginations that we construct when reading. In reading this paper, you might, in a relevant sense, be attempting to take the perspective of the fictional targets in its examples. Similarly, when taking the perspective of non-fictional targets, we also construct and fill in certain

information. This information is often based on our own experience and our own values. I think that presenting my examples in such neutral terms may allow us to further notice the importance of taking into consideration environmental variables and values in developing a fuller account of empathy. Now, on to a few examples.

Imagine that a friend tells you that they have recently been fired from a job they found fulfilling. Upon hearing this, you share their disappointment, their belief that they were dismissed unjustly, and you feel motivated to help them find a new job. You experience similar emotions and beliefs as they do, and you are motivated to help them

appropriately. You empathize with your friend. It is also possible to empathize with someone you have not previously met. Imagine you are taking a leisurely evening walk around your neighborhood. You see a person sitting against lamppost bearing a cardboard sign asking for money. You imagine what it would be like for you to be in that person’s place, you feel somewhat sad, and feel motivated to give them some change. You empathize with that stranger. It is also possible to empathize with an enemy. By

imagining how an enemy perceives your actions and their effects as being dangerous or harmful, you can feel motivated either to change your actions or to better describe the

goals of your actions in order to help an enemy towards increased cooperation. These are examples that help us to understand what empathy is: becoming aware of someone else’s concerns, sharing their emotions and beliefs, and feeling motivated to help them with their concerns. A point I will elaborate upon later is that empathy is often taken to be synonymous with mindreading. But there is a big difference between the two both in terms of their psychological processes and their neural instantiation (Singer 2006). Whereas mindreading involves understanding the behavioural intentions of a target, empathy invariably involves in some sense sharing a target’s emotional states. While there is some debate about the neural overlap between the mentalizing system that makes mindreading possible and the mirror (neuron) system that is often said to be involved in empathy (Overwalle & Baetens, 2009, p 566), most theorists take the key component psychological processes of empathy to be emotional contagion, mimicry, perspective- taking, and motivation.

These component psychological processes of empathy are the focus of accounts that answer the question: how does empathy operate? The conventional approach is to answer this question by discussing the mental format of one or more of empathy’s component processes. Accounts that answer the question in this way include: simulationist, theory- theory, and direct-perception accounts. On “simulationist” accounts for example, the processes of empathy are realized in mental simulations (Goldman 1992; Gallese and Goldman 1998; Goldman 2006; de Vignemont and Singer 2006). These simulations are taken to be perceptual representations that an agent creates when taking the perspective of a target. Similarly, “theory-theory” accounts answer the question of how empathy works by arguing that the processes of empathy are realized in mental representations that are less perceptual and more like a-modal theories (Stich and Nichols 1992; Nichols 2004). Both simulationist and theory-theory accounts espouse a metaphysical theory of mind according to which perspective-taking in empathy employs mental representations. Contrary to this view, direct-perceptual accounts of empathy answer the question of how empathy works without positing such a role for mental representations (Gallagher 2001, 2008; Zahavi 2001, 2008, 2011a, 2011b). On a direct-perception account, an agent has causally unmediated access to the psychological states of a target. An agent reads the

psychological states of a target off the target’s behaviour. The target’s states are thus directly available in the agent’s conscious experience. What is important to note is that all three of these accounts (simulationist, theory-theory, direct-perceptual) answer the

question of how empathy works by characterizing the mental format of the psychological processes of empathy.

But the question of how empathy works remains elusive. This is partly because the various accounts that focus on the mental format of empathy are actually talking about different phenomena. There is a striking variety of uses of the term ‘empathy’ among these accounts. And indeed there is no consensus in empathy research about what empathy is. This inconsistency of usage is impeding progress towards answering the question of how empathy works. By not clearly specifying what empathy is and focusing on the mental format of empathy, accounts that agree on the format of empathy turn out to disagree about what empathy is. With the aim of clarifying what empathy is, in the next section, I will discuss how four of empathy’s component processes—(1) emotional contagion; (2) mimicry; (3) perspective-taking; (4) motivation—inform different uses of the term ‘empathy’.