Intersubjectivity and Empathy Workshop

Intersubjectivity and Empathy Workshop, Dublin 5-6 May 2010

ABSTRACTS

'From intentionality to the ethical', Joseph Cohen (University College Dublin)

According to which Law has phenomenology radicalized the intentional modality of its horizon into an ethical commandment? This question shall frame our reflection. In this sense, our primary task will be to demonstrate in and within Husserlian phenomenology how and why the ethical exigency emerges. From this demonstration, we shall seek to trace the development of an ethical call which, never being dissociable from its intentional horizon whilst never being reducible to it, furnishes the place of phenomenology itself. What shall be the modality by which the phenomenological and the ethical co-belong? And furthermore, in which manner is this co-belonging deploying itself?  In order to mark this movement and reveal its inherent “logic”, we shall focus primarily on the writings of Husserl, Heidegger and Levinas.

'The Space Between Us: Empathy, Expression, and Cognitive Extension', Joel W. Krueger (Center for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen)

According to the extended mind thesis (EM), some of the physical mechanisms of cognition may, in certain contexts and under certain conditions, extend beyond the head. Might social cognition be a kind of extended cognition? Might some of the processes central to social interaction extend beyond the head? Despite intense recent interest in both EM and social cognition, this question has yet to receive sustained consideration. In this paper, I explore some consequences of EM for understanding the interactive basis of empathy and social cognition. The thesis of the paper is that social cognition is fundamentally a form of skillful space management—the negotiation and management of what I term “we-space”—and that some of the non-neural actions involved in the negotiation and management of we-space (e.g. gesture , facial expression, etc.) do genuine cognitive work. Social interaction, understood as the negotiation and management of we-space, is thus a kind of extended cognition. I support this thesis by drawing upon empirical research on the cognitive-affective benefits of gesture and facial expression, as well as research on Moebius Syndrome. Additionally, I show why this thesis challenges core cognitivist presuppositions informing the Theory of Mind paradigm in current social cognition research. 

'How To Be Conscious of Someone’s Feelings', Rowland Stout (University College Dublin)

We are certainly conscious of people’s feelings.  The issue is what implications this has for the nature of feelings and the nature of consciousness.  Generally we are aware of someone’s feelings by being aware of these feelings being expressed.  This means that we must be aware of a process of these feelings being expressed rather than the products of such a process.  Being fully sensitive to the existence of someone’s feelings in the process of the expression of these feelings requires the capacity to interact with these feelings – to engage emotionally with the subject of these feelings.  But this raises the question of how we can be conscious of someone’s feelings towards someone else – where we ourselves are not emotionally involved.  The answer is that we are conscious of these feelings using the same interactive perceptual mechanism that we employ when we do engage with them emotionally, but we do not employ the full range of possibilities provided by that mechanism.  For this answer to work it is essential that the 3rd-personal capacity to recognize someone’s emotional state cannot be separated out as a capacity in its own right but must always be a limiting case of the 2nd-personal capacity to be aware of someone’s feelings by engaging with them emotionally. 

'Empathy, Embodiment and Interpersonal Understanding', Dan Zahavi (Center for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen) 

When it comes to understanding the nature of social cognition, we have - according to the standard view - a choice between the simulation theory, the theory-theory or some hybrid between the two. The aim of my talk is to argue that there are, in fact, other options available, and that one such option has been articulated by a various thinkers belonging to the phenomenological tradition. More specifically, in my talk I will contrast Lipps’ account of empathy – an account that has recently undergone something of a revival in the hands of contemporary simulationists – with various accounts of empathy found in the phenomenological tradition. I will discuss the way Lipps was criticized by Scheler, Stein and Husserl, and outline some of the core features of their, at times divergent, alternatives. I will then proceed by considering how their basic take on empathy and social cognition was taken up and modified by Schutz – a thinker whose contribution to an analysis of interpersonal understanding has been unjustly neglected in recent year.

'The Solitude of the Ego (solus ipse) and the Power of Phantasia', Raymond Kassis (Université Paris-Ouest-La Défense, Paris 10 Nanterre)

For centuries, at least since the Egology of Descartes, therefore long before the emergence of Reduction in the development of Husserl’s Phenomenology, the question of solus ipse has appeared constantly under one or other of its multiple facets. The most appropriate way to solve the problem of this solitude is to take as a starting point one of the original intrinsic phenomena of the Ego itself, namely empathy (Einfühlung), rather than an external reference. The aim of this paper is to prove that there is no satisfactory solution as long as the way of dealing with empathy is the traditional objective phenomenological one i.e. taking the Other Ego as an object of apperception. I will try to show that a radical solution can only be found by returning to the internal sphere of the solipsist Ego itself. An initial form of empathy deployed by the power of phantasia, whose original function is accomplished through the modifying activity, reveals on the one hand the a priori intersubjective status of the transcendental Ego, and on the other hand the meaning of the solipsism of the individual Ego. This status should precede every imaginable ontology.

'Self-variation and Self-modification – or the different Ways of Being Other', Carlos Lobo (Université de Caen)

Empathy, taken in its phenomenologically purified meaning, is a specific mode of intentionality, describable as a modification of more primitive and lower forms of lived experiences (Erlebnisse). But at the same time, it is criticized by Husserl in many instances. Mostly, it is considered as inefficient to give a satisfactory account of the logical and ontological possibility of objective knowledge. In order to do so two preliminary investigations are required. [1] An eidetic egology obtained through a self-variation of the pure ego which aims at disclosing the pure field of pure possible egos (each of them with its own world constituted through its own flow of lived experiences) and not at explaining if and how other real egos are posited as such. [2] A transcendantal genesis of groups of co-posited egos, possible through a radicalised form of transcendantal reduction. In a step by step description of this genesis, Husserl aims at motivating the (sup)position of a common world. The crucial step, as it is well known, consists in a specific self-modification by which a first alter-ego is posited as such, i.e. as an other and equivalent perspective on a world — whatever it may be — which can be absorbed neither into my own nor into his. How is [1] implied in [2]? While addressing this question, unexpectedly we enter the domain of a complex modal ontology consisting in a two levels system of a priori incompossibility (Cartesian Meditations, § 60). What does this system consist in ? Can we get by it a more precise understanding of the self-modification involved in the manifold apprehension of the other, starting from the transformation of the proper space into a common space?

'Constitutivism, Detectivism, and the Phenomenology of Self- and Other-Knowledge', Cynthia Macdonald (Queen’s University Belfast)

Contemporary discussions of the presumed asymmetry between self-knowledge and knowledge of others have focused on the trichotomy ‘by inference, by observation, or by nothing’ in attempting to explain it.  Since it is generally agreed that self-knowledge is not arrived at by inference, recent accounts of the epistemic specialness awarded to certain self-knowledge have turned to one or the other of the remaining two sources.  Constitutivist accounts maintain that the relation between a subject’s first-order mental states and her knowledge of them is non-contingent and conceptual, whereas Detectivist accounts argue that that relation is contingent and causal and that self-ascriptions merely describe one’s first-order states.   I sketch an account of self-knowledge that takes self-ascriptions to be not merely descriptive, based on considerations concerning the phenomenology of deliberative thought, which can serve as a basis for explaining the epistemic asymmetry between self-knowledge and knowledge of others.

'Engagement, Feelings and the Awareness of Minds in Infancy', Vasudevi Reddy (University of Portsmouth)

Most approaches in psychology posit the need for some sort of inferential or imaginative leap for infants (or anyone) to reach other minds. Infants are placed, inevitably, beyond the pale in terms of understanding things 'mental'. The assumption not only of a fundamental gap between minds, but between mind and behaviour, leads to problems in explaining infant social interactions and to unconvincing explanations of how social understanding develops. In this talk I explore some interactional phenomena from early infancy to argue that it is precisely the emotional recognition of the mentality of others within engagement that allows an appropriate development of social cognition. I focus specifically on early attentional and intentional engagements and offer an alternative to the standard explanation of the development of attention awareness. Joint attention, I will argue, is a late product of a much earlier awareness of attention as attention developed within mutual attentional engagements. It signifies, not the discovery of attention, but merely one point in the continually expanding awareness of the scope and meaning of attending. 

'The ‘Theory-Theory’ of Mind and the Aims of Sellars’ Original Myth of Jones', Jim O’Shea (University College Dublin) 

Recent proponents of the ‘theory-theory’ of mind sometimes trace its roots back half a century to Wilfrid Sellars’ famous ‘myth of Jones’ in his ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’ (1956).   In this work Sellars developed an account of the intersubjective basis of our knowledge of the inner mental states of both self and others.  In particular Sellars suggested that our knowledge of inner thoughts and sensations is in some sense theoretical knowledge, although it is no easy task to determine the precise sense in which this claim should be taken.  In this paper I examine the philosophical background and aims of Sellars’ original account, with reflections on both its Kantian origins and its relationship to more recent debates concerning the ‘theory of mind’.