>
> The question of "empathy" and "theory of mind" are distinct. I'm just
> talking about empathy; Jerry and John introduced the theory of mind
> stuff into the discussion. I have to disagree with you and Jerry
> about the definition of empathy; psychologists have studied it for
> decades. It's the metacognitive ability to understand the thoughts
> and feelings of another entity. There's plenty of research about
> personality differences related to empathy and techniques for
> increasing empathy.
The question, as I would like to frame it, is:
Are the mental and biological processes that cause behaviors that look like empathy the same in humans and our closest evolutionary cousins? Or are the mental and biological processes that we call empathy in humans, the same or similar to the mental and biological processes that look like empathy when displayed in the behavior of our closest biological relatives? I would ask this question not because I would want to anthropomorphize chimpanzees but because I want to find out a little bit about the biological or evolutionary origins of what we call empathy. If studies were made to answer this question we would probably drop the notion of empathy not only when applied to chimps but also to humans.
Like you Miles, I really don't care what so called "human" characteristics we apply to other species. It is rather the other way around. I think the tendency to emphasize the specialness, the exceptionally, of human emotions such as "empathy" is unwarranted. We think such emotions make us special, that they somehow make us more than "just" "animals", because we can name them and report them to each other. I don't think that you think this way Miles. But earlier you said that some of us were anthropomorphizing. I think if I am erring it is rather in the opposite direction, of wanting to make humans more like chimps.
What psychologists think they are doing is about as reliable as what their subjects report they are doing. Not very reliable .
In truth I don't think that we can study empathy. The best way to understand empathy is not to ask a psychologist but to read great novels and poems. Psychologists may study what we call empathy but they don't have much idea about what they are studying. Of course this is true of most if not all psychology. Simply giving a definition to a word in everyday speech and then asking people to self-report on it, may be interesting, but it provides very little knowledge beyond the statistical. All it really does is codify our experiential understanding. And it is s far less adequate in providing experiential understanding than reading and discussing the novels of Tolstoy or George Sand.
> However, every reliable and valid measure of empathy relies on
> language and the assumption that a person can reflect upon and report
> their psychological states.
Which is basically my problem. There is no warrant for the assumption that we are doing anything beyond bad story-telling when we self report in this way.
Again the question as I would frame it is: What exactly is the "psychological state" we call empathy, and are the mental and biological processes of that state the same or similar in our cousin-species?
And the methodological problem here is that there is a sense that by definition "empathy" is turned into a epiphenomena of language.
> This is the methodological problem I have
> with any attempts to demonstrate empathy in entities that cannot talk.
> If my cat brings me a dead bird, should I call that empathy? How
> could I tell whether or not my interpretation is correct?
>
> I have to say this whole question "Does species X have human
> characteristic Y?" isn't very interesting to me; it really makes no
> practical difference
It may not make a practical difference but it may tell us something about the evolution of a trait? Does species X have the "human" characteristic of opposeable thumbs? ?
There is a little bit of a "trick" here. By defining a characteristic of species X as a "human" characteristic you define an attribution of that characteristic to species X as anthropomorphizing.
This is similar to the other "trick". If you define a characteristic as only reportable through language then it is automatically only a human characteristic no matter what the underlying mental or biological state of that characteristic may be.
> whether or not my cat has empathy--I'll feed her
> and pet her in any case. As I mentioned earlier, given compelling
> data, I'd be happy to say that some particular species has the
> capacity for the human experience of empathy. I have nothing invested
> in the belief that empathy is exclusive to humans.
>
> Miles
>
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