Abstract
Slote (‘The Many Faces of Empathy’) has argued that empathy plays a crucial role in such speech acts as questions and assertions. After clarifying some of the aims and limitations of speech act theory, providing an account of empathy and its potential epistemic value, and sketching the role that some speech acts play in expressing psychological states, we consider Slote’s argument for the place of empathy in questions and assertions. We show that the most that Slote has established is that some cases of questioning and asserting depend upon on empathetic engagement between speaker and addressee. That, however, is no basis for concluding that empathy plays a crucial role in either of these illocutions.
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Notes
My thanks to Paul Bloomfield for insightful comments on earlier drafts of this essay.
I take speaker meaning to be an act in which one intentionally and overtly manifests an object, state of affairs, or set of commitments. (See Green 2007b, and Green 2017, for further motivation and development.) Although, by virtue of its appeal to overtness, speaker meaning as construed here builds in a reflexive dimension, it does not require an intention to produce an effect on an audience, to say nothing of an intention to produce an effect on an audience by means of their recognition of one’s intention. Also, expressive behavior may make an emotion perceptible (a view defended in Green 2007b) but need not in general do so.
Deonna 2007 speaks of being “in tune” with the psychological state of others as part of empathy.
Aaltola 2014 uses ‘cognitive empathy’ to refer to those cases in which we are aware of another’s affective situation. I have explained above why such mere awareness should not count as a form of empathy.
See Smith 2015 for a defense of a view of empathy congenial to that developed here.
I discuss the question at greater length in Green 2016c.
Note also that Slote’s use of force here is non-standard. Force as it characterizes assertion is an aspect of speaker meaning by which we put forth a content as something we believe and something that we are on the hook for defending in the case of possible challenges. Slote’s description of force as ‘the force of strong feeling’ is a quite different notion.
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Green, M. Illocution and Empathy. Philosophia 45, 881–893 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-017-9872-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-017-9872-6