Empathy as a means to understand people

ABSTRACT

Misunderstanding other people can be interpreted as the result of an insufficient performance of people’s skills to understand other persons and their experiences. But what does understand mean in these contexts? And what are the relevant skills that need to be engaged to successfully understand other people? I argue that understanding other people is a form of recognition of the epistemic validity of another person’s perspective. I claim that minimal understanding does not require an endorsement of another person’s perspective. This makes the avoidance of lack of understanding a feasible achievement in almost all cases, though it often requires effort in the interactive process of understanding. I specifically analyse the epistemic and normative roles of empathy in this process. In pursuing this aim, I also defend empathy against recent philosophical arguments that point at moral dangers of empathic processes.

KEYWORDS:

• empathy
• interpersonal understanding
• perspective-taking
• misunderstanding
• immorality
• justice

1. Introduction

My starting point, presented in the first section, is the problem of interpersonal lack of understanding. Understanding, in our context, is a success term; it refers to an achievement. I argue that understanding however only sets a minimal threshold. It merely requires to appreciate a perspective as valid in an interpersonal encounter. The aim of understanding is hence to achieve an epistemic form of recognition, which itself does not necessarily involve agreement with another person’s perspective.

In the second section, I further clarify the notion of interpersonal understanding. I argue that minimal understanding only requires to see the point or to make sense of the other’s specific perspective. I discuss possible limits to our capacity of understanding other perspectives, especially if they cannot at all be connected to our own experiences. I argue that there are no relevant limits for our context, because the only cases that might be fully closed from understanding are extreme cases. All relevant perspectives can be potentially aligned and understood. This might require interaction, effort and time, but it is not impossible to reach an understanding even in cases where we initially struggle.

In the third section, I analyse the role of empathy in understanding people. I identify a function of direct forms of empathy, called empathic experience, in experiencing another person as having a subjective perspective. This results in a form of epistemic fellow-feeling, an appreciation of another person as minded. More effortful forms of empathy include attempts to take the perspective of another person. I argue that empathising does not require taking over or endorsing the perspective of another person. To be sure, empathy’s role for interpersonal understanding is not unique, as understanding might be reached via other routes than empathy. Yet, without having the skill to empathise at all, it seems that human beings would struggle to ever understand others.

2. Why interpersonal understanding is important

If we do not understand a particular perspective of others, we struggle to see it as relevant and tend to ignore it. Such marginalisation of stances can occasionally constitute a form of injustice, if certain moral duties have been violated or malleable social conditions prevent understanding and hence hinder elimination of disadvantages. For instance, Miranda Fricker (2007, 1) uses the example of sexual harassment as an example of epistemic injustice. For a long time, pertinent complaints of women were ignored or brushed away at least partly because the experiences were not understood. Partly this lack of understanding was due to a lack of words to refer to the relevant practices, but it was obviously also driven by structural and interpersonal forms of failures. Failing to understand another person might not always constitute a matter of injustice, of course, but epistemic injustice seems to be at least partially caused by lack of interpersonal understanding. Obviously, other forms of moral wrongs and, generally speaking, interpersonal problems are also often based on lack of understanding or misunderstanding. Hence, the goal of interpersonal understanding plays an important role in practical contexts.

Note that understanding in our context does not merely require propositional knowledge about the content of the mind of others, for instance knowing that they feel harassed. Importantly, understanding involves an additional element, which I will later call appreciation. Understanding implies seeing the perspective of others as understandable in a specific sense that needs fleshing out.

The concept of understanding is to be read as a success term. It refers to a specific intellectual achievement – having understood the other. This notion of understanding differs from the process of understanding, which of course is supposed to result in an effect; an understanding. Accordingly, it is important to think about the specific way the process of understanding needs to be structured to enable success. But first we need to know what the relevant success consists in; then we can think about the process leading to this result.

Interpersonal understanding can be explained as an attitude of an understander towards the perspective of a target of understanding, which involves an assessment of the perspective as valid. Validity is here to be interpreted as an epistemic term. As I will argue, we can understand, at least to a minimal degree, perspectives that we wholeheartedly disagree with from a normative point of view. Having successfully understood another person accordingly implies an epistemic threshold. Successful understanding can be distinguished from an ideal of full understanding, which will come with its own epistemic threshold. The difference can briefly be illustrated: Consider a person who is angry at an obnoxious waiter. Any other guest might easily understand the anger of this person, because they see the point and adequacy of the reaction. In contrast, a friend of this person might struggle to fully understand her anger because he knows that she is usually very relaxed. A friend can often aim at a deeper level of understanding than a stranger. The thresholds of success will accordingly differ.

I have claimed that understanding is gradable, which is a common assumption (see, e.g. Berenson 1981, 40; Grimm 2019, 349), and that successful understanding refers to a specific epistemic minimum that needs to be achieved by a person aiming to understand. Such a minimum will have to be defined for different purposes. We might want to introduce different levels of understanding in relation to different contexts, say, understanding between friends or between strangers. Minimal understanding, that is, preventing persistent lack of understanding, allows people to appreciate and take seriously each other’s perspective within a social encounter. Understanding therefore has an enabling normative function. It does not guarantee civility or moral respect, and it might also not be necessary for these achievements. Yet is plays an important role in making interpersonal adjustment and collaboration feasible.

It is important to appreciate that misunderstanding is not always a unidirectional matter, in the sense of one person failing to understand another person. Rather, the process of understanding is bidirectional and hence lack of success in understanding might be due to interactive failures. If a person does not offer, as it were, their specific perspective, then understanding is hampered. In real life cases, especially as regards contexts of social struggles, this of course means that everyone needs to have a voice, to be able to raise their concerns and to offer them to others for understanding. The lack of finding a voice in ‘hermeneutical struggles’ (Medina 2017, 42f.) is itself based on social structures that go beyond lack of interpersonal understanding and hence beyond the scope of my paper. It needs to be added that hurdles to interpersonal understanding do not always have to be due to moral failures; they might well be caused by contextual epistemic constraints, such as limited time or absence of a common language.

An important structural background condition of interpersonal understanding is important for our purposes, though. There is a common assumption, also found in philosophical discussion, that understanding has hard limits, not simply hurdles to overcome, and that therefore some perspectives cannot be understood at all, however hard one tries. This seems to me a dangerous assumption, which potentially aggravates and perpetuates lack of understanding, especially because it ignores the open-ended nature of the process of understanding. I will claim that to achieve minimal understanding the standard of successful understanding must not be set too high. We do not need to fully understand a perspective to prevent misunderstanding. As Medina puts it (Medina 2017, 43), perspectives within real societies are not monolithic conceptions but diverse, heterogenous and occasionally inchoate meanings that struggle to be understood. Yet, they are not inherently non-understandable.

In sum, I have argued in this section that the aim of minimal interpersonal understanding, that is, the avoidance of misunderstanding, can issue interactive demands and might require circumstantial conditions to be met. Minimal understanding is a relevant aim of human interaction; it has normative importance.

3. What is interpersonal understanding?

The recent philosophical debate on understanding has mainly focused on understanding the world. It has been said that understanding differs from factive knowledge in terms of achieving, for instance, good explanations as to why something is the case (Hannon 2019). When we have understood something about the world, then we know more than the simple fact that something is the case. Rather, we understand how it came about and can potentially make predictions about its future trajectory. The focus on understanding the world is partly driven by the older debate on the methodologies of human sciences as opposed to natural sciences and the related Verstehen versus Erklären dichotomy (Stueber 2012). We do not need to get involved with this debate because our focus is on interpersonal understanding, which sets a different context. The main difference is that in understanding another person we aim to understand something that has its own perspective (Debes 2016, 64). To be sure, we can understand another human being as a thing – as an element of the world – but often we aim to understand a person as a centre of subjectivity. The latter requires understanding of a different kind than understanding the natural world.¹

When we say that we understand another person, we usually do not simply mean that we have knowledge about them. We might know a lot about a specific person, say, Vladimir Putin, but can nevertheless fail to understand them. This is not simply a consequence of the rather loose expression ‘understanding another person’, which seems to imply a more holistic epistemic stance toward another than knowledge about their characteristics or of facts about them. It is correct to insist that strictly speaking we understand aspects of persons, for instance their character traits or motives, not persons as whole entities. This being admitted, it is also correct that there is a difference between having knowledge about the character traits or motives of another person and understanding them. What is this element of understanding?

A reasonable starting definition of the concept of understanding is ‘seeing the point’ or ‘making intelligible’ perspectives of others (cf. Winch 1990, 115). In interpersonal understanding, we aim at the subjectivity of other persons; that is, we see them as subjects, not as objects of inquiry. Metaphorically speaking, different levels of understanding refer to the depth of seeing their individual shape. We often start with a shallow understanding of another person, perhaps seeing them in their simple role as other human beings, whose perspective is not really special. Many of these shallow elements of understanding will have to do with social norms. Often, such a shallow level suffices for our practical purposes. For instance, we can understand the perspective of another person in the purpose of coordinating our behaviour when stepping aside in a situation where we might physically collide. There are certain conventions working in the background and common experiences and assumptions that make any deeper level of interpersonal understanding superfluous. We might reach a slightly deeper level of understanding with people who fulfil certain social roles. For instance, we can understand a cashier in the supermarket when they return change. With friends and family, we will have a deeper level of understanding still. Partly because of our greater knowledge about their life and characteristics, partly because we are interested in them as individuals, and they usually in us as well, we will both dig deeper into understanding the perspectives of the other.

Importantly, the need for a deeper level of understanding is usually prompted by situations of lack of understanding. When someone randomly bumps into other people on the pavement, or when a cashier starts handing out candies instead of cash in return to our payment, we struggle to understand them. Even if we know the relevant persons very well, we might not see the point of their behaviour or fail to make it intelligible. Our practical purposes are undermined by such situations and hence there is usually an urge to understand better.

So, I do not want to claim that understanding is different from knowledge for the reason that it supposedly adds something to it. Rather, I want to argue that understanding another person and gaining knowledge about another person are two different modes of accessing other people’s perspectives.² Very often, it is enough to know what another person thinks or feels to figure out why, for example, she acts in a certain way. Yet sometimes we need more than facts about another person’s state of mind, for instance when we want to comprehend more complex features of a perspective, say, the persistent hostility of a person. In these cases, we need to change to the mode of understanding. Understanding comes into play especially when we do not gain sufficient access to the other person for our purposes via the mode of gaining knowledge.

Some scholars claim that in order to understand the perspective of others we somehow need to see its content as valuable or worthy of choice (e.g. Grimm 2016, 217). This bears a relationship to the traditional thought that desires need to be seen ‘under the guise of the good’ (cf. Velleman 1992). Similarly, for beliefs we might want to say that they need to be seen as good in the sense of being in line with minimal requirements of rationality. For the purposes of this paper I condense the relevant philosophical debate to the point that theories of understanding usually involve a normative constraint condition. Understanding, according to this idea, requires a form of normative stance by the understander towards the perspective of the other. I agree that a constraint condition is required for a theory of interpersonal understanding. Yet, I do not agree with the strengths of this condition that is occasionally put forward by other philosophers for successful understanding. Other people’s perspectives do not need to be regarded as good or valuable by the person aiming at understanding. The target’s perspective merely needs to be understandable. This is less demanding and only requires epistemic appreciation, not endorsement.³

I want to immediately qualify this claim. I would like to maintain that for successful minimal understanding we merely require an appreciation of another person’s perspective as valid. There might be deeper levels of understanding that are more demanding and perhaps require a positive evaluation by the understander; a form of ‘understanding-as-taking-to-be-good’ (Grimm 2016, 217). For a perspective to be minimally understandable, I have claimed, an understander does not need to endorse it or assess it as endorsable for her. The German term Verständnis haben captures this aspect nicely.⁴ I can understand behaviour or stances of others that I personally hate, would never consider appropriate for myself, or that I find appalling.⁵ To be sure, this result might only be achieved after some effortful engagement, but it is nevertheless usually feasible.⁶

Remember that in aiming at understanding a person we attempt to understand the target’s perspective, not a mirrored potential perspective of ourselves. For example, to minimally understand a person desiring a saucer of mud for no obvious purpose (Anscombe 1963, 70), I do not need to imagine myself desiring a saucer of mud. To be sure, it might well be true that we need to see purposes of other people to make their action intelligible. Yet, this does not imply that an understander needs to endorse their purposes. In the given example, understanders minimally understand the other person if they appreciate her perspective; that means that they see her desiring a saucer of mud as a valid perspective.

Can all limits of understanding be overcome by effort or are there real insurmountable limitations? Most examples of persistent lack of understanding that come to mind are likely to be drawn from cases that are deemed pathological. This is not surprising because when we persistently fail to understand we usually assume a form of mental illness or at least a temporary insanity to be present in the other. Non-understandability becomes a sign of mental pathology. Moritz Geiger (1911, 46) gives the example of a sick person who is crying and suddenly bursts into laughter. Geiger claims that a person aiming to understand can indeed understand each individual expression, crying and laughing, but not the sequence altogether, the ‘inner connection’ of the mental events. Geiger argues that in order to understand the mental life of others in its connectedness, not just statically in a kind of mental snapshot, we need to be able to ‘relive’ (nacherleben) their mental processes.⁷ Perhaps there are limits in human nature as to what we can relive, not just the limits of lack of information or individual capacity. But Geiger’s example is of course one of mere perception of another person. If the case involved some form of interaction between the sick person and the person aiming to understand, reliving the whole sequence of mental events might become an option.

Karl Jaspers introduced an interesting categorisation of phenomena that we can aim to understand in an early paper and in his General Psychopathology (1912, 400 (1968, 1318); 1913, 256, 261ff.; cf. Walker, 253f.). Some experiences are known to all human beings, say, sadness or anger. Here, according to Jaspers, understanding is usually straightforward. Other experiences can be seen as extreme or unusual versions of familiar phenomena. This might require more effort in the process of understanding. In this second case, understanding is hence a matter of ‘stretching’ one’s own experience (Walker 1995, 254). For Jaspers, there is however a third group of experiences which cannot be understood by any means or effort. These cannot connect to any experience in the understander and, interestingly, there is no common language for the target to express their experiences. There is a straightforward connection here to Fricker’s example of understanding sexual harassment. If we lack a concept for the phenomenon, we struggle to understand.

I have argued that for minimal understanding to be achieved an understander does not need to agree with the perspective of the other. This is an important insight in relation to misunderstanding because it shows that it can fairly easily be avoided. In relation to Fricker’s example mentioned above, people do not need to agree that sexual harassment has actually happened or even that it is morally bad. All they need is an understanding of the relevant experiences as valid and worthy of attention. To be sure, this is not achieved automatically. Very often, we fail to appreciate the perspective of others. However, such failure is not due to the fact that their perspective is too remote from ours and that we accordingly struggle to endorse it. Rather, it is due to failures in the process of understanding that prevents its success.

Consider the perspective of slave-owning Englishmen in the late eighteenth century.⁸ From today’s perspective it is difficult to understand how someone could see human beings as less than equal from a moral point of view and even as possible property of others. Yet, it seems to me that minimally understanding slave-owners is only difficult, perhaps even impossible, if we assume that the process of understanding eventually has to result in a form of endorsement or approval of the other’s perspective. To appreciate, for instance, their particular reasons for actions within their context is actually not hard.

For understanding to fail permanently, a perspective must be such that it cannot be imagined to be a humane perspective; it must lack a connection to an account of what it means to be a normal human being. This seems to be the case with extreme cases of immorality of ‘moral monsters’. The latter term already hints at the limits of minimal understanding in relation to our human nature. Disregarding such extreme cases, lack of understanding is simply a temporary and malleable situation (cf. Grimm 2016, 218). To be sure, I do not want to deny that there are deeper levels of understanding that might be unachievable on a more regular basis, but my focus is on the minimal (or shallow) level of understanding, which I have called appreciation, as opposed to endorsement. Endorsement or approval can be seen as deeper levels of understanding. When a person approves of the perspective of another, this involves a level of identification that results in a closer congruence between perspectives than minimal appreciation, which only requires some minimal level of alignment. Altogether, we can interpret achieving deeper levels of understanding another person as a process of increasingly aligning perspectives. Deeper levels will also involve some access to the lived experiences of another person (Gibson 2016, 236), or what it is like for them. However, for a minimal form of understanding, such an element is superfluous.

Interpersonal understanding, according to my argument, is not a pre-determined result, to do with similarity between people or with seeing another person’s perspective in a specific light. Rather, it is very often an achievement, gained through an effortful interactive process. Whether there are any limits to this progression, preventing us to gain any level of understanding of another person, can be left open because such cases are certainly extreme, most likely connected to severe mental pathologies. The cases we usually deal with are not extreme and can be based on common or generally accessible experiences. Even when we lack words to describe the relevant experiences, we can collaboratively find such language.

4. The role of empathy in interpersonal understanding

Understanding, if successful, is the result of an occasionally effortful interactive process. This process allows us to gain access to the minds of others. In this section I want to argue that empathy is an important element, although not all that is required, in the pursuit of interpersonal understanding. Perhaps more importantly, I want to argue that in order to successfully empathise with another person, we do not need to endorse their perspective. This is important, because it removes an apparent obstacle when discussing empathy as an instrument to achieve interpersonal understanding.

For many philosophers there is a close link between understanding and empathy, up to the point where the two notions are run together. Max Weber, for instance, identified empathy (Einfühlen) and what he called ‘interpretive understanding’ (deutendes Verstehen) (Walker 1995, 249). More recently, Olivia Bailey has claimed that successful empathising results in ‘humane understanding’ (Bailey 2022). Karl Jaspers and Laurie Ann Paul have referred to ‘empathetic understanding’ (Jaspers 1913, 16, 255; Paul 2021, 351). For Jaspers and the tradition of philosophers who discussed empathy in the early twentieth century, the connection between understanding and empathy was mainly epistemic. Empathy was the assumed mechanism to gain access to the mind of others and the latter resulted in understanding the other mind. Whether there were other possible mechanisms to solve the puzzle of understanding other minds (Fremdverstehen), which occupied these thinkers does not matter for our purposes. Suffice it to say that empathy is one promising route to interpersonal understanding.

Max Scheler pointed out a direct form of empathy. The central notion for Scheler in this respect is expression (Ausdruck) (Scheler 1913, 257). When we see someone wince in pain, we do not see his wincing as a result or sign of his mental state, that is, being in pain. We do not have to infer his mental state similar to the way we would assume a fire when we see smoke. Rather, his wincing expresses his mental state. The same goes for many other affective mental states. A person perceiving the other who is expressing mental states has an experience herself, namely an empathic experience (Einfühlungserlebnis) (Geiger 1911, 35).⁹ Now, the immediate result of this form of empathy can of course be wrong in relation to the real mental state of the other. The wincing person may, for instance, be an actor and not in pain at all. So, empathic experiences do not always result in an authentic understanding of the other person’s mind. But this only means that empathic experience is not necessarily correct, not that it is always wrong. More importantly, it allows us to reasonably assume the other person as minded. This is an important result of immediate empathic experience. We gain an epistemic reason to assess the other as having subjectivity. It is, in a word, an epistemic form of fellow feeling: feeling that the other feels and is a fellow.

The immediacy of empathic experience has an important repercussion on our discussion. Theorists who explain empathy only in terms of the more effortful feeling into the other have a tendency to assume a specific prerequisite of successful empathy, namely a form of congruence between the mind of the empathiser and the assumed mental states of others. According to this unidirectional picture of empathy, from the empathiser to the empathised, the empathiser needs to, as it were, find herself in the other (Richter 2018, 413). But in empathic experience this is not required. We experience a mental state, not our mental state as if it were located in the other person. Although empathic experience is not the whole of empathy, as we will see shortly, it enables a form of access to the other’s mind which is not itself normatively constrained by the perspective of the empathiser.

It has been noted, at least since Smith and Hume, that sharing an experience with others might be more difficult, and even fail, if the understander has normative quarrels with the perspective of the other. In this context, Hume referred to the required ‘resemblance’ between the parties (Hume 1739-1740, T 2.1.11.5). Lack of successful empathising is not always due to an explicit or conscious disagreement. Normative hurdles can also be caused by unconscious biases or deeply engrained convictions. But, importantly, lack of understanding, which is here due to a failure in the mechanism of aligning perspectives, may only be temporary. It is not the end of the process. This is where the more effortful process of empathising or feeling into the other becomes significant, a phenomenon that Geiger (1911) called ‘imagined’ (vorgestellt) empathy. More recently, Stueber (2006, 21, 131ff.) dubbed it ‘reenactive empathy’ and Paul (2017, 11f.) ‘cognitive’ empathy.¹⁰

Hume and Smith assumed, like many modern philosophers, that the empathic process, if it succeeds, leads to a form of endorsement, an ‘approval’ of the perspective of the other (Smith 1759/1790 17, TMS I.i.3.1). But it seems that they have actually claimed a stronger connection between perspectives than they can establish. In order to ‘partake’ in other’s ‘pleasure and uneasiness’ (Hume 1739-174017391740, T 2.2.5.14), we do not need to approve of the perspective of the other. It is true that understanding – the result of successful empathising – requires a form of alignment of perspectives but this is not the same as congruence.¹¹

Modern philosophers of empathy similarly assume the need to take over the perspective of others in order to successfully empathise with their perspective. They accordingly see specific dangers in the empathetic process. After all, empathy might easily lead to changes in one’s own perspective. Paul, for instance, claims that empathy might lead a person to transform their perspective. This can result in a form of ‘mental corruption’ (Paul 2021, 352). Similarly, Betzler and Keller (2021) argue that empathy might lead to (epistemically and normatively) inappropriate perspectives. However, this type of argument only works if we assume that the process of empathy, when successfully employed, results in the empathiser having a very similar or even the same mental attitude or perspective as the person empathised with. Yet, this assumption is not plausible.

There are many examples where we empathise with another person and do not end up in the same mental state, not even a similar one. Consider again the person wincing in pain: To successfully empathise with this person, in terms of understanding mental experiences we do not need to feel pain ourselves (Groethuysen 1904, 208; see also Scheler 1913, 50). The same applies to more complex mental attitudes. For example, to empathise with a person who just lost her husband, we do not have to feel sad or even grief. We might need to have had comparable experiences of loss of beloved objects to successfully empathise, but we do not need to feel similarly to the grieving person or to approve of the grief. It is true, of course, that in some situations we do indeed feel in a more affective sense what the other feels. For instance, we might feel sad with the grieving person or even have pain-like experiences in, say, seeing graphic details of an injury of a person. However, this is not generally required for empathy.¹²

It seems to me that the assumption of perspectival change through empathic processes is caused by the commonly used metaphor of ‘sharing’ and ‘taking on’ mental states in empathy (e.g. Bain 1859, 83, 179). We have now seen that sharing does not necessarily imply a congruence of perspectives between empathiser and the person empathised with, especially not in the more active phenomenon of feeling into the other. Rather, sharing here means something epistemic; a form of recognition of the perspective as understandable. This is not the same as having the same experience or agreeing with it.

I suppose that Paul and Betzler/Keller, and other authors in the same vein, come to the conclusion that successful empathising might change the empathiser because they assume that an empathiser needs to see the other person’s perspective in a positive light, as something valuable, in order to really empathise with her. They claim that ‘(…) to share in a picture of the world, by having it embedded within your emotions, is to come under rational pressure – pressure on pain of incoherence – to accept that picture within your beliefs’ (Betzler and Keller 2021, 273). Similarly, they state that ‘[s]ometimes, you can find yourself unable to engage in affective empathy with another person’s emotions, because to do so would be to accept beliefs that you take to be unreasonable or unsupportable (…)’ (Betzler and Keller 2021, 275).

To be sure, if a perspective is valuable and an empathiser realises this value whilst empathising, then she might well change her own perspective. That seems plausible enough. But it does not follow from the fact that these empathy-induced changes can happen that we therefore generally need to see the perspective we successfully empathise with in a positive light. What is more, such changes are not very likely due to empathy alone. Rather, a specific experience or perspective we empathise with will provide us with material to consider as worthy of exploring and perhaps taking over for ourselves. Such an evaluation requires far more than empathy.

Betzler and Keller, as well as Paul at some points (Paul 2021, 356), additionally worry about the fact that empathy can result in people taking on morally corrupt perspectives and that hence empathy brings dangers, as they put it (Betzler and Keller 2021, 270). But this worry is either unreasonable or, alternatively, not a worry that ought to be blamed on empathy. The worry can be deemed unreasonable because a possible bad result of a process does not establish that the process itself is bad or dangerous. Obviously, according to their argument, empathy might as well cause people to take on virtuous perspectives; a fact that does not escape them. And even if we worry about the morally bad result of a person taking on a vicious perspective via empathy, we should acknowledge that such a consequence cannot be accounted for by empathy alone. There are numerous other cognitive processes involved in taking on normative perspectives, for instance assessments of its moral value. We can empathise with and minimally understand, say, racists without at all endorsing their immoral perspective. In other words, we can appreciate their perspective as having a point. The latter does not, of course, exclude our firm verdict that it is morally false to adopt a racist perspective. In summary, Betzler and Keller are misled by their assumption that successful empathy involves accepting the other person’s perspective. This assumption is not plausible. Similarly, Paul assumes that taking on the epistemic stance of another person by itself has the power to change a person’s mind.¹³ Again, such a complex change in a person can hardly be due to empathy alone.

We might now wonder whether empathy has a function in interpersonal understanding at all. After all, neither being directly affected through empathic experience nor feeling into another person’s perspective seems necessary for our capacity to successfully understand.¹⁴ I agree that an empathetic process is not always required to go through in order to understand another person’s perspective. However, it is difficult to account for interpersonal understanding if we had no capacity for empathy at all. After all, to align our perspective to another person’s perspective, especially in cases where we struggle to immediately understand them, can be relatively easily achieved by empathic processes. Indeed, the basic form of empathic experience is likely the only mental function in our species that allows us to straightforwardly experience other human beings as minded. This experience naturally leads to a form of epistemic fellow feeling. Although the latter alone does not secure understanding others, of course, it serves an important function in establishing the presence of another subjective perspective that can be explored via the more complex processes of empathy and interaction. In other words, it seems to me that interpersonal understanding generally requires an acknowledgement of others as minded beings, and this acknowledgement is a function of basic empathy. Understanding another person’s perspective additionally often relies on a form of epistemic alignment. This additional function is supported by further, more complex processes of affective and cognitive empathy. In sum, interpersonal understanding might be possible without employing empathic processes in every single case, but again it seems difficult to account for successful understanding if we did not have the skill to feel into others at all.

5. Conclusion

Occasionally, perspectives are excluded from consideration because they are not understood. I have analysed what interpersonal understanding means in the relevant context. A minimal form of understanding does not require endorsement or approval of a perspective but merely an appreciation of its epistemic validity. This would be enough to prevent many instances of lack of understanding. If we minimally understand a perspective, we can engage with it. Of course, we might still deem it unjustified, but whether a perspective is morally justified is not itself a matter of understanding.

An important hurdle to interpersonal understanding is normative resistance to a specific perspective. A possible route to overcome such resistance is empathy. I have therefore discussed empathy in relation to understanding and pointed out differences between the direct empathic experience, which presents another person as minded – as having a subjective perspective – and more effortful empathising when taking the perspective of another. Taking the perspective of another, I have argued, does not require taking over their perspective. It is therefore wrong to criticise empathy for alleged dangers of over-identification. The role of empathy in interpersonal understanding consists, firstly, in providing a form of epistemic fellow-feeling; a recognition of another being as a person with a subjective perspective on the world. Understanding can, secondly, be reached via more effortful and interactive processes of empathising.¹⁵

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Notes on contributors

Thomas Schramme

Thomas Schramme is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Liverpool (UK). He specialises in moral psychology, political philosophy, and philosophy of medicine.

Notes

1 The main point, at least for my purposes, is hence not that there is an alleged difference between explanation and understanding, but a difference between understanding a person and understanding a thing in the world. "It is therefore misleading to say that understanding versus explanation marks the difference between two types of scientific intelligibility. But one could say that the intentional or nonintentional character of their objects marks the difference between two types of understanding and of explanation" (von Wright 1971, 135).

2 I do not take a stance regarding the extensive debate on the best theory of folk psychology. Whether simulationism or a version of theory-theory can best account for our capacity to theorise about the mind of others is not my concern.

3 Remy Debes similarly states that empathic understanding requires that the other person's feelings "makes sense" to the empathiser. In terms of normative constraints, he says that an empathiser "must at least condone the way" another feels and he calls this a "permissive sense of approval" (Debes 2010, 223).

4 Note that the German term Verständnis is a success term. This feature is congruent with the fact that the normative constraint of understanding sets a criterion of success.

5 The relevant type of understanding is regularly requested for bad deeds, in a moral or non-moral sense. For instance, British Rail regularly asks for customers' understanding in relation to faults or inconveniences. Even if customers believe that they would never fail so badly as British Rail if put to the same task, they might still achieve an understanding.

6 I believe this minimal form of understanding is different from intelligibility, because the former involves an epistemic stance towards the other as having a subjective point of view. Berenson (1981, 72ff.) accordingly stresses that interpersonal understanding involves an interpersonal relationship. Intelligibility, in contrast, seems to be a form of understanding that does not involve the other person's perspective. It can be achieved by seeing the other as an object in the world.

7 We can draw a connection here to the modern debate on narrative understanding (see, e.g. Hutto 2016).

8 Grimm (2019, 344f.) uses a similar example.

9 Stueber (2006, 20, 131ff.) calls the phenomenon "basic empathy" and Fuchs (2017, 31ff.) "primary empathy". The idea is also found in Zahavi's writings (2014, 114f.), as well as Gallagher and Hutto's account (2012).

10 There are other names for the same or very similar phenomena (see, e.g., Coplan 2011; Maibom 2020, ch. 1). For my purposes, the distinction between direct empathic experience of another person and the processual and interactive empathising into the other person is pertinent.

11 In fairness, I have not discussed what notion of understanding Hume and Smith are committed to: the minimal notion I have dubbed appreciation or the deeper form of understanding I called endorsement. In any event, I do not think that understanding necessarily needs to be conceptualised as requiring more than minimal appreciation of the other's perspective.

12 Note also that empathetically understanding that someone is in pain or grieving does not mean that we sympathise with them, i.e. feel for them. Sympathy and empathy are different phenomena.

13 "When you take the epistemic stance of another, you open yourself up to experiencing how they feel or understand the world. Such experience has the power to teach you. It can motivate you to help, support, and engage, and it can change your mind. It’s the power of this experience that is at once so important and yet potentially so dangerous. If you allow yourself to experience the way another person feels and thinks the way they do in order to understand why they believe and act the way they do, the way you think about the world might be affected" (Paul 2021, 356).

14 It also appears fairly obvious that at least direct empathic experience is not sufficient for understanding (cf. Walker 1995, 249; Debes 2017, 60).

15 Many thanks to my collaborators in the AHRC-DFG funded project "How Does it Feel? Interpersonal Understanding and Affective Empathy" (AH/T012781/1). I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments.