A post by Adriana Clavel-Vázquez & Jimena Clavel Vázquez

Imagination is often invoked as central to our engagement with others. In particular, imaginatively inhabiting someone else’s point of view, or perspective-taking, is seen as crucial in understanding and motivating moral concern for agents in oppressive circumstances. Alluding to Ryle’s metaphor of the mind as a ghostly Robinson Crusoe, Amy Coplan sees perspective-taking as a promise of rescue from an isolated existence (Coplan 2011, 18), and, therefore, as a remedy for apathy. But what if the perspectives of others remain beyond the reach of imagination? Here we want to explore an alternative picture. Touting perspective-taking as the bridge to others obscures a fundamental flaw in this way of approaching the issue. We aren’t in fact living the isolated existence of a ghostly Robinson Crusoe. Instead, we’re surrounded by others who are in a position to tell us about their experiences in the world. But does this mean that imagination plays no role? We believe that it can still be a helpful tool in listening. This is the alternative we want to explore.

In the traditional picture, perspective-taking promises to deliver two different, if related, goals: one epistemic (e.g., Bailey 2022; Coplan 2011) and one ethico-political (e.g., Hannon 2020; Schramme 2017). On the one hand, perspective-taking delivers a first-personal understanding of others. From an exercise of perspective-taking we come to see from a first-personal point of view why others’ interests, reasons, evaluations, etc., hold. On the other hand, perspective-taking can foster responsiveness to others. First-personal access to their perspective can illuminate why and how others count morally, bring home the urgency of their plights, and motivate and inform actions aimed at responding to their needs.

We have, however, reasons to reject this picture: perspective-taking delivers on neither its epistemic nor its ethico-political promises. Rather than offering understanding of someone else’s point of view, perspective-taking risks simply projecting one’s perspective onto different circumstances. We have argued elsewhere (2023) that perspective-taking is so constrained by one’s own embodiment that the imaginative project is unlikely to result in the relevant mental states and it is unlikely to be accurate. And others before us have raised the same concern. Janine Jones (2004), for example, argues that one’s position in unequal social structures results in an asymmetry such that those in privileged positions see their perspective-taking abilities impaired. Likewise, Iris Marion Young (1997) argues that perspectives are irreversible due to the asymmetries that constitute hierarchical social organizations, and that exercises of perspective-taking simply involve the projection of one’s perspective onto another.

These epistemic failures hinder perspective-taking’s ethico-political goal, especially when it comes to others in oppressive circumstances. Because it is unlikely to consist in anything more than a projection of one’s own perspective onto someone else’s circumstances, the imaginative exercise might result in mental states that undermine the legitimacy of others’ attitudes. If this is the case, failures in perspective-taking threaten the epistemic authority of others, which would leave us unresponsive to their needs (e.g., Tullmann 2020). But notice that this threat to others’ epistemic authority remains even if perspective-taking were successful. Depending on a first-personal understanding of why others’ attitudes hold already undermines the epistemic authority and puts into question the epistemic competence of those who face oppression. These are cases, Olivia Bailey argues, in which trust in the absence of first-personal understanding is warranted because of its significant symbolic function (Bailey 2018, 155).

Furthermore, the perspective-taking model fails to acknowledge the central ethico-political goal: to be responsive to others, they need to be recognized as subjects in their own right. Moreover, in cases of oppression, others need to be restituted as subjects. The oppression suffered by those disadvantaged in hierarchical organizations involves processes of dehumanization and objectification. If that’s the case, intersubjective recognition is the moral duty from which responsiveness should follow. The perspective-taking model, in contrast, risks taking others as objects to be apprehended. The ethico-political goal, however, is best served by recognizing others as subjects from the get-go.

Enter the second-person model. Critics of the perspective-taking model highlight that we don’t need to engage our imagination to understand others because they are there to be addressed. Kelly Oliver (2001) notes that the presumed gap between one and others is a made-up problem that is only impossible to resolve because of the mistaken Cartesian assumption at its basis: that we are forever cut off from the world and others. Instead, we can rely on others to speak to the intelligibility of their attitudes. Rather than a first-personal approach, we can rely on a second-personal understanding. This second-personal approach doesn’t need to depend on testimony. As Bailey (2018) argues, testimony is often tied to perspective-taking insofar as it is tied to evidence and accuracy. Because perspective-taking involves a first-personal assessment of the other’s testimony, it can contribute to the attribution of epistemic competence. Contrary to this, Oliver argues that our epistemic and ethico-political goals are better served by building a second-person model of understanding on the basis of the notion of bearing witness.

When bearing witness, one offers an account of that which cannot be experienced by others. It involves testifying to that which is out of reach for them. Because it remains beyond what others can corroborate, bearing witness eliminates worries about accuracy from the picture of intersubjective understanding. This is central to oppressive contexts. Here, hierarchical organizations lead to asymmetries such that perspectives are not reversible (Young 1997). Others are there, however, to bear witness and speak to that which one cannot access from a first-person perspective.

Moreover, understanding is not precluded by the inaccessibility of perspectives because communication remains open. Young builds the second-person model of understanding on the paradigm of gift-giving (1997, 50-55). Communication is asymmetrical, just like the practice of gift-giving. But this asymmetry isn’t problematic. When it comes to gifts, we don’t give and receive the same thing nor at the same time. A gift creates openings for gift-giving: precisely because of the asymmetry, each exchange opens participants to future exchanges. Likewise for communicative exchanges. They are asymmetric because they presuppose the irreversibility of perspectives. They involve an offer and an acceptance. Like gift-giving, although there might be “excesses and resistances”, communicative exchanges always create openings for further exchange. Through open communication we can thus come to understand that to which others bear witness.

This picture is supported by recent approaches to social cognition which privilege mutual address and communicative connectedness as the means for interpersonal understanding and, therefore, moral concern (e.g., Eilan 2014). Nevertheless, the second-person model fails to account for the widespread intuition that imagination contributes to our engagement with others somehow. And that could be an unsavory conclusion (especially for imagination-enthusiasts, like us!).

Instead, we think that the second-person model actually leaves openings for imagination to play a role. The caveat, of course, is that we need to do away with perspective-taking. There are at least two aspects of these communicative exchanges for which imagination can be an asset. The first is that, due to its asymmetric nature, communication is a creative enterprise. Young argues that, since it doesn’t assume a shared world, communicative exchanges don’t evolve from a shared repertoire of available moves. Imagination might thus aid this creative enterprise by coming up with responses to communicative moves that can’t be anticipated.

The second is that, as noted by Dan Zahavi (2023), because communication assumes that the two perspectives remain distinct, it is similar to cases of joint attention in which two subjects attend to a shared object. Since the notion of bearing witness assumes a lack of access to the relevant aspects of the world by the interlocutor, it cannot simply be a case of joint attention to an external object. But imagination might take up a role as a surrogate: our imagination is guided in the communicative exchange.

Imagination could thus prove crucial in active listening and asymmetric communicative exchanges. If through communicative acts others bear witness to an aspect of the world that remains inaccessible to us, perhaps through imagination we become secondary witnesses. Note that as an imaginative project in response to others’ bearing witness, matching isn’t at stake and accuracy conditions are beside the point. But in active listening, much like we do when engaging with narratives in general, imagination might be helpful in making sense of what our interlocutor offers. Crucially, it is a sense-making that maintains the differentiation at stake: that who bears witness guides us in what we need to put together to come to the realization that what is accessible to us isn’t what the other encounters.

This picture suggests a different way of thinking about the skill of imagination in understanding others. It’s not about becoming better at perspective-taking, but about resisting the urge to engage in perspective-taking and using our imaginative abilities in different ways. While what we offer here is a rough sketch, we hope it’s good enough as an invitation to take seriously the second-personal turn in imagination and think about what it could look like.

References

Bailey, O. (2018). Empathy and testimonial trust. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements, 84, 139-160.

Bailey, O. (2022). Empathy and the value of humane understanding. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 104(1), 50-65.

Clavel Vázquez, M. J., & Clavel-Vázquez, A. (2023). Robustly embodied imagination and the limits of perspective-taking. Philosophical Studies, 180(4), 1395-1420.

Coplan, A. (2011). Understanding Empathy: Its Features and Effects. In A. Coplan & P. Goldie (Eds.), Empathy. Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives (pp. 3–18). Oxford University Press.

Eilan, N. (2014). The you turn. Philosophical Explorations, 17(3), 265-278.

Hannon, M. (2020). Empathetic understanding and deliberative democracy. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 101(3), 591-611.

Jones, J. (2004). The impairment of empathy in goodwill whites for African Americans. In G. Yancy (Ed.), What white looks like (pp. 65–86). Routledge.

Oliver, K. (2001). Witnessing: beyond recognition. University of Minnesota Press.

Schramme, T. (2017). Empathy and altruism. In H. Maibom (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of philosophy of empathy (pp. 203-214). Routledge.

Tullmann, K. (2020). Empathy, power, and social difference. The Journal of Value Inquiry, 54(2), 203-225.

Young, I. M. (1997). Intersecting voices: Dilemmas of gender, political philosophy, and policy. Princeton University Press.

Zahavi, D. (2023). Observation, interaction, communication: The role of the second person. In Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume (Vol. 97, No. 1, pp. 82-103).