Shannon Spaulding is Professor and Head of the Philosophy Department at Oklahoma State University. She publishes on empathy, mindreading, mirror neurons, imagination, embodied cognition, and extended cognition. She is the author of How We Understand Others: Philosophy and Social Cognition and co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition, 2nd edition.
A post by Shannon Spaulding
Can you have trust without understanding? This is not an esoteric question. It is a question directly relevant for the many politically and affectively polarized debates in our society. Individuals on either side of these polarized debates find it difficult to empathically imagine the perspective of someone on the other side, and to see what is subjectively reasonable about the other’s perspective. Moreover, individuals on either side of these polarized debates tend to distrust those on the other side. Such polarization raises the question whether there is a rational way out of this dynamic.
Some have suggested that the way out is to use empathic imagination. For example, Ian Ravenscroft (2017) maintains that empathy is a useful, reliable tool for understanding what it is like to be another person. Ravenscroft argues that we can and frequently do come to learn what it is like to be another person in this way. Of course, there are limits to our ability to understand others’ lived experiences. For starters, we can never fully know what it is like to be another person without becoming that person, which of course is impossible (Goldie 2011). So, the best we can do is try to understand what it is like for someone else to have certain thoughts and experiences. Furthermore, we sometimes get it wrong, Ravenscroft acknowledges (Ravenscroft 2017, p. 152). Despite these limitations, many exercises of empathy enable this kind of knowledge of other people.
Ravenscroft is not alone in arguing that empathic imagination is a useful tool for helping us understand others. Karsten Stueber (2017), for instance, argues that empathy not only allows us to know what someone else thinks, feels, and will do, it also reveals a target’s subjective reasons for actions. That is, empathic imagination allows us to understand what counts as reasons for the target from her own perspective. The capacity to understand a target’s subjective perspective is what makes empathic imagination uniquely valuable. Along these same lines, various philosophers argue that empathic imagination can help us (i) find meaningful common ground with people who ostensibly have very different experiences, beliefs, and values (Read 2021), (ii) resolve conflict due to misunderstanding and allow us to have deeper and more meaningful interactions (Hannon 2020), (iii) learn about fundamentally new types of experiences (Kind 2021; 2020), and (iv) make us less biased by allowing us to consider and balance diverse perspectives and lived experiences (Maibom 2022). If these views are correct, empathic imagination can be a powerful tool for navigating interpersonal differences. And, perhaps, upon understanding someone with different lived experiences, values, and beliefs, we may end up suspending the distrust that animated the hostile relations.
Empathy is, of course, not the only route to understanding. And it may not be a particularly good route, anyway. Peter Goldie (2011) argues that imagining being another person is impossible. Because of the inherent subjectivity of our mental lives, one person can never fully grasp what it is like to experience someone else’s subjective thoughts and feelings. Instead, we should focus on imagining ourselves in the other person’s situation and imagine what we would think, feel, and do in that situation. This distinction is sometimes called the imagine-other/imagine-self distinction. Goldie argues that imagine-self empathy is the only empathy that is possible.
Katherine Tullmann (2020) takes up Goldie’s argument against imagine-other empathy and argues that imagine-self empathy is similarly problematic. We cannot even imagine ourselves experiencing what the target experiences because our own imaginings are shaped by our own beliefs, goals, and values. Thus, whatever we end up attributing to the target is likely to be a warped version of what we think we would or should think or feel, not what a target does in fact think and feel.
Olivia Bailey (2021; 2018) argues that empathy amongst people with vastly different experiences is nearly impossible. Empathizing with another’s experiences involves imagining being in their circumstances, having their mental states, and experiencing their emotions. Emotions, she argues, have an evaluative aspect. When we experience anger, disgust, or fear, we implicitly approve of our appraisal of the target as infuriating, disgusting, or scary. Of course, upon reflection we may reject our emotional responses as inappropriate. However, Bailey argues, we are inclined to approve of our emotional appraisals as fitting responses in the moment. When we empathize with someone whose lived experiences are vastly different from our own, it is difficult or perhaps even impossible to imaginatively recreate their affective experiences. Specifically, we cannot capture the appraisal embedded in the emotions nor the approval of that emotional experience. As such, we cannot accurately empathize with someone whose experiences, perspectives, and emotions radically differ from our own.
Both Tullman and Bailey argue that instead of empathizing or trying to understand a target’s subjective perspective in these circumstances, we should simply trust. As Tullman puts it, ‘instead of trying to imagine what the social Other thinks or feels, subjects should ask for and listen to others’ views and, importantly, trust their testimony’ (Tullmann 2020, p. 205). We should trust what others say about their experiences. Trust their evaluations. Trust their behavior. Trusting in these circumstances requires a heavy dose of intellectual humility, that is, of acknowledging that your own perspective may be limited or flawed.
This is a bold argument. It holds that we should not try to understand why the other person is thinking, feeling, and behaving a certain way. We should set aside any urge to take their perspective and understand where they are coming from, and instead simply trust the other person. This advice conflicts with the well-documented psychological need for narratives that explain phenomena (Lombrozo, 2012; Lombrozo & Carey, 2006). This psychological need is especially strong in social contexts, where we are drawn to explain others’ behavior in terms of their mental states and reasons (Malle, 2004; Spaulding, 2018). Thus, the advice to not try to understand their behavior from their perspective, to not try to understand at all, is in tension with strong psychological tendencies. Of course, this is not a decisive reason against cultivating trust rather than understanding in these contexts. It may be that this psychological tendency is counterproductive.
A second difficulty is that simply deciding to trust someone is difficult, at best. Perhaps one can decide to rely on someone, but trust is a bigger ask. A brief-ish aside on what trust is: To trust someone is to believe in their competency and motivations. Typically trust is a three-place relation: X trusts Y with respect to Z. For pragmatic trust, Z concerns behavior. That is, X believes that Y can, will, or would do Z. Contrast pragmatic trust with epistemic trust where X believes Y’s testimony with respect to Z. X believes that what Y says, or would say, about Z is true.
Believing that someone can and will complete a task or tell the truth is necessary for trust, but it is not sufficient. I can believe that a new plumber from a reputable company can and will tell me the truth about and fix my leaky faucet, but I do not trust him. If he suggests a very expensive fix to what seems to me to be a minor problem, I will not take his word for it. I will instead seek another opinion. In this case, I do not trust my plumber, but I do rely on him. That is, I assume he will show up and do the job competently. But still, this reliance falls short of trust. To see why, suppose he fails to fix the leaky faucet or he diagnoses the problem incorrectly. In that case, I may feel frustrated or disappointed, but I do not feel betrayed. As Annette Baier puts it, “trusting can be betrayed, or at least let down, and not just disappointed” (Baier, 1986, p. p. 235). The nature of this extra factor that distinguishes trust from mere reliance is a matter of debate (McLeod, 2021), but a promising candidate is the nature of the motivation we attribute to the other person (Baier, 1986; McLeod, 2002).
Coming to believe that a plumber is reliable requires evidence of his competence, which may come through experience, reviews, or testimony from a friend. Coming to trust a plumber involves something more. It involves something like the belief that he is motivated to help customers like me. I believe that he will tell the truth and do a good job - even if other extrinsic motivations fail - because he is motivated by loyalty or respect for his customers. Thus, what distinguishes the merely reliable plumber from the plumber I trust is the kind of motivation I attribute to him.
Trusting involves believing that someone is competent and appropriately motivated. In the kind of case we are considering, there are wide gaps between the target’s and subject’s experiences, beliefs, values, and goals. Thus, there are no obvious personal similarities to ground beliefs about the target’s competence and motivations. Moreover, on Bailey and Tullman’s view, we cannot rely on understanding their mental states and reasons to ground our trust either.
On the cultivate-trust view, the basis for trust is a host of instrumental reasons concerning our own fallibility and ignorance, valuing tolerance, and diversity of experience. These instrumental reasons may be good reasons for us to be intellectually humble or agnostic, but they cannot ground trust (Hieronymi, 2008). Imagine trusting someone to care for your children because, despite not grasping their motivations and competence, who are you to judge? Believing that someone is competent and appropriately motivated because it is useful or respectful to believe this borders on irrational. Furthermore, even if we could rationally establish trust in this way, such trust would be extremely fragile. Trust that is not grounded in any understanding may falter under even the slightest pressure. Thus, for many reasons this is not the most promising path for traversing polarized gaps. In other works in progress, I attempt to make the case that empathy is better poised to close these polarized gaps than trust. But I’ll leave the positive case for another post.[1]
Notes
[1] This post draws on my works in progress and some of my previously published work. See Spaulding (2024a; forthcoming; 2024b)
References
Bailey, Olivia. 2018. “Empathy and Testimonial Trust.” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements 84:139–60.
———. 2021. “Empathy with Vicious Perspectives? A Puzzle about the Moral Limits of Empathetic Imagination.” Synthese 199 (3–4): 9621–47.
Goldie, Peter. 2011. “Anti-Empathy.” In Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, edited by Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie, 302–17. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hannon, Michael. 2020. “Empathetic Understanding and Deliberative Democracy.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 101 (3): 591–611. https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.12624.
Kind, Amy. 2020. “What Imagination Teaches.” In Becoming Someone New: Essays on Transformative Experience, Choice, and Change, edited by Enoch Lambert and John Schwenkler, 133–46.
———. 2021. “Bridging the Divide: Imagining Across Experiential Perspectives.” In Epistemic Uses of Imagination, edited by Christopher Badura and Amy Kind, 237–59. Routledge.
Maibom, Heidi L. 2022. The Space Between: How Empathy Really Works. 1st ed. Oxford University Press. New York. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197637081.001.0001.
Ravenscroft, Ian. 2017. “Empathy and Knowing What It’s like.” In The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy, 148–57. Routledge.
Read, Hannah. 2021. “Empathy and Common Ground.” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 24 (2): 459–73.
Spaulding, Shannon. 2024a. “Imagining Others.” Analysis, July, anae019. https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/anae019.
———. 2024b. “Motivating Empathy.” Mind & Language 39 (2): 220–36. https://doi.org/10.1111/mila.12469.
———. forthcoming. “Empathy Skills and Habits.” In Empathy’s Role in Understanding Persons, Literature, and Art, edited by Christiana Werner. Routledge.
Stueber, Karsten R. 2017. “Empathy and Understanding Reasons.” In The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy, 137–47. Routledge.
Tullmann, Katherine. 2020. “Empathy, Power, and Social Difference.” The Journal of Value Inquiry 54 (2): 203–25. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-019-09691-8.