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DOI: 10.1177/1754073911421395 2012 4: 68Emotion Review

Karsten R. StueberAuthor reply: Empathy Versus Narrative: What Exactly is the Debate About? Response to my Critics

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Emotion ReviewVol. 4, No. 1 (January 2012) 68 69

The Author(s) 2012ISSN 1754-0739DOI: 10.1177/1754073911421395er.sagepub.com

Abstract

In response to my critics, I highlight areas of agreement and disagreement. I also argue that my view is better suited than narrativism to account for the difficulties that we encounter in trying to understand other agents. Moreover, the points brought up by Gallagher and Hutto do not succeed in showing that our understanding of an agents reasons for acting proceeds independently from reenactive empathy.

Keywordsempathy, narrativism, rational agency, simulation/reenactment

Let me start by thanking Shaun Gallagher and Daniel Hutto for taking the time to engage with my favorite narrative of how we understand each other as rational agents in the folk psychologi-cal realm. I very much appreciate our ongoing conversation. In response to Shaun Gallaghers (2012) worries about how to define the concept of empathy, I ultimately think that the correct way of defining the term empathy does not exist. I only claim that my manner of understanding it is a reasonable one in light of the philosophical and psychological discussion about the empathy-related phenomena. In the end, the central question is whether empathy, however defined, does the work it is sup-posed to do in illuminating the phenomenon of social cognition. It is in this respect that Shaun Gallagher disagrees with me.

Yet there are important areas of agreement. I agree with Gallagher (2012) that empathy is certainly not all there is to social cognition. This fact has probably been underemphasized in the original context of the debate between theory theorists and simulation theorists. In arguing against theory theorists, simulation theorists were emphasizing the centrality of the sim-ulation phase, rather than issues related to what I call the match-ing phase or what Gallagher calls the starting problem. Yet the central issue is not whether we need propositional knowledge to get a simulation started, but whether that information makes the simulation phase superfluous. Gallagher is inclined to think so, but one of the main reasons for our disagreement has to do with differences of opinion about how important it is to understand

rational agents in their individuality. I will discuss this issue further in my response to Daniel Hutto.

Gallagher (2012) also brings up the important diversity problem and claims that narrativists can provide a better account of how we are able to understand persons from different and diverse backgrounds and cultures. However, one has to be care-ful of how one conceives of the diversity problem. A theory of understanding not only has to explain how understanding of persons from very different backgrounds is possible, but it also has to account for the difficulties that we encounter in trying to gain such understanding. And it is exactly in this context that I see the great advantages of my view according to which such understanding essentially involves reenactive empathy. As I have extensively argued (Stueber, 2006, Chapter 6, 2011), the difficulties have to do with difficulties in retooling our own cognitive system in order to take the perspective of another person. This not only requires feeding our own cognitive system with pretend-beliefs and desires, to use cognitive science language, but also requires quarantining our beliefs, desires, and values, which we know are not shared by the other person, from the simulation procedure. If, however, as narrativists claim, understanding of narratives proceeds completely inde-pendent of simulation or reenactment, then it is not clear to me why we should encounter these difficulties or why we are prone to experience something like imaginative resistance. The understanding of all narratives should be on par, regardless of how far removed they are from my familiar way of thinking about the world.

Let me therefore turn to Daniel Huttos (2012) comments. First, a clarification: While Hutto is absolutely right to point out that I regard the considerations for the essential involvement to be a priori considerations, I regard them to be a priori in a low grade sense of the term, having nothing to do with good old-fashioned conceptual analysis. While they involve reflections from the philosophical armchair, they make full use of the established scientific knowledge about the domain of inves-tigation. In particular, they articulate the implications of the so-called frame-problem in cognitive science and artificial

Empathy Versus Narrative: What Exactly is the Debate About? Response to my Critics

Karsten R. StueberDepartment of Philosophy, College of the Holy Cross, USA

Corresponding author: Karsten Stueber, Department of Philosophy, College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA 01566, USA. Email: kstueber@holycross.edu

421395 EMRXXX10.1177/1754073911421395 StueberEmotion Review

Author Reply

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Stueber Empathy Versus Narrative 69

intelligence for our understanding of rational agency. My argu-ment for the essential involvement of reenactment for rational agents, who act for a reason, can be seen as a generalization of the argument that Jane Heal has given for co-cognition. Since Hutto does accept the necessity of co-cognition, I am a bit puzzled why he does not recognize that the argument can be generalized. He is also right to point out that a great deal of the debate depends on what it means to understand reasons (see Stueber, 2011, in press). Understanding reasons for acting, however, can-not mean that we merely understand how beliefs and desires as inner states somehow causally interact in the agent to produce a certain behavior. Rather, in citing certain beliefs and desires in folk psychological explanations, we do point to considerations that count, from the perspective of the agent, in favor of his action and constitute in a specific situation his reasons for acting. And in order to understand thathaving a mere desire is nor-mally even from the perspective of the agent not a good enough reason for actingwe have to understand how those cited beliefs and desires fit in with an agents other beliefs, desires, plans of actions, values and rules of conduct to which the agent is committed. It is exactly in this context that the frame-problem raises its ugly head, which leads me to conclude that we need reenactive empathy in order to understand an agents potential reasons for acting. Understanding a persons action in narra-tives, in my view, not only requires such reenactment and perspective taking; narratives also encourage it by providing us (if they are good) with the necessary information to take up the perspective of the other person. Hutto seems to indirectly

confirm my position by saying that we learn about a persons reasons if we, for example, learn about an important religious ritual for X, since this allows us to see a link between this sort of activity and activities that play, or could have played, a similar role in our lives [my emphasis] (Hutto, 2012, p. 67). To me, this sounds very much like a position I have always argued for, that is, we understand another persons rea-sons by understanding through imaginative perspective taking how they could be my reasons for acting. Now maybe I have misunderstood the narrativist position in this regard. However, if that is so, it would be good to be told a bit more about how narrativists conceive of the structure of a narrative and how exactly they conceive of the mechanisms involved in narra-tive understanding.

ReferencesGallagher, S. (2012). Three questions for Stueber. Emotion Review, 4,

6465.Hutto, D. D. (2012). Understanding reasons without reenactment: Com-

ment on Stueber. Emotion Review, 4, 6667.Stueber, K. (2006). Rediscovering empathy: Agency, folk psychology, and

the human sciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Stueber, K. (2011). Imagination, empathy, and moral deliberation: The case

of imaginative resistance [Spindel supplement on empathy and ethics]. Southern Journal of Philosophy, 49, 156180.

Stueber, K. (in press). Explaining human agency: Reasons, causes and the first person perspective. In G. DOro (Ed.), Reasons and causes: Causalism and non-causalism in the philosophy of action. Palgrave Macmillan.

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