Mirroring Minds: Hume on Sympathy

Abstract

Hume’s account of sympathy has often been taken to describe what the discovery of so-called mirror neurons has suggested, namely, that we are able to understand one another’s emotions and beliefs through experiences that require no mediating thoughts and exactly resemble the experiences of the observed person. I will oppose this interpretation by arguing that, on Hume’s standard account, sympathy is a mechanism that produces ideas and beliefs prior to the emergence of shared feelings. To stress this aspect of Humean sympathy is to show that the experiences, which mirror neurons apparently cause us to have, may well count as inferentially derived emotion-laden beliefs, thus undermining the opposition between experience-grounded and inference-based accounts of mind-reading.

Notes

1. Earlier drafts of this essay were presented at “The Reading Hume’s Treatise” workshop at the University of Cambridge in 2008, and the departmental seminar series of the University of Sydney in 2009. Many thanks to the audiences and organisers. Special thanks to Peter Kail, Annette Baier, Donald Ainslie, Jacqueline Taylor, Jane McIntyre, and Paul Griffith who offered helpful comments.Giacomo Rizzolatti, Leonardo Fogassi, and Vittorio Gallese, “Mirrors in the Mind,” Scientific American 295 (2006): 56.

2. Rizzolatti, “Mirrors in the Mind,” 58, 56.

3. For this critique, see Ilan Dinstein, Justin L. Gardner, Mehrdad Jazayeri, and David J. Heeger, “Executed and observed movements have different distributed representations in human aIPS,” The Journal of Neuroscience 28 (2008): 11231–39.

4. Russell Hardin, David Hume: Moral and Political Theorist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 42–43.

5. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 2^nd ed., rev. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 319, abbreviated as T. Henceforth I follow the convention and provide the universal reference (book, part, section, and paragraph number), followed by the page number in the Selby-Bigge edition, abbreviated as SBN.

6. Páll Árdal, Passion and Value in Hume’s Treatise (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966), 50.

7. In the next section, I will explain why all ideas figuring in Humean sympathy should be regarded as beliefs. This is because these ideas also stem from that kind of association that undergirds causal inferences.

8. David Hume, A Dissertation on the Passion, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 19.

9. Cf. Susan James, Passions and Actions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), 83–156.

10. For more details on this point, see Annette Baier and Anik Waldow, “A Conversation between Annette Baier and Anik Waldow about Hume’s Account of Sympathy,” Hume Studies 34 (2008): 61–87.

11. Strictly speaking, mental states cannot be contiguous to behavioural events, plainly because these states are not in space and therefore cannot neighbour events such as bodily movements; cf. Annette Baier, Death and Character: New Essays on Hume (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). This suggests that mental states, while being regarded as causes, in fact fail to meet one of the conditions necessary for an object to qualify as a cause. This problem readily resolves itself if we conceive of the Humean stream of consciousness as a series of consecutive mental entities. Contiguity here then emerges in relation to those perceptions that follow one another directly, that is, without the interplay of another perception. They thus neighbour one another in time and space for the very reason that they occupy consecutive intervals of time. See Donald Baxter, “A Defense of Hume on Identity through Time,” Hume Studies 13 (1987): 323–42, for the notion of perceptions as occupying intervals of times.

12. For an account of how differences in the appearance between first-person and third-person behaviour can be bridged, see Anik Waldow, “Hume’s Belief in Other Minds,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 17.1 (2009): 119–32.

13. This consideration, for instance, matters with respect to the question of what kind of capacities are required for moral agency. According to Robert Hare, psychopaths lack the ability to feel fear and therefore cannot understand what is involved in another person’s fear; Robert Hare, Without Conscience (New York: Guilford Press, 1993), 52–56. For an approach that regards cognitive rather than emotional deficits as the source of an inability to understand other people’s concerns, see Janette Kennett, “Autism, Empathy, and Moral Agency,” The Philosophical Quarterly 52 (2002): 340–57.