Why the Capacity to Pretend Matters for Empathy

A phenomenological insight in the debate on empathy is that it is possible to directly perceive other people’s emotions in their expressive bodily behaviour. Contrary to what is suggested by many phenomenologists, namely that this perceptual skill is immediately available if one has vision, this paper argues that the perceptual skill for empathy is acquired. Such a skill requires that we have undergone certain emotional experiences ourselves and that we have had the experience of seeing the world differently, which is a form of pretence. By investigating how we retain knowledge of what is real while pretending, that is, how we anchor the experience of pretence in something that is not pretended, the paper argues that we split our experiential perspective into a double perspective, which differs from the cognitive act of understanding what a perspective is. With this notion in hand, we can return to the debate on empathy. It is argued that in order to have the capacity for direct empathic perception, one must have undergone experiences involving a double perspective.     

Making Up Your Mind: How Language Enables Self‐Knowledge,Self‐Knowability and Personhood

If language is to serve the basic purpose of communicating our attitudes, we must be constructed so as to form beliefs in those propositions that we truthfully assert on the basis of careful assent. Thus, other things being equal, I can rely on believing those things to which I give my careful assent. And so my ability to assent or dissent amounts to an ability to make up my mind about what I believe. This capacity, in tandem with a similar capacity in respect of other attitudes, supports three important lessons. It means that I can know what I believe by seeing what commands my assent, that I can put aside the possibility of error in committing myself to holding such a belief, and that I can therefore perform as a person: I can organize my mind around commitments to which others are invited to hold me.     

In the Pursuit of Absence: Reimagining Early Loss within the Psychotherapy Relationship

In this paper I examine absence—absence as an internal relationship, absence as an enactment, absences characteristic of psychotherapy, absence as a theory, and absence as something people do to each other, including patients, therapists, families, and societies. To illustrate these ideas, I discuss my work with Gemma. When absence enters our relationship in a very present way, the powerful emotions that absence eludes come alive for us. Forced to confront my own absences, I begin doing a better job of holding her in mind, which ultimately helps her to hold me in mind and make better use of me.     

Contents of Experience

In this paper I aim to situate the Naiyayika theory of perception in contemporary philosophy of mind. Following the ancients, I suggest we reconsider the taxonomy and the assumed interactions between kinds of perceptual content. This reclassification will lead us to reconsider some aspects of the Cartesian conception of mind that continue to influence the work of contemporary theorists. I focus attention on different accounts of sensory perception favoured by ancient Indian Naiyayika philosophers and Descartes as a starting point for reconsidering contemporary accounts of perceptual content.I show that Descartes' account of sensory perception provides the impetus for a causal-explanatory account of conceptual content in terms of its non-conceptual counterpart. Though contemporary philosophers claim to have cast off their Cartesian heritage, my discussion reveals that some of its tenets continue to influence the work of contemporary philosophers. I offer reasons for rejecting yet another Cartesian influence and recommend that we follow the Nyaya taxonomy of perceptual states.     

Moral Imagination,Perception, and Judgment

This paper develops an account of moral imagination that identifies the ways in which imaginative capacities contribute to our ability to make reason practical in the world, beyond their roles in moral perception and moral judgment. In section 1, I explain my understanding of what it means to qualify imagination as ‘moral,’ and go on in section 2 to identify four main conceptions of moral imagination as an aspect of practical reason in philosophical ethics. I briefly situate these alternative ideas in relation to standard accounts of moral perception and judgment with reference to some guiding examples. In section 3, I argue that the fourth conception of moral imagination, moral imagination understood as the capacity to generate new possibilities for morally good action, is not well accounted for within the standard categories of practical reason. Section 4 clarifies the scope and importance of this capacity and defends its claim to increased theoretical attention.     

Perceptual resonance: action-induced modulation of perception

A direct relationship between perception and action implies bi-directionality, and predicts not only effects of perception on action but also effects of action on perception. Modern theories of social cognition have intensively examined the relation from perception to action and propose that mirroring the observed actions of others underlies action understanding. Here, we suggest that this view is incomplete, as it neglects the perspective of the actor. We will review empirical evidence showing the effects of self-generated action on perceptual judgments. We propose that producing action might prime perception in a way that observers are selectively sensitive to related or similar actions of conspecifics. Therefore, perceptual resonance, not motor resonance, might be decisive for grounding sympathy and empathy and, thus, successful social interactions.     

Do you see what I know? On reasons,perceptual evidence,and epistemic status

Our epistemology can shape the way we think about perception and experience. Speaking as an epistemologist, I should say that I don't necessarily think that this is a good thing. If we think that we need perceptual evidence to have perceptual knowledge or perceptual justification, we will naturally feel some pressure to think of experience as a source of reasons or evidence. In trying to explain how experience can provide us with evidence, we run the risk of either adopting a conception of evidence according to which our evidence isn't very much like the objects of our beliefs that figure in reasoning (e.g., by identifying our evidence with experiences or sensations) or the risk of accepting a picture of experience according to which our perceptions and perceptual experiences are quite similar to beliefs in terms of their objects and their representational powers. But I think we have good independent reasons to resist identifying our evidence with things that don't figure in our reasoning as premises and I think we have good independent reason to doubt that experience is sufficiently belief‐like to provide us with something premise‐like that can figure in reasoning. We should press pause. We shouldn't let questionable epistemological assumptions tell us how to do philosophy of mind. I don't think that we have good reason to think that we need the evidence of the senses to explain how perceptual justification or knowledge is possible. Part of my scepticism derives from the fact that I think we can have kinds of knowledge where the relevant knowledge is not evidentially grounded. Part of my scepticism derives from the fact that there don't seem to be many direct arguments for thinking that justification and knowledge always requires evidential support. In this paper, I shall consider the three arguments I've found for thinking that justification and knowledge do always require evidential support and explain why I don't find them convincing. I think that we can explain perceptual justification, rationality, and defeat without assuming that our experiences provide us with evidence. In the end, I think we can partially vindicate Davidson's (notorious) suggestion that our beliefs, not experiences, provide us with reasons for forming further beliefs. This idea turns out to be compatible with foundationalism once we understand that foundational status can come from something other than evidential support.     

Direct perception and the predictive mind

Predictive approaches to the mind claim that perception, cognition, and action can be understood in terms of a single framework: a hierarchy of Bayesian models employing the computational strategy of predictive coding. Proponents of this view disagree, however, over the extent to which perception is direct on the predictive approach. I argue that we can resolve these disagreements by identifying three distinct notions of perceptual directness: psychological, metaphysical, and epistemological. I propose that perception is plausibly construed as psychologically indirect on the predictive approach, in the sense of being constructivist or inferential. It would be wrong to conclude from this, however, that perception is therefore indirect in a metaphysical or epistemological sense on the predictive approach. In the metaphysical case, claims about the inferential properties of constructivist perceptual mechanisms are consistent with both direct and indirect solutions to the metaphysical problem of perception (e.g. naïve realism, representationalism, sense datum theory). In the epistemological case, claims about the inferential properties of constructivist perceptual mechanisms are consistent with both direct and indirect approaches to the justification of perceptual belief. In this paper, I demonstrate how proponents of the predictive approach have conflated these distinct notions of perceptual directness and indirectness, and I propose alternative strategies for developing the philosophical consequences of the approach.     

THOMAS REID ON ACQUIRED PERCEPTION

Thomas Reid's distinction between original and acquired perception is not merely metaphysical; it has psychological and phenomenological stories to tell. Psychologically, acquired perception provides increased sensitivity to features in the environment. Phenomenologically, Reid's theory resists the notion that original perception is exhaustive of perceptual experience. James Van Cleve has argued that most cases of acquired perception do not count as perception and so do not pose a threat to Reid's direct realism. I argue that acquired perception is genuine perception and as direct as original perception. Perception is grounded in a productive and developing relationship between the mind and world.     

Perceptual systems and realism

Constructivism undermines realism by arguing that experience is mediated by concepts, and that there is no direct way to examine those aspects of objects that belong to them independently of our conceptualizations; perception is theory-laden. To defend realism one has to show first that perception relates us directly with the world without any intermediary conceptual framework. The result of this direct link is the nonconceptual content of experience. Second, one has to show that part of the nonconceptual content extracted from the environment correctly represents features of mind independent objects. With regard to the first condition, I have argued elsewhere that a part of visual processing, which I call “perception,” is theory-neutral and nonconceptual. In this paper, facing the second demand, I argue that a part of the nonconceptual content of perception presents properties that are the properties of mind independent objects. I claim first that nonconceptual content is the appropriate level of analysis of the issue of realism since it avoids the main problems besetting various types of analysis of the issue at the level of beliefs about the world. Then I claim that a subset of the nonconceptual content presents features of objects in the environment as they really are. This paper was mostly written when I was a fellow at the Center of Philosophy of Science in the University of Pittsburgh during the Spring Semester of 2005–2006. A draft of this paper was presented both at the Center’s colloquium and at one of the informal discussion meetings of the fellows. I have very much benefited from the discussion that followed the presentation of the paper and so I would like to thank Gabriele de Anna, Carla Fehr, Malcolm Forster, Lilly Gurova, Nikolay Milkov, and Wang Wei. I am especially indebted to the director of the Center Professor John Norton whose astute comments made me think hard about the issues discussed in the paper. Several of my arguments in Sect. 4 are the result of John’s concerns with the earlier draft of the paper. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for helping me clarify several points in the paper. Thanks to them (especially the second one) the paper is considerably better than it would have been without them.     

Making sense of the libertarian’s semantic claim about agential phenomenology

Libertarians about free will sometimes argue for their position on the grounds that our phenomenology of action is such that determinism would need to be false for it to be veridical. Many, however, have thought that it would be impossible for us to have an experience that is in contradiction with determinism, since this would require us to have perceptual experience of metaphysical facts. In this paper I show how the libertarian claim is possible. In particular, if experience depicts the world such that there is more than one physically possible future, then determinism would need to be false for that experience to be veridical. I show that we have experiences, or perceptual episodes, of this kind on the basis of recent work in the study of perception. Theorists in this area have argued that we have vision-for-action, and that what we visually perceive are not just objects but also possibilities for action. If we experience that it is possible that we ?, then we also experience that it is possible that we not ?. Furthermore, we probably experience more than one possibility for action at any one moment. I argue that these are physical possibilities, and therefore that we experience the world such that there is more than one physically possible future. So the libertarian claim about the semantics of agential phenomenology is highly plausible, even if this does not entail libertarianism.     

What could have been done (but wasn’t). On the counterfactual status of action in Alva Noë’s theory of perception

Alva Noë’s strategy to solve the puzzle of perceptual presence entirely relies on the principle of presence as access. Unaccessed or unattended parts or details of objects are perceptually present insofar as they are accessible, and they are accessible insofar as one possesses sensorimotor skills that can secure their access. In this paper, I consider several arguments that can be opposed to this claim and that are chiefly related to the modal status of action, i.e. the fact that the action that would secure access to the absent aspects is a possibility, something that can (or maybe could) be done. The main difficulty Noë’s account must face is –as several situations demonstrate– that the action that should be performed for the absent aspects to be actually accessed does not have to be itself available for these aspects to be perceptually present. What matters for the absent aspects to be present is not their de facto (i.e. effective) accessibility, but their de jure accessibility. To overcome those difficulties, I propose to rely on a ternary model of the role of action possibilities in perceptual awareness. This model builds on Husserl’s analysis of the role of perceptual circumstances in perception and connection between sense (Sinn) registering and horizontal intentionality.     

Reasons,rules and the ring of experience: Reading our world into Carlos Castaneda's works

Don Juan said that my body was disappearing and only my head was going to remain, and in such a condition the only way to stay awake and move around was by becoming a crow ... He ordered me to straighten up my head and put it on my chin. He said that in the chin were the crow's legs. He commanded me to feel the legs and observe that they were coming out slowly. He then said ... that the tail would come out of my neck. He ordered me to extend the tail like a fan, and to feel how it swept the floor ...I had no difficulty whatsoever eliciting the corresponding sensations to each one of his commands. I had the perception of growing bird's legs, which were weak and wobbly at first. I felt the tail coming out of the back of my neck and wings out of my cheekbones. ...When don Juan directed me to grow a beak, I had an annoying sensation of lack of air. The something bulged out and created a block in front of me. But it was not until don Juan directed me to see laterally that my eyes actually were capable of having a full view to the side... (Castaneda, 1968, pp. 172–174)An earlier version of this paper was presented at a meeting of the International Society for the Sociology of Knowledge, New York, 1976. I am grateful to Kurt H. Wolff and Mary E. Rohman for their comments and continuing encouragement through several drafts of this paper.     

Reply to Janine de Peyer’s “Traversing the Ineffable: Commentary on Sharon Farber’s ‘Becoming a Telepathic Tuning Fork’”

Janine de Peyer’s thoughtful and stimulating response to my paper evoked a good deal of thinking about playfulness and creativity in doing psychotherapy, what part intuition and empathy play in promoting telepathic communication, the distinction between thoughts and feelings unconsciously transmitted between people within close proximity and those transmitted across geographical distance, where there is no reliance on sensory clues involving sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste. De Peyer’s summary of research on telepathy tells us that most of the research tries to rule out the variable of unconscious sensory exchange by physically separating the “sender” from the “receiver.”

In her discussion of my paper, Janine de Peyer raises some very interesting questions about how telepathy is to be defined. I recall reading years ago about someone who had gone to a medium and heard some startling information about herself and those in her circle. As I wondered how the medium could know so much about someone she had never before met, it occurred to me that there was a lot of knowledge about a person conveyed by the brain-to-brain sensory cues, and this was not telepathic but more a function of intuition and empathy. I think that was true about the relationship I had with my patient. but as with the medium there was a lot of other information I received about her that did not depend on sensory cues, and that information was, I believe, conveyed telepathically. So yes, I say, to de Peyer’s (this issue) question, “Is it not worth differentiating between in-session heightened intuitive receptiveness, and unexplainable transmissions of affect/thoughts/information that traverse time and geographical space?” (p. 736, italics in the original). In considering the time spent in my patient’s physical presence, much of my empathic attunement originated from the intuitive response that was induced in me by her physical presence. I think the increasing empathic attunement laid the foundation for subsequent telepathic communication.     

Valence is a basic building block of emotional life

The goal of psychology is to discover the scientifically viable constructs or categories that will characterize what is variant and invariant in the working of the human mind. In this paper, I outline the idea for one such construct—valenced core affect. I first introduce the idea that valence is a basic, invariant building block of emotional life that derives from the human mind’s capacity to engage in the process of valuation (or judging whether something is helpful or harmful). I then review evidence to show that valence is a variant property of emotional responding, in that people differ from one another in the degree to which they focus on valence. Finally, I discuss the possibility that valence focus is not a property of the person that can be meaningfully separated from the psychological situation.     

Naïve Realism,Privileged Access,and Epistemic Safety

Working from a naïve‐realist perspective, I examine first‐person knowledge of one's perceptual experience. I outline a naive‐realist theory of how subjects acquire knowledge of the nature of their experiences, and I argue that naive realism is compatible with moderate, substantial forms of first‐person privileged access. A more general moral of my paper is that treating “success” states like seeing as genuine mental states does not break up the dynamics that many philosophers expect from the phenomenon of knowledge of the mind.     

Achieving Transparency: An Argument For Enactivism

The transparency of perceptual experience has been invoked in support of many views about perception. I argue that it supports a form of enactivism—the view that capacities for perceptual experience and for intentional agency are essentially interdependent. I clarify the perceptual phenomenon at issue, and argue that enactivists should expect to find a parallel instance of transparency in our agentive experience, and that the two forms of transparency are constitutively interdependent (Section 1). I then argue that i) we do indeed find such parallels: the way in which an action is directed towards its goal through our bodily movements parallels the way in which an experience is directed towards its object through our perceptual sensation (Section 2), and ii) reflecting on sensorimotor skills shows why the two instances of transparency are constitutively interdependent (Section 3). Section 4 gives reasons for generalizing beyond the cases considered so far by applying the enactive view to Kohler's landmark studies of perceptual adaptation. The final section clarifies the form of enactivism to which the previous sections point. The view that emerges is one whereby our perceptual and practical skills are interrelated aspects of a single capacity to have one's mind intentionally directed upon the world. The transparency of experience, on this view, is achieved in virtue of our capacities as agents as much as it is given in virtue of our capacities as perceivers.     

THE PROBLEM OF HEAVEN

An argument against the rationality of desiring to go to heaven might be put in the form of a trilemma: (1) any state of being that both lasts eternally and preserves me as the person I am would be hellish and therefore would not be a state of being that I could have any reason to desire; (2) any state of being that lasts eternally and yet fails to preserve my personhood by turning me into a non‐person would not be a state of being that I (qua person that I am) could have any reason to desire; and (3) any state of being that lasts eternally and yet fails to preserve my personhood by turning me into some other person would not be a state of being that I (qua person that I am) could have any reason to desire. This paper offers defenses of each of the three horns of this trilemma and concludes that there is no rationally compelling reason for any human being to desire to go to heaven.     

Empathy is interpretation (and who ever said it wasn't?)

Whenever the subject is explicitly addressed, all analysts agree that empathic perception is an attitude one takes toward making observations, not a privileged means of perception. Furthermore, analysts seem to agree that observations made with an empathic intention are interpretations like any other observations. Empathy is not a conduit to the patient's inner life. But despite these points of consensus, it often seems to be implied in the psychoanalytic literature, usually unintentionally, that empathy is a privileged means of knowing another person. This undercurrent is sometimes present even in the work of theorists who simultaneously state their opposition to this very point of view. In this paper, after presenting an example from the literature of this kind of contradiction, I, basing my argument in hermeneutics, offer the view that all observation, inside and outside psychoanalysis, is interpretation. Then, turning to the three papers of the symposium individually, I take the perspective that in one way or another they all portray empathic perception as a privileged means of observation. These portrayals are examples of the unconscious politics of theory.     

Experiencing Gendered Seeing

This paper explores the concept of “gendered seeing”: the capacity to visually perceive another person's gender and the role that one's own gender plays in that perception. Assuming that gendered properties are actually perceptible, my goal is to provide some support from the philosophy of perception on how gendered visual experiences are possible. I begin by exploring the ways in which sociologists and psychologists study how we perceive one's sex and the implications of these studies for the sex/gender distinction. I then discuss feminist philosopher Linda Alcoff's concept of “interpretative horizons,” which highlights the role that one's social and political identities play in how we understand the world around us. I also discuss Elizabeth Grosz's notion (borrowed from Merleau‐Ponty) of double sensation. I then apply some work in the philosophy of perception on perceptual learning and the cognitive penetration of perception to gendered seeing. My hypothesis is that we can explain how one's interpretative horizons are acquired through some notion of perceptual learning. I conclude by suggesting some of the epistemic and ethical implications of gendered seeing.