This week at The Junkyard we’re hosting a symposium on Heidi Maibom’s recent book The Space Between: How Empathy Really Works (OUP 2022). See here for an introduction from Heidi. Commentaries and replies are appearing Tuesday through Friday.
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The Skill of Perspective Taking: Commentary from Amy Kind
It’s a pleasure to have this opportunity to comment on Heidi Maibom’s recently published book, The Space Between: How Empathy Really Works, which I read with great interest, and from which I learned a lot. Calling upon an extensive array of empirical research, personal anecdotes, and examples ranging from Shakespeare to de Beauvoir to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Maibom develops an account of empathy in terms of perspective taking, and much of the book is devoted to developing an account of what perspectives are and how perspective taking works. In short, on Maibom’s view, to take someone else’s perspective requires us to recenter ourselves away from ourself and towards that person.
Read MoreThis week at The Junkyard we’re hosting a symposium on Heidi Maibom’s recent book The Space Between: How Empathy Really Works (OUP 2022). See here for an introduction from Heidi. Commentaries and replies are appearing Tuesday through Friday.
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Three cheers for More Empathy with Some Additional Sympathy for Adam Smith’s Impartial Spectator: Commentary from Karsten R. Stueber
I comment on Heidi Maibom’s engaging new book with great enthusiasm. It is a pleasure to read and provides us with an astonishingly comprehensive exploration of the different perspectives that characterize the dimensions of interpersonal understanding within the social realm. Maibom distinguishes for this purpose among the agent, the observer, and the interactor perspectives (Part I, chs. 1-5). Based on an extensive review of the psychological literature and well-chosen examples from ordinary life and literature, she deftly analyses the nature of these perspectives and characterizes their potential shortcomings in conceiving of another person’s agency. Maibom focuses mainly on the agent perspective and our ability to acquire interpersonal understanding through empathic perspective taking, allowing us to grasp other persons’ emotional attunement to the world and their motivational framework for their actions. Right from the start, Maibom emphasizes that understanding another person has to be conceptually distinguished from becoming or being that person. Indeed, as she points out even our understanding of ourselves does not differ in kind from the understanding of other persons. It is only in the gap between us, associated with a clear awareness of the distinction between self and other, that interpersonal understanding takes place.
I will focus my comments in the following on the last two chapters of the book. I will be particularly concerned about the relationship between empathy and impartiality.
Read MoreThis week at The Junkyard we’re hosting a symposium on Heidi Maibom’s recent book The Space Between: How Empathy Really Works (OUP 2022). See here for an introduction from Heidi. Commentaries and replies are appearing Tuesday through Friday.
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Recentering Perspectives: Commentary from Luke Roelofs
The Space Between offers two much-needed things: a defence of empathy’s value and a reorientation of how we should analyse it. I won’t say too much about the defence: Maibom responds to critics of empathy both in philosophy and in the wider culture, making the case that empathy is a multi-faceted skill that often requires effort and care, but which provides a lot of valuable things when done well, some of which we can’t get elsewhere. In particular, empathy is not opposed to either rationality or impartiality, but is a key contributor to, even component of, both. On this score I’m in full agreement.
What I want to dwell on is the picture of empathy the book develops and deploys, which I think somewhat blurs or cross-cuts some common distinctions that philosophers use to analyse empathy. That’s not to say it’s idiosyncratic; the book’s picture is woven out of both everyday examples and empirical results, and left me suspecting that the picture of empathy given here matches pretty well how a lot of non-philosophers think of it.
Read MoreThis week at The Junkyard we’re hosting a symposium on Heidi Maibom’s recent book The Space Between: How Empathy Really Works (OUP 2022). See here for an introduction from Heidi. Commentaries and replies are appearing Tuesday through Friday.
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Perspective Taking and Social Difference: Commentary from Hannah Read
Talk of perspective taking—its benefits and its challenges—is ubiquitous across philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and more recently computer science. But for all that talk, relatively little has been said about what exactly a perspective is and what taking others’ perspectives involves. (A notable exception to this is Camp, 2013, 2017). At long last, The Space Between provides a comprehensive and engaging answer to these questions. In this exciting new work, Maibom draws our attention to perspective taking as a tool for achieving a fuller and more accurate picture of others, ourselves, and our shared world. As she rightly notes, we relate to the world via particular perspectives, which are themselves limited with respect to what they prompt us to attend to, care about, believe, and do. As she puts it, the “human point of view is always a view from somewhere,” and attempts to adopt a so-called objective or impartial perspective are futile (57). Instead, Maibom’s response to critics of empathy (which is a form of perspective taking, on her view) is that the antidote to the limited view of things that individual perspectives afford is not less empathy (or perspective taking), but rather more of it.
Read MoreThis week at The Junkyard we’re hosting a symposium on Heidi Maibom’s recent book The Space Between: How Empathy Really Works (OUP 2022). Today we begin with an introduction from Heidi. Commentaries and replies will follow Tuesday through Friday.
What do we mean when we say “take my (his/her/their) perspective?” In The Space Between, I set out to explore this question. Whereas it is often assumed that a person’s perspective reflects their comprehensive way of seeing the world as a result of their unique backgrounds and personalities, I argue that a first-person perspective represents a relatively invariant way of seeing the world common to all people and other organisms. It is, if you like, the form of our perspectives which, of course, also have contents (though those contents are themselves affected by their form). Such a perspective involves a distinctive way of seeing the world in relation to ourselves, and as a reflection of our interests as the beings that we are. This means that our pre-reflective way of seeing others is, in fact, in terms of the significance those people—their thoughts, feelings, and actions—have to us. Following the literature in psychology, I call our pre-reflective way of experiencing and thinking about the world, an ‘agent perspective’ and our pre-reflective way of experiencing and thinking about others, when we are not directly interacting with them, an ‘observer perspective.’ The empirical literature shows that there are subtle, but significant, differences between the way we think of ourselves and “our” world (from an agent perspective) and how we think of others and their world (from an observer perspective). The philosophical literature, particularly that grounded in the phenomenological tradition, gives us further reasons to believe that we are situated in the world, not primarily as epistemological consumers—or thinkers, to put it more simply—but as actors. I focus mainly on agent and observer perspectives because a) they are the best documented in the empirical literature and my aim is to provide an empirically adequate account, and b) they are the most relevant when it comes to perspective taking. It should not be ignored, however, that when we interact with others, we do not do so as observers, nor do we do so from a pure agent-perspective because their very presence affects our own perspective. I discuss this phenomenon, but acknowledge here that much more work needs to be done in this area.
Read MoreA post by Jennifer Church
Here are three cases where I could perceive something but I decide it is best left to the imagination:
I am talking to my sister via zoom, and request that we not use video.
I wonder what a friend would think of an idea I have; I would rather imagine her response than ask for it.
I walk by a room I used to teach in, recall how it looked, and choose not to revisit it.
What explains these preferences? Several different considerations are at play, several of which reflect something important about the difference between perceiving and imagining.
For the purposes of this post, I restrict myself to cases where the imagining is accurate. I am not thinking of cases where I imagine my sister to be smiling when she is actually frowning, where I imagine my friend being supportive when actually she would disapprove, or where I imagine a classroom to be bigger and brighter than it really is.
Read MoreA post by Preston Lennon
Take a moment to answer the following question: how many windows are there in your kitchen? Once you’ve reached an answer, reflect now on how you arrived on it. If you are like most, then you might have called up a visual mental image of your kitchen and used this image to arrive at the correct number. Some, however, can answer questions like this without performing this process of visual imagining. There has recently been a flurry of research in cognitive psychology on the phenomenon of aphantasia (Zeman et al 2010, 2015, 2016, 2020). Subjects with aphantasia report having impoverished mental imagery, with some aphantasics completely lacking mental imagery altogether.
Aphantasia has implications for a number of live issues in philosophy of mind. In this post, I consider some the consequences of aphantasia for debates over the nature of conscious thought.
Read MoreA post by Peter Langland-Hassan
This post was submitted in response to Jonathan Weinberg’s recent post at The Junkyard, “Hanging Up on the In-the-Fiction Operator”
Many thanks to Jonathan Weinberg for this thoughtful and challenging critique of my operator-laden account of enjoying fictions (developed in Chapters 10 and 11 of Explaining Imagination). He raises questions and generates worries that I’m sure others will have. In reply I will make one defensive point in favor of operators and one offensive point against doing without.
Read MoreA post by Jonathan M. Weinberg
In the decades since Radford’s classic (1975) “How can we be moved by the fate of Anna Karenina?”, philosophers of the imagination have increasingly shifted away from confronting that titular question and its close relatives in terms of resolving a paradox, and more towards treating our affective responses to works of fiction as a complex set of phenomena to which a theory of the imagination must be adequate. My goal here is to raise such concerns of adequacy about one such theory’s treatment of the psychological particulars: Peter Langland-Hassan’s one-box theory, and its operator-theoretic approach to fiction.
Read MoreA post by Sarah Robins
While I was in graduate school, a group of psychologists at WashU brought Ben Pridmore to campus. Pridmore had recently won the World Memory Championship and held the record in speed cards, an event where one memorizes the order of a shuffled deck of cards (Ben achieved this in 24.97 seconds; a decade later, the record now stands at 13.96 seconds). Pridmore met with some of us to talk about his memory training—and of course show off his speed cards. He described building memory palaces as the act of creating “an Escher painting in my head.”
Mnemonics have fascinated me ever since.
Read MoreA post by Josh Myers
Imaginings can justify empirical beliefs about the actual world. For example, you can get justification for believing that your suitcase will fit into the trunk of your car simply by imagining trying to fit your suitcase inside and finding that you imagine succeeding.
But not all imaginings are created epistemically equal. Consider two variations of this case:
(1) You imagine the suitcase fitting into the trunk clearly and vividly. Your imagining is intense, richly detailed, and precise. Although you do not mistake your imagining for perception, its sensory phenomenology is highly perception-like.
(2) You imagine the suitcase fitting into the trunk blurrily and faintly. Your imagining is weak, sparsely detailed, and imprecise. The sensory phenomenology of your imagining stands in stark contrast to the comparative vivacity of your perceptual phenomenology.
Intuitively, (1) confers more justification than (2). This motivates the view that imaginative vivacity can make a difference to the justificatory force of the imagination.[i] We can formulate this thesis as follows:
Vivacity: Imaginings with a greater degree of vivacity confer a greater degree of justification.
Vivacity has not been explicitly discussed in the literature on the epistemology of imagination. Nevertheless, I suspect that it is sometimes tacitly assumed. For example, Kind (2018) argues that imaginings can justify beliefs by appealing to extraordinarily skilled imaginers such as Nikola Tesla and Temple Grandin. I take it that at least part of the motivation for appealing to extraordinary imaginers is that their imaginings are extremely vivid and that this makes them good candidates for conferring justification.
In this blog post, I will argue that, despite its intuitive appeal, Vivacity is false. The vivacity of an imagining plays no role in determining its justificatory force.
Read MoreAs usual, The Junkyard will be on summer break for July and most of August. But even during the blog’s hiatus, the quest for imagination domination continues. We know that many Junkyarders will be busy speaking at conferences like this one in Austria on Reductive Explanations of Imagination or this one in Grenoble on Simulationism.
As always, we would be happy to hear your suggestions for future posts. If you are interested in writing for us, please feel free to get in touch by email.
We’ll be back in late August with a great set of new posts, including some exciting book symposia (stay tuned for more details!). Have a happy summer, and go Team Imagination!
Read MoreA report by Jill Cumby
The quest for imagination domination continues with the third annual C.O.V.I.D. This was a pre-read, online conference. From various time zones and sometimes with pets, conference participants met on Zoom for commentaries and discussion on six previously circulated papers that showcased progress on perennial and relatively novel topics in the imagination literature. Read on for a report of the proceedings. A more detailed schedule can be found here.
Read MoreA post by Eric Peterson
What is the relation between faith and imagination? Naturally, questions abound as to what faith is and what imagination is. I am particular to an account of faith developed by Daniel Howard-Snyder (2013). On his view, faith is a propositional attitude – he is concerned with cases where we have faith that such and such, rather than faith in such and such. Howard-Snyder takes faith to be a complex attitude that has at least three dimensions: an evaluative dimension, a conative dimension, and a cognitive dimension. Interestingly, he argues that the cognitive dimension need not be that of belief, but it does need to be an attitude that takes a positive cognitive stance towards its object. As examples of attitudes that might substitute for belief, he suggests acceptance or assuming. In this post, I want to explore whether imagining might also fit this bill.
Read MoreA post by Steve Humbert-Droz and Juliette Vazard
According to contemporary philosophical accounts of hope, a hopeful emotion involves an element of imagination as input, part, or output of hope. A typical description of a hopeful episode often goes with mental imagery or immersion into the hoped-for scenario: as Ariel is hoping to win the dance competition on Saturday night, he projects himself in the scenario where he visualizes his name appearing on the screen display, quasi-hears the crowd cheering, feels proud, and starts thinking about the national dance competition.
This raises the question: how does hope exactly interact with the processes required to produce a mental image or even an immersive exploration of the desired reality? This is the question we tackle in our paper. Rather than putting forward a new account of the nature of hope, we explore the interactions between hope and the different kinds of imagination.
Read MoreA post by Michael Omoge
In his insightful review of the volume, Epistemic Uses of Imagination (2021), edited by Christopher Badura and Amy Kind, Tom Schoonen (2022) raised a problem for the view I defended in the volume. I’ll quote him at length:
Another issue with respect to the justification use of imagination is that it is not often explicitly considered whether it is really the imagination that is doing the epistemic heavily lifting, or whether it is something else that does […] We also see this in the contribution of Omoge. He extends Nichols and Stich’s notion of scripts to, what he calls, modalizing scripts. ‘For example, to imagine whether zombies are possible, the relevant modalizing script (call it, a zombie script) is that which details how thoughts involving “consciousness” typically unfold’ (p. 84). However, as Langland-Hassan (2012) points out, merely suggesting that there is a mechanism that fills in the details and labelling it ‘scripts’, ‘does little more than provide space for an explanation to come’ (p. 162, emphasis added). This is especially problematic for Omoge’s project of presenting an imagination-based epistemology of modality, for it is the scripts, which consist of theoretical knowledge, that are doing all the epistemological work, not the imagination (Schoonen 2022: 3, original italics).
For a bit of context, let’s begin with what scripts are. Scripts have a long history in cognitive psychology as components of beliefs, which guide both reasoning and acting. According to Schank & Abelson, “a script is a structure that describes appropriate sequences of events in a particular context” (1977: 41). Thus, there is a restaurant that details how events in a restaurant typically unfold. My view, as Schoonen correctly describes it, turns on extending this notion of ‘script’ to metaphysical modalizing, e.g., the phenomenal zombie. Schoonen’s problem with my view, however, is that by relying on scripts, it becomes unclear whether imagination is doing the required work. Perhaps scripts are doing the “epistemic heavy lifting”, and, so, it is unclear to what extent I’ve described an imagination-based epistemology of modality. In short, Schoonen is saying that “scripting is not imagining”. This contribution is a first attempt[i] at showing why scripting is imagining. My submission is that if Schoonen is correct, then we would have to forfeit what we mean by ‘imagination’.
Read MoreA post by Marta Benenti
Climate Change in Fiction
Alongside the efforts of scientists and journalists to communicate the magnitude of climate change and the urgency of taking action to mitigate it, arts promise to play a relevant role in raising people’s awareness. In particular, over the past 20 years a new narrative genre has flourished called Climate Fiction, or, patterning after the more established “Sci-fi” label, “Cli-fi”.
Typically, Cli-fi stories present scenarios where climatic conditions determine the narrated vicissitudes and influence characters’ practical, socio-political, and psychological lives. Popular examples in the Anglophone landscape are movies like The Day After Tomorrow (2004), Interstellar (2014), or Snowpiercer (2013), and novels like Solar (2010), MaddAddam (2013), or The Overstory (2018).
It is reasonable to hypothesize that such works may modify people’s view of current and forthcoming environmental disasters by increasing their sensitivity towards environmental threats and incite them to take action accordingly. Following this intuition, psychologists have tested changes in Cli-fi recipient’s beliefs. According to Anthony Leiserowitz’ 2004 study, for example, watching The Day After Tomorrow significantly increased viewers’ preoccupation with possible environmental catastrophes and influenced their opinions on the most adequate model to forecast climate changes. On the literary side, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson (2020) showed that short Cli-fi stories affected participants’ beliefs in the anthropogenic nature of global warming and increased their risk perception.
Read MoreA post by Will Kidder
You trust someone to repay a loan, to give you honest and considerate advice, to remain faithful in a relationship, or simply to pick you up at the airport. How do you know whether they will honor your trust or make a fool of you? Do you need to “get inside their head” and imagine their perspective? Do you need to believe they have imagined yours?
In what follows, I would like to briefly outline a role for empathy, which I take to require imaginative simulation of other perspectives, in the assessment of trustworthiness. I will also explore how this relationship between empathy and trust might explain deep-seated distrust of AI-based decisions, particularly when those decisions involve AI’s assessment of a human being’s trustworthiness, as in the cases of parole decisions and credit scores.
I argue that empathy impacts the assessment of trustworthiness in two ways. First, empathy allows us to discover a potential trustee’s motives and assess whether those motives in fact justify trust. Empathy helps gather evidence relevant to trustworthiness. Second, a potential trustee can exhibit trustworthiness by making an effort to empathetically imagine the trustor’s perspective. Empathy can serve as evidence of trustworthiness.
Read MoreA post by Antony Aumann
Lovers of art often extol its cognitive benefits. Among them is its ability to aid our imaginations. Novels, movies, pictures, and poems can enhance our native abilities in this domain. They can help us imagine things we otherwise couldn’t imagine (Feagin 1996, 83–112; Gerrig 1993; Nussbaum 1990; Oatley 2016; Peacocke 2020; Rowe 2009; Smith 2011, 109–10). But how far does this go?
There’s a famous limit on imagination. It’s said that we can imagine what an experience is like only if we’ve gone through it ourselves (Peacocke 2020, 1). My question in this essay is whether art can help us overcome this limit. Can reading novels etc. help us imagine what it’d be like to have experiences we haven’t had before? I’ll argue that they can—provided we add some qualifications.
Read MoreA post by Max Haiven.
As a child, I was slow to learn, not because of any specific diagnosable developmental delay but because of some deep, abiding and often angry skepticism towards anything that seems to me to be an arbitrary social convention that was presented as an unquestionable truth. For example, I remember being called before the class for some task in school at the age of 7 or 8, only to inadvertently reveal I could not tell my right from my left. Red-faced, I threw a tantrum before my shocked and bemused classmates, explaining that the distinction was purely conventional, calibrated solely by, so far as I could tell, the doctrines of our forebears. Such orientation was a form of guided narcissism, rather than a material point of reference: My left, I ranted from in front of the room, was my classmates’ right, after all. Why do we even use these words? Wasn’t it a matter of arbitrary perception being passed off as an iron law of nature. How many other things had we been taught as truth that were, in fact, habits of collective thought? What made North up and South down? Why did certain letters have to make the sounds we associated with them when they were all funny symbols that exist nowhere in nature?
Read More