Smith Joel
School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester, Manchester, M13 9PL UK.
Synthese. 2017;194(3):709-722. doi: 10.1007/s11229-015-0771-8. Epub 2015 May 30.
The concept of empathy has received much attention from philosophers and also from both cognitive and social psychologists. It has, however, been given widely conflicting definitions, with some taking it primarily as an epistemological notion and others as a social one. Recently, empathy has been closely associated with the simulationist approach to social cognition and, as such, it might be thought that the concept's utility stands or falls with that of simulation itself. I suggest that this is a mistake. Approaching the question of what empathy is via the question of what it is for, I claim that empathy plays a distinctive epistemological role: it alone allows us to know how others feel. This is independent of the plausibility of simulationism more generally. With this in view I propose an inclusive definition of empathy, one likely consequence of which is that empathy is not a natural kind. It follows that, a number of empathy researchers, certain experimental paradigms tell us not about the nature of empathy but about certain ways in which empathy can be achieved. I end by briefly speculating that empathy, so conceived, may also play a distinctive social role, enabling what I term 'transparent fellow-feeling'.
共情的概念受到了哲学家以及认知心理学家和社会心理学家的广泛关注。然而，它的定义却大相径庭，一些人主要将其视为一种认识论概念，而另一些人则视其为一种社会概念。最近，共情与社会认知的模拟主义方法紧密相关，因此，人们可能会认为这个概念的效用与模拟本身的效用同生共灭。我认为这是一个错误。通过探究共情的目的来探讨共情是什么的问题，我认为共情发挥着独特的认识论作用：只有它能让我们了解他人的感受。这与更普遍的模拟主义的合理性无关。鉴于此，我提出了一个包容性的共情定义，其一个可能的结果是，共情不是一种自然类别。由此可见，对于一些共情研究者来说，某些实验范式告诉我们的不是共情的本质，而是实现共情的某些方式。最后，我简要推测，这样理解的共情可能还发挥着独特的社会作用，即促成我所说的“透明的同感”。
