Empathy is worthless for understanding people
Empathy is praised to no end as a higher level of human emotion which allows for compassion and understanding. The idea of "putting yourself in someone else's shoes" in order to understand them is common advice and it's rare to find someone who disagrees with that notion.
Now empathy clearly motivates people, it clearly makes people feel things and develop new perspectives. We imagine what things might be like and if that encourages someone to be kinder or more open-minded then great. I am going to be talking only about why empathy is a poor tool for understanding others.
Main Reasons
1. Unknown differences b/w people
Differences in intelligence, upbringing, temperament, interpretations, values, appearance, social/family life, hobbies, personalities, psychological proclivities such as with stress and anxiety and so many other factors that can't be understood when you're trying to empathise with anyone but particularly strangers.
Even in seemingly unambiguous contexts, you have no idea how other people perceive things or what it makes them feel or think. You can understand sentiments but not people.
2. Removes people from their past
In scenarios like divorces, homelessness, being laid off, friends having arguments and so on. You can perhaps generally although probably inaccurately guess what people might be feeling in those situations but you can't understand exactly what has happened in the lead up to this scenario. The reasons for homelessness, for instance, are vast. I watched a very interesting youtube channel think called "invisible people" interviewing homeless people.
Some became homeless by choice, some were basically born into it, some are clearly not all there, some made terrible choices and some were just very unlucky. Some were very happy and others were miserable. I'm not saying we can take what they're saying at face value but you don't actually understand anything by just trying to "empathise" with a homeless person.
3. Empathy requires imagination
Pretty self-explanatory, you are filling in gaps by imagining things or guessing and this is obviously not an ideal way to achieve understanding. If you aren't imagining things or making assumptions then I don't think you can call what you're doing empathy. I don't mean empathy as in "being open-minded about what others might be experiencing" which is a very sensible alternative to empathy in my view.
4. Empathy is likely to be well received
So my problem here is that I know many people who think their attempts at empathy have been successful because the attempts are appreciated. There might be pragmatic reasons for accepting someone's attempt at empathy like receiving help from them in some way or to avoid offending them.
When someone tells you of their problems and you respond by trying to understand and trying to show concern, that's going to affect the feedback you get. Alternatively, you never meet the people you're empathising with and there's no chance to even be corrected. I know many who refuse to see empathy as a flawed tool for understanding because of such experiences or lack of bad experiences.
Conclusion
There are many alternatives to empathy but none of them promise the same kind of results because those results are unrealistic. People use empathy to justify positions on topics they know absolutely nothing about and talk like experts. I see this all the time when it comes to topics like politics, dating, law and philosophy.
You can't even take what people say at face value, let alone just imagining either what it would be like to be in their shoes or putting yourself in their shoes or just imagining anything of the sort I suppose.
I realise lots of different definitions for empathy exist and if you bring up one that is different from mine then don't assume we disagree. I am only talking about the definition as I've laid it out.
Now empathy clearly motivates people, it clearly makes people feel things and develop new perspectives. We imagine what things might be like and if that encourages someone to be kinder or more open-minded then great. I am going to be talking only about why empathy is a poor tool for understanding others.
Main Reasons
1. Unknown differences b/w people
Differences in intelligence, upbringing, temperament, interpretations, values, appearance, social/family life, hobbies, personalities, psychological proclivities such as with stress and anxiety and so many other factors that can't be understood when you're trying to empathise with anyone but particularly strangers.
Even in seemingly unambiguous contexts, you have no idea how other people perceive things or what it makes them feel or think. You can understand sentiments but not people.
2. Removes people from their past
In scenarios like divorces, homelessness, being laid off, friends having arguments and so on. You can perhaps generally although probably inaccurately guess what people might be feeling in those situations but you can't understand exactly what has happened in the lead up to this scenario. The reasons for homelessness, for instance, are vast. I watched a very interesting youtube channel think called "invisible people" interviewing homeless people.
Some became homeless by choice, some were basically born into it, some are clearly not all there, some made terrible choices and some were just very unlucky. Some were very happy and others were miserable. I'm not saying we can take what they're saying at face value but you don't actually understand anything by just trying to "empathise" with a homeless person.
3. Empathy requires imagination
Pretty self-explanatory, you are filling in gaps by imagining things or guessing and this is obviously not an ideal way to achieve understanding. If you aren't imagining things or making assumptions then I don't think you can call what you're doing empathy. I don't mean empathy as in "being open-minded about what others might be experiencing" which is a very sensible alternative to empathy in my view.
4. Empathy is likely to be well received
So my problem here is that I know many people who think their attempts at empathy have been successful because the attempts are appreciated. There might be pragmatic reasons for accepting someone's attempt at empathy like receiving help from them in some way or to avoid offending them.
When someone tells you of their problems and you respond by trying to understand and trying to show concern, that's going to affect the feedback you get. Alternatively, you never meet the people you're empathising with and there's no chance to even be corrected. I know many who refuse to see empathy as a flawed tool for understanding because of such experiences or lack of bad experiences.
Conclusion
There are many alternatives to empathy but none of them promise the same kind of results because those results are unrealistic. People use empathy to justify positions on topics they know absolutely nothing about and talk like experts. I see this all the time when it comes to topics like politics, dating, law and philosophy.
You can't even take what people say at face value, let alone just imagining either what it would be like to be in their shoes or putting yourself in their shoes or just imagining anything of the sort I suppose.
I realise lots of different definitions for empathy exist and if you bring up one that is different from mine then don't assume we disagree. I am only talking about the definition as I've laid it out.
Comments (193)
And sometimes empathy is pretty thin and cold. For instance, people who say they feel empathy for the homeless, but wouldn't give them cash because they might use it to buy alcohol are not actually empathetic -- they're being judgmental. If I were homeless, I would consider it entirely appropriate that I should salve my misery with a few beers, especially in the hot summer. If I were addicted, I would consider buying a hit (of whatever I needed) as a necessary thing.
There's always more knowledge which can impact our understanding, here's a recent example for me.
https://www.princeton.edu/news/2013/08/29/poor-concentration-poverty-reduces-brainpower-needed-navigating-other-areas-life
Quite an interesting discovery which demonstrates even further how stupid the idea of empathy is. Science, knowledge, experience, open-mindedness are all great but give us realistically imperfect understandings. There's no way that a well-fed, happy person who has never experienced poverty can actually understand it just by imagining some things, making some assumptions and trying to compare it to their own, very different experiences.
I'm not saying we should give up on trying to understand others but rather than it should be obvious that it won't be easy to do that. Empathy is a half-hearted attempt which leads to falsehood.
As for the hypocrisy for people with their actions and their words, that's a whole other can of worms for a later time.
Quoting Joshs
Being able to identify with the behaviour of others is completely fine because it's something that you're feeling rather than an attempt to understand how someone else is feeling. For example, I saw this video on youtube where these two Russian soccer hooligan gangs fought each other for who knows why.
The title of the video was "Russians beat up Muslims" and despite the fact both sides were clearly white Russians and some commenters who understood Russian saying "these are two Russian gangs" many people identified with the frustration and aggression being shown in the video with their own anti-Islamic sentiments.
Now I'm not saying there aren't cases where there is understanding. The point of the story is to show that particularly when it comes to complete strangers, we're very easily misled and we really don't know anything at all until we get the facts.
So I'm not saying we should give up on understanding others at all, I'm just saying that empathy and imagination are not providing us with helpful tools towards the end of understanding others.
Plenty people use the word sympathy and empathy interchangeable were is probably were you got your definition.
True empathy is requireds no imagination because it only can occur when you have gone through something similar.
Empathy is one of the things that we actually have a hard definition for, it is
the ability to understand and share the feelings of another
What you described sounds like, this
feelings of pity and sorrow for someone else's misfortune.
Or
understanding between people; common feeling
Wich is the definition of sympathy. A key part of sympathy is
True empathy doesn't have the problems you listed. However it is also far more difficult.
What I am describing is not sympathy and doesn't even necessarily entail sympathy. Sympathy does not involve imagination, it involves feeling badly towards someone else's situation. What you've quoted actually has a lot more to do with the definition you've given of empathy.
So you've given me a google definition for empathy well let me give you one for sympathy. It is "feelings of pity and sorrow for someone else's misfortune". No imagination or no understanding involved.
I can promise you that there are a lot of definitions for empathy out there and the one you've given really hasn't scratched the surface. If we can't agree on this then that's okay. Our disagreement is limited to a definition.
You will hear people use empathy as a tool for understanding all the time. You can google "empathy for/towards" and see what others have been searching and it is clearly being used as a tool to understand others. Even your definition says that empathy means to understand and share the feelings of others. This necessarily requires imagination because you aren't literally feeling their feelings.
What I meant by understanding "sentiments" are like people saying "I feel so alone" and you don't just feel sorry for that person, you may very well think back to moments of your own aloneness and really feel it with them or you see the pain on their face and you feel that with them. Or you might see a character running away from something and really feeling that you yourself may as well be the one being chased.
Empathy has many benefits to it because you don't always need to understand precisely what's going on, sometimes you just need to be there for people or have a basic idea of what's going on. If your roommate looks annoyedly at you when you lost the remote then it'd be bad if you don't understand their frustrations or empathise with that feeling and react appropriately.
I am talking about:
1. Empathising with people you don't even know like homeless people, refugees, transpeople, people living in debt and so on. Using your theories, imagination and guesses.
2. Thinking empathy actually gives you true understanding.
To continue the homelessness example; even if you've been homeless yourself, you still don't understand homelessness. You can relate to certain things, you have more experience and knowledge than others but these things don't mean you understand it.
You also don't know anything about a person just because he's homeless even if you've been homeless. So you can surely see a homeless person crying while talking about their homelessness and put 1 and 1 together and really feel that pain as though it's your own and that's okay but don't turn around and tell me you actually understand that person's homelessness.
All I am pointing out in this thread is that many people do try to use empathy as a tool for understanding people and situations when they really shouldn't be. Empathy is not worthless but it is a worthless tool for understanding people, it's not worthless at understanding sentiments but it's not great at that either.
The real test of empathy is when you can empathize with people whose actions you might be tempted to call "dangerous" or "evil" etc.
I think I agree with you this far @Judaka -- only that I'd say people claiming empathy for a category are a little confused on what empathy is, though perhaps that's not what you're wanting to focus on.
What I would ask of your belief is -- if empathy is bad at understanding people, is there anything good at understanding people? And if so, what is it?
So you are telling us that understanding other people is hard. Who knew? You discount knowledge and empathy as both being insufficient. So, we use emotional and intellectual tools to try and understand each other -- which you say is not enough.
What is the upshot? What else have you got?
Empathy promises unrealistic results - even the idea of using it face-to-face implies intuitively understanding things you have no means to understand - you can only imagine.
When we're dealing with someone face-to-face, I would say that making assumptions isn't as bad if you can confirm their truth or not with that person. Especially if you have experience and knowledge.
Here's an example: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7eBNeDW1GQf2NJQ6G6gAxw
This guy gives people financial advice and because of his personal experiences with debt, his experiences of dealing with many people with financial stress and his knowledge about how debt works. He has a lot to draw from to understand people who are going through those things. However, even he asks whether his assumptions about them are correct or not and he says things which are just logical.
He has some more advantages:
1. Tone/word usage or (facial expressions)
I don't think he could know how someone with a lot of debt is feeling becasue there are many ways to interpret that debt. However, he knows they feel they need help, he can hear how desperate they are and how frazzled they are. You can make a lot of assumptions with this added context.
2. Applying basic knowledge of causation
He knows that for this person to be in the kind of debt they in, there must be a cause. That might be their behaviour, their lack of income or whatever else. So he can safely assume that if you're a high-earner but you're in debt that you are being financially irresponsible and with some questions about that, he can get a pretty good idea of what's going on.
3. Applying commonality in interpretations
There's a lot of difference in interpretation but also commonality, for instance, I remember a caller saying her fiancee had $250,000 in debt that she didn't know about. We can't exactly understand how she feels about that or what went on but it doesn't take much to confirm that she fits into a larger pool of some kind of interpretation. Which might be "He needs to commit to a plan to dealing with the debt or I'm leaving" or "He lied to me so I'm leaving" and so on. Once we understand the why and the what, we can make guesses.
All in all, understanding someone as a means to an end is possible. We can recognise and relate to sentiments and interpretations even if we don't personally share them. It's important to deal only with the facts, not be too confident in our assumptions and confirm our beliefs.
I think most people get this when we're talking about a single person. I just think many throw the complexity out the window when it becomes inconvenient for them and impedes their ability to make generalised assumptions that become premises in their arguments, interpretation and understanding.
This is the kind of empathy that I am criticising, you aren't becoming less self-centred via imagining yourself in others' situations you're just pretending that there's any similarity between your imagination and the reality. You can explore different perspectives as an intellectual exercise but you can't turn ignorance into knowledge by using imagination.
You also talk about "empathising with people who do "'evil'". You're talking about something very complex which most people don't understand, have experience with, know the backstory for or really anything at all. You want them to imagine what it might be like despite all that and try to come up with some reason that allows them to 'understand' the individual a bit better?
Your theories are just that and have no place being called understanding, imprecise or not.
You example of misreadings concerning Russians is an example of this. a better one would be the schism in the u.S. between conservatives and liberals. Their inability to empathize with one another is the result of their inability to understand from the others perspective the underlying worldview that justifies their political view point. In your every day dealings with other people, especially your family and friends, the most significant conflicts that develop and make empathy difficult arise out of differences in worldivew, not the particular events that spark one's anger, disappointment or disapproval. Trivial events are only able to spark a lack of empathy because they are informed by larger schemes of understanding on the part of others that we are not able to subsume within our own perspective. That's why its ludicrous to say we should empathize with those who despise or think are evil. The very fact that we despise them is the result of an ability to subsume their worldview, And empathy cannot be achieved into we do that. But the history of in p[philosophical and cultural worldviews is a history of the increasing ability to identity with and subsume what had formerly been seen as alien thinking on the part of other peoples.
That's the whole point.
If you find it entertaining then why should I criticise?
If I wanted to learn, for instance, what it's like to be a soldier in war. I could read up on what soldiers say it's like or I could imagine what it might be like. If I do either option and I want to make some opinions about soldiers, I've got a few things to look out for, some appreciation for what might've happened to these people and how it might've affected them.
If you want to indulge your imagination as being valid and plausible, despite the fact you probably know as much about war as could be expected of someone who's never fought in one and knows very little about it (like myself) then go ahead. Personally, I will try to stick to the facts, read body language and understand expressed sentiments and try to keep my imagination on a tight leash.
If you discount empathy, you are devaluing the prime mover of behavior. Delete the prime mover from your thinking, and you won't know jack shit.
Emotion and cognition don't operate in isolation from each other -- they are reciprocating pistons. It takes both parts. Feeling and thinking together leads to insight, discovery, the "ah ha!" moment.
I don't agree with everything you said but I'm not criticising empathy as a motivator. Many good things come from empathy as a motivator and I think it's not something people can avoid. We were born capable of empathy and we can't become incapable of it.
I don't think people should be using fear or anger to understand things either. However, as motivators, they have their roles, important roles. So yeah I don't disagree with your overall sentiment.
Empathy is not perfect because we cannot actually hack into other's people minds and fully project our consciousness into their minds an know exactly what they feel and think otherwise the world would be like a hive-mind in which the self and even death were known and accepted as illusions.
Yes, as humans we have limited capacity for empathy nevertheless it's our natural defects what makes us humans. In French and Spanish this is called Grégarisme (I don't know why it's hard to find the same term in English) that says that humans are beings between totally "gregarian" species such as bees or chimpanzees and totally independent or asocial ones such us some spiders and leopards.
Buddhism and Vedanta are some of those philosophies that aim for that "hive mind" that is called "Universe". In the first one it is said that all sentient beings want to be free of suffering. Besides they experience ignorance and impermanence too. The idea of free-will is debatable. When you accept that you get compassion and true understanding of existence not just for people but for every living creature.
The question of "who am i?" makes you do that philosophical trip from solipsism to a total non-ego experience. Empathy is just an stage.
You're expecting empathy to amount to literally seeing something as someone else, but that's neither possible nor the idea of it.
I am not a solipsist as a result of empathy, it's an epistemological question. I don't really want to go into it here.
Quoting pbxman
In some ways it isn't and in some ways it is, I don't think this is an issue of people being unique but rather than there are many variants and you can't account for those in your analysis.
Overall it's important to realise I am talking about empathy as a tool for understanding. I am not complaining about the limitations of empathy but people who don't recognise and implement an understanding of the limitations of empathy into their use of it as a tool for understanding people, situations, concepts and so on.
You talked about empathy as being useful for understanding different perspectives. To theorise (for the sake of gaining insights into others) about possible reasons for behaviour.
My opinion is that the theories of an ignorant man are more likely to lead him towards falsehood than truth. They're not giving you insight, they're not useful and I'm not expecting empathy to be perfect but it's not even ineffective it's just harmful.
If an ignorant person seeks knowledge then there are many tools for that. Seek out those with experience and learn from them, gain your own experience, acquire knowledge and deal with the facts. That's how I try to overcome my ignorance.
Now if you honestly feel misrepresented by my words then state plainly your position and I will apologise for any mischaracterisations that I made. It remains that many others think in the way that I criticise and I think this is a rather mainstream idea; that empathising with people you don't know will help you to understand them.
If you don't know then you don't know! It's not a terrible thing. If you couldn't be bothered to do any research then it wasn't interesting to you and why should you care that you don't know about it. Imagination can be useful but there are pre-requisites of knowledge and experience. A brilliant chef with great imagination will be very successful, someone who knows nothing about cooking shouldn't be trying to imagine great dishes - go learn how to cook instead!
Falsehood and truth about what, exactly?
I don't think that inter-human understanding hasn't improved. Through technology, anthropology, psychology, biology, neurology, sociology, improved communication, travel, immigration and so on, things have improved.
I agree with your general sentiments but I think worldviews are products of the real differences which are biological and interpretative and these manifest themselves differently in different contexts and lead to different kinds of difficulties in understanding others.
About that which he theorises about, his theories will direct his focus towards unlikely or implausible outcomes or even worse lead to assumptions which act as foundations to further incorrect conclusions.
Example:
You imagine that soldiers returning from war have experienced traumatic experiences during their service. You meet a few soldiers who appear uninterested or unwilling to talk about their wartime experiences. You think "understandable, they don't want to relive those traumatic experiences" and it sounds reasonable and plausible but mainly because you had this first idea that they had these traumatic experiences. It's an interpretative focus caused by ignorance and it leads to invalid conclusions that sound reasonable and wise.
Empathy isn't about finding correct answers to mathematics and science questions.
It's about understanding feelings and situations and decisions and actions and the like.
I agree.
Theorise definition: To formulate theories or a theory; speculate.
I think I am being fairly unambiguous in talking about non-mathematical, non-scientific contexts like with understanding soldiers experiences in war and homeless peoples' experience being homeless. Is there some kind of problem?
Quoting Terrapin Station
Right. I am saying to use empathy in this way is wrong and covered extensively as to why I think this. That's literally what my OP and this entire thread is about. I think perhaps you just saw "empathy" in the title and gave your 2 cents and it has been a bit of a waste of time for me to have responded to you about the topic of this thread. Is that invalid?
I think intellectually you can appreciate that, for instance, nobody wants to be ugly. You can understand that an ugly person will want to try to improve their looks if they can.
So here are two major questions:
1. If someone who isn't ugly (maybe even attractive), who doesn't know many ugly people would try to "put themselves in the shoes of an ugly person" or "imagine what it might be like to be ugly" what kind of accuracy would you expect here? In understanding how that person experiences their "ugliness" and how it impacts their lives?
2. Would you agree that "ugliness" would be experienced differently by:
Men vs Women?
Extroverts vs Introverts?
Rich vs Poor?
Educated vs Uneducated?
Someone who is happy vs someone who is depressed?
Someone in a relationship vs someone who is single?
Someone with good friends/family vs someone without that?
What about different temperaments or cultures or religions or life goals or value structures?
My answers to these questions are 1. They would have no clue about what it's like, none whatsoever and everything they said would be more or less wrong. 2. It is experienced differently to the point where to talk about Person A's ugliness and think it's the same as Person B's ugliness is a bit silly imo. I have laid out more problems with empathy as a tool for understanding in my OP but these are most relevant to your perspective.
Do you agree that these questions are pertinent to the issue at hand? Do you disagree with my answers?
Yes all perceptions of the mind can be misleading and lead us intro wrong conclusions however "empathy" is one of the qualities only few species have and they have it for a reason.
You statement sounds more like "well if you don't have a clear idea of what I'm going through you better shut up because I found that offensive" or "Since we don't know what a person is made of only God can judge".
Well, I have provided examples as I hoped they would help others understand my views. I have also provided reasons for why I think empathy is a worthless or even counter-productive tool for understanding people and ideas for what should be used rather than empathy.
I am also not arguing "empathy is worthless" as I don't believe that is the case. I think empathy is important in encouraging people to be compassionate and act harmoniously with others. Empathy can give us the courage and resolve to do good, I think most people are good people and empathy has a lot to do with that.
My motivations for arguing against empathy as a tool for understanding people is not to do with people being unfairly judged but more simply because I think the process of using empathy to understand people or more generally imagination/theories to understand things to be an abundant source of stupidity and falsity.
I think I am painting a picture of empathy being completely worthless and harmful as a tool for understanding people. I am hardly saying "well it's not perfect so let's steer clear of it".
So in my "ugliness" example, I answered that the person who imagined how the state of ugliness is experienced would be pretty much completely wrong in their assumptions. I also think that this person would not realise they were completely wrong and would possibly not care enough to challenge their assumptions.
It would've been better if this person simply said "hmm I have no idea how it would feel to be ugly". That's the sensible answer. The alternative is to go watch some yotube videos about people who are ugly talking about their experience. That alone would actually give this person a chance but you obviously can't take that at face value.
You could probably spend many hundreds of hours researching this topic and your time would not be wasted. It's a very complicated issue.
I don't think I'm being unreasonable by suggesting that such a complicated topic shouldn't be tackled by the imagination of an individual who knows nothing about it and hasn't experienced it. That should be the bare minimum, that you at least know a little bit about it and you have some experience with people who experience ugliness.
Also, we are biologically hardwired for empathy, it cannot be "discarded".
OK then the premises of your question are wrong and have nothing to do with empathy. I think the title "Unicorns are worthless for understanding people and the world" would be much more accurate.
Empathy: em•pa•thy /??mp??i/ : the power or ability to identify with another's feelings, thoughts, etc., as if they were one's own.
I don't think empathy guarantees goodness just the limited ability to feel through others. It has to do with perceptibility but also with imagination as you pointed out. Masochists, psychopaths, depressed people etc may know how you feel about them but that doesn't necessary stop them from carrying out their actions. Then again that's another debate...
....
Quoting pbxman
Me neither and I didn't say it did.
So can you be explicit about what you're referring to re true/false/valid with empathy?
What sort of thing might we be saying is true or not?
Well, I said you're right but why do we have things like etiquette, manners, good, evil? Their existence point to a shared belief vis-a-vis our feelings. I agree manners may differ among cultures and this maybe something relevant to your assertion. However, one thing all this points to is our ability to virtually experience (you said imagination) another person's comfort zone or no-go area. This is empathy at work, don't you think?
So answer to your question is, what types of things are people trying to use empathy to understand.
Quoting Terrapin Station
We may as well use this quote as a reference...
So my position is that whether empathy as a tool for understanding is useful or not isn't unambiguous, It's always not. You could just give your own examples of what you are trying to use empathy to understand really.
I agree that people do use empathy to understand the things you've stated, surely you had an idea of what you meant by that.
I've given multiple comprehensive arguments against empathy as a tool for understanding with many examples already. If you still don't get it then that's a pity but I won't keep giving proper responses to careless questions and assertions.
Well, I might open the door for someone but I have no idea what they thought about me doing it. Even if they smile at me, perhaps they're merely being polite. I can't read minds.
Has the existence of empathy contributed to the development of the idea that opening the door for someone is good manners? Could be. I am not saying empathy doesn't exist as a thing which has consequences. Empathy has many consequences on all different levels across society. It's a hugely useful and influential thing in many different areas of life.
We don't rely on empathy for expressing, for instance, discontent with someone. If a culture of giving people their personal space developed, it could as likely be because the person whose space has been violated becomes angry and communicates that anger through word or action.
Or perhaps people know that they like their personal space and treat others as they would like to be treated themselves.
I don't see the things you've listed as evidence of empathy being successful at developing understanding.
What sort of evidence would convince you?
The whole gist of your argument is that it doesn't literally give you another person's perspective, but that's a misunderstanding of the idea.
You can become a wise judge of people, and empathy can bring joy and happiness to a human.
Good question.
I'd like at least a plausible explanation as to why you think empathy would overcome the barriers I listed or perhaps some fairly conducted experiments that showed empathy can be accurate?
We could even talk about anecdotal examples... Really I haven't heard anything remotely interesting as a counter-argument, I have given an absolute argument and usually I hate absolute arguments. I'm sure there's some exception to my rule and I'm hoping people can add nuance to my understanding even if they can't completely reverse it.
The gist of your argument is "I can't understand or didn't read what you're saying, therefore, you're saying something else". I'm not going to have a debate about what I am saying or not saying when I've been very clear in my argumentation.
Empathy could provide small bits of useful information, large bits of useful information or a comprehensive idea. Demonstrations of any of these things would have been counter-arguments to my position NOT just the latter. Talking to you has been a waste of my time, I give you detailed accounts of my position only to have to refute things like "dude empathy isn't about mathematics" and "empathy isn't perfect... but you're acting like it should be!!"
I agree. Truth must be rigorously and earnestly pursued and no short cuts will be satisfactory.
This thread is about empathy being worthless as a tool for understanding people, not empathy being worthless. I personally use empathy to advise me on the moral thing to do all the time and I can't see why I should stop. I think empathy is a great thing, I just don't think people should be using it as a tool for understanding.
If you become a great judge of people, that's not the same as becoming good at empathy, in my view. Becoming a great judge of people means having knowledge, experience and skills which you utilise to make theories and then confirming them later. I have many theories about people too, I hope they give me insights but I won't use empathy as a tool for understanding.
Understanding different perspectives is useful information.
I agree.
What about for psychologists? Seems to me they need to approach their patients with a mixture of intellectual detachment and empathy. Especially when a person is having irrational feelings and behaviors, empathy can help the psychologist connect with the patient. They can assess what a patient is feeling, and then later unravel why. Most patients probably wouldn't open up to someone they thought was too judgmental or analytic.
I think you're correct that psychologists need to avoid appearing judgement or analytic, I agree that displays or attempts at empathy are good for disarming people and making them feel like you're on their side. Empathy and displays of empathy are very useful but should a psychologist be using their imagination and assumptions to understand their patients?
Many psychology students think being a psychologist is about using anecdotal evidence, intuition and so on. They become very disillusioned with all the data they need to learn. Studies and more studies backed up with evidence, experiments and testing.
It's very important that psychologists use the available evidence and not their imagination. My argument is that this kind of thinking should extend to all things.
I think that's a false dichotomy. You can (and should ) use evidence, studies, knowledge, etc. to help guide you in your attempts at empathy/imagination.
I think intuition also gets a bad reputation for being the opposite of intellect. Intuition is useful because you're reacting to cues that your conscious mind isn't picking up on.
For example, a good empath knows someone is feeling x, y, or z even before anything has been said. You often can't pinpoint at first how you know someone is feeling something, but you pick up on all the little bodily cues: eye movements, posture, hand placement, clothing, facial expressions, etc etc.
If you have to use empathy then I agree but I don't think you do. If you don't understand then ask more questions and try to understand but not by using your imagination. You probably have some ideas based on deductive reasoning, probability, experience, perhaps expertise and so on about what's going on. Strong platforms from which to begin further questioning or establishing your theories and their probabilities.
Quoting NKBJ
I don't agree reading body language is empathy but I do agree to be able to read body language is useful for understanding people.
This is a bit misinformed.
In a face to face with someone you've never met, if you witness them in pain, you'll know it. Mirror neurons. If you witness them in pain and it makes you 'sad' for them, or want to help eliminate their suffering, then you'd be empathizing. If you witness them in pain and give it no further thought, or even laugh and/or make jokes about it, you're not.
It's about knowing how other people are feeling, knowing what they're going through, whether it be heartache, anxiety, suffering, death of a loved one, etc.
All humans go through these things. Expecting empathy to provide some sort of different understanding is quite the misguided expectation.
I am discussing empathy as a tool for understanding people, you talk like you're disagreeing with me but it doesn't seem like you are. Provided you aren't expecting any kind of specificity with "knowing what they're going through" then I don't know what you disagree with.
There does appear to be a slight contradiction in what you're saying that I would ask you to clarify.
Quoting creativesoul
I agree with that but then you say.
Quoting creativesoul
Don't you think someone can tell when someone else is in pain without being sad about it? They aren't empathising but they can read facial expressions, understand expressed sentiments and so on. I don't think it's fair to say empathy is responsible for being intellectually aware of the existence and nature of something like "heartache" or whatever else.
Read the post again. Look at what I quoted.
In general, I'm disagreeing with the criterion you're holding empathy to. While it seems evident that there are some aspects of understanding another that empathy - all by itself - simply cannot provide. However, even in those cases, in is a great way to start. Thus, it is a good tool.
What sort of understanding do you expect empathy to help provide one with?
So don't say that. I sure didn't.
Sorry, what do you think is misinformed? You said that empathy allows us to see "pain" in others and see that pain in ourselves, we feel their pain.
Quoting creativesoul
So you agree that we can intellectually understand these things then what's the point of bringing up that empathy can do this? What are you trying to say?
Quoting creativesoul
None.
Are you perhaps doubting that others use empathy irresponsibly? I am not attacking empathy, I'm criticising people who use empathy as a tool for understanding people (among other things). I am giving arguments for why people shouldn't do this and why it's wrong.
I agree with that.
Your expectation of empathy, and now your recounting of my words. I said no such thing.
I think, like may people in the world, you have difficulty stepping into the shoes of someone else and seeing the world from their perspective. What will compound your difficulty is that you apparently have convinced yourself that the problem is not in the limits of your own thinking but in some supposed structural features of humanity, such as biological differences(whatever that's supposed to mean). Yes, of course individuals' behavior manifests itself s differently in different contexts. That's precisely the point. The advantage of powerful philosophical and psychological worldviews is that they are able to
transcend what appears to you to be hopelessly different manifestations in different contexts.
The problem isn't in the world , its in your inability to construct a more effective, flexible and comprehensive scheme of interpersonal undestanding .
Okay but I don't have an expectation of empathy and I just said that.
So rather than feeling their pain, we see their pain and sad for them and want to help, is what you said. I don't know if the difference has any relevance to what I said so I got nothing more to add.
Quoting Joshs
Nobody can do this, not me, not you, nobody. It's your imagination at play.
Quoting Joshs
Worldviews do not transcend anything, they are products of a variety of nature/nurture influences. Behind every overreaching generalisation lies overwhelming complexity and nuance which demolish all of your attempts to put things into neat little boxes.
This is the quintessential problem of empathising with "groups" or "categories of people", you have to ignore the millions of differences that exist within the group. That's good enough for you, not for me.
You have a long way to go. There are all sorts of things problematic with your worldview here. Far too much to take to task in one year, let alone one session here.
Empathy is the ability to recognize another's suffering/distress/discontent. That begins the road to better understanding others. Putting yourself in another's shoes requires more than just simple empathy. However, that is not to say that it is not a great tool that can be used for doing so. Just that it is not enough all by itself.
So, I'm not really disagreeing with some of what you're saying. I'm more or less pointing out that just because empathy alone is insufficient, it does not follow that it is not necessary for understanding another in the ways you've outlined. It does not follow that it is not a tool that can be used to better understand others. It's just not the only tool. Intellectualism in and of itself isn't either, by the way.
Why not?
If I understand the words another uses, how am I not seeing the world from their perspective?
What else would it take to do so?
Need I jump inside their head and look out at the world through their eyes, literally?
Oh, but they do. They consist of words. Words are meaningful. Meaning transcends the language user... most certainly.
This is absurd. Patently.
The differences are not what makes them a group. Rather, it is the similarities... Thus, ignoring the differences is required to even identify the group. It is certainly required to understand their plight, whatever it may be that binds them all together as a group.
I mean, when one empathizes with the homeless, one is considering the common problems of the homeless, and perhaps some possible solutions to help them suffer less. One doesn't get into personal individual particulars to empathize with the group of homeless. One does that to better understand a specific case.
....
Quoting creativesoul
You don't need imagination to understand concepts. Even robots can read human expressions and label them, many of them are universal across humans - even blind people. Recognising something and understanding it is not the same at all. You say it "begins the road" but what does that even mean?
Honestly, creativesoul, what I'm getting from you is that you hold contempt for nuance and specificity.
So you've "empathised with the homeless" with the understanding that homeless people are homeless and broke and whatever else you either know to be the case or imagined to be the case. Explain how your understanding of homeless people has increased.
Quoting creativesoul
Words are just arguments and sentiments expressed by people affected by nature'nurture influences, what transcendence occurred here?
"Words are just arguments and sentiments expressed by people affected by nature'nurture influences. "
Tell me, which philosophical positions are you drawing from? Which writers have influenced you most?From which model of personality are you getting your idea of the unpredictablity of
human behavior? Do you identify with a pschoanalytic id-ego-supergo-unconscious psychic structure? IS the mind a stimulus-response machine conditiond by environmental stimulus contingencies? Is behavior mostly dictated by instinctive drives and dispositions shaped by biological evolution? I mention these approaches because they posit the individual as arbitrarily pushed and pulled by environment and biology, which seems to jibe with your arguments.
You should know , however, that there are richer , more insightful accounts of personality than these that may help you to see inter-relationality where you are now only able to see arbitrariness and categorical separation.
Cool. Hence the utility of empathy.
Why spouting? Are you serious?
Anyway, I mean the issue here is that I don't know how much you've read of what I've written in this thread and how much you think we've deviated from OP. If we're still talking about OP then I am actually arguing against the use of empathy as a tool for understanding people. It's not really a "philosophy" I'm just saying it doesn't work out as well as people seem to think it does.
Quoting Joshs
I'm not familiar with most of the philosophies you listed and I am not going to learn so many just because you think they're relevant. Ask me to learn one or two that make your point.
I don't really think anything you've said has anything to do with using groups to understand individuals, which is what I think you're talking about. I don't care about the dynamic interactions between individuals and communities. I don't know how much I want to go into this because it's not relevant to OP and I'm not really sure why we're talking about it.
Briefly, there are a huge range of problems. Lack of unity in the group, differing interpretations, experiences, priorities, reasons for being part of the group and other peripheral aspects. Whenever I hear someone talking about Muslims for example, I just kind of roll my eyes. Muslims live in many different countries, different sex, different interpretations of their religion, different sects, different socio-economic statuses, different levels of education and so on.
The moment you start talking about "Muslims" you lost, there is nothing you can say anymore which will be worth listening to.
Quoting Joshs
I don't study philosophy or read any works from philosophers or Freud.
The issue here is that person A talks about "women this, women that".
Person B talks about "conservatives this, conservatives that".
Person C talks about "extroverts this, extroverts that".
The list goes on forever.
Then Person Z comes along and she's an extroverted, conservative, intelligent, disciplined, spiritual, wealthy, well-spoken, romance-loving, Indian woman ETC.
Person A to Person Y have all made these generalisations about people with all these different categories and characteristics but then you finally have Person Z.
Let's assume that from Person A to Person Y, they all had very good reasons to say what they said. There's a possibility for variations within all the things they said, all these people would agree. It's just some stereotypes they've seen or some causal arguments they've made.
We've actually learned a lot about Person Z, I am not saying we shouldn't use all this information when trying to understand her. I'm just pointing out things get tricky because there's going to be contradictions, she's not going to fit all these categories as people thought. She's going to experience things differently because of these other various aspects about her. Person B will talk about her worldviews based on the fact she's one of these things but that's also what Person E said about his point about Indians and the worldviews are totally different.
Lots of implications for this, I don't feel like going into that though.
I am also currently understanding how to be a computer programmer by imagining myself as a computer programmer. I will let you know on the results soon.
You mean how to literally be a computer programmer? Because empathy isn't about literally having the other person's perspective.
Meh.
That proposition is highly debated in psychological research , and more importantly, even for those who believe that there is such a thing as hard wired empathy, the question is, what exactly is it that is inherited? Is it merely a 'feeling', a 'sentiment'? Current research in mirror neurons focuses not on emotion but on the ability to recognize the other's behavior as similar to one's own. I've written a lot about emotion, and my definition of empathy would see it as necessarily beginning from a cognitive appraisal that recognizes something identifiable, relatable, familiar , in the other. Can this appraisal be wrong or fatally superficial? Of course. This is where your critique is useful. Empathy begins as an incipient appraisal, a beginning, sketchy hypothesis. It is no different than an initial judgment or perception in any other domain. It is only the beginning of a process of unfolding a more and more nuanced and complex picture of situations with others.
Whether one's motive is to empathize or to condemn, it will always be an endless process to construct a full understanding of any subject matter. You critique of empathy really comes down to a critique of relying on one's gut, one's first impression, one's initial hypothesis without adequately exposing oneself to the particulars . Seeing empathy as a special category or device or supposed hard-wired module is beside the point . The blame for our prejudices and biases comes down to the weaknesses of human pattern-forming. How do we know when we've got it right?
You have set up a dichotomy between imagination, theory and sentiment on the one hand and 'facts' on the other. You wrote "It's important to deal only with the facts, not be too confident in our assumptions and confirm our beliefs. I will try to stick to the facts." Your imagination-sentiment vs fact binary is a bit problematic. This is where philosophy comes into play(when I said your were spouting philosophy, I meant you were asserting a philosophical position without knowing it. ). It is now understood that interpretive valuation and empirical fact are inextricably dependent on each other. A fact implies a grounding scheme of interpretation to make sense of it, or to even allow it to be seen as a fact in the first place. Knowing this doesn't radically change your argument, but it allows us to appreciate that the difference between a starting hypothesis-sentiment and getting the 'facts' is a matter of degree rather than of kind. Deterministic causality is itself a theory, that is , it is framed by valuative presuppositions, so rooting someones behavior in a causal chain does not get us to the irreducible bed rock 'fact' of the matter.
It's necessary to constantly test and question one's imaginative hypotheses against what one is observing in front of one, but If you think you've gotten to the bottom of the matter via causal facts you're less farther along than you think compared to the person who forms their view on their initial 'empathetic' or condemnatory impulse. In understanding our world , it's sentiment and hypothesis and imagination all the way down, just a matter of how how adaptive , flexible and explanatory we can manage to build our constructions of each other. The others will tell us when we're on the right track.
I agree with you that imagination and theory divorced from a thoroughgoing questioning of, and interaction with, the person or group one is theorizing about empathetically will give one an impoverished picture of who they are. What theory and imagination will do is provide one with a method of approach to forming hypotheses and testing those hypotheses . it will guide one toward how to question, what to look for, how to interpret, how rigidly to hold an interpretation, whether pure facts exist, etc. In fact, i would argue that one's methodological framework is the most important element in dealing insightfully with others.
One could say that philosophical method can be the antidote to the dangers of empathy.
A philosophical method is essentially what you've offered here. You've told us to consider insight gained from empathetic feeling and canned theory to be inadequate by itself. You 've told us to engage in thoroughgoing manner with the person you are attempting to relate to.
You've told us to look for causal sequence when we can, to attempt to arrive at facts, to not settle for categories in place of particulars.
Everything you've laid out is consonant with the philosophical underpinnings of modern scientific method, but not consonant with much of medieval or classical thinking about the methods of arriving at truth.
Enough of this... Empathy allows you to understand the perspectives of others? By taking a few select characteristics as a framework and using your imagination and making assumptions? Only a fool could seriously believe it.
Quoting creativesoul
What is that supposed to mean? You don't have the answers you thought you did and you lack the humility to admit it? Or you are like a hungry lion who decided his prey is too much of an effort?
This is a good post, I can't understand how this post and your other posts came from the same person and so I'm just going to respond to this post by itself.
I don't actually have many opinions about how empathy works, I follow a general rule that if something is highly prevalent (90-99%) in humans across the spectrum of geographical, time, nurture and nature possibilities, it's almost certainly biological. However, there are many definitions for empathy and not all of them fit mine. Some people in this thread have called empathy things that I don't necessarily think are biological. It is an epistemological position I suppose, I haven't said that my philosophies aren't present in this thread.
Quoting Joshs
This is probably the most major claim in your post. I have three responses.
1. The way you've laid out things here is by far the least problematic interpretation of empathy and what to do with it that I can imagine. When I made this thread, I was really criticising people for overexaggerating empathy as a tool for understanding things. There have been posters in this thread who disagreed with me but probably aren't egregious offenders while others have taken empathy beyond the starting point you describe and take it as a tool for developing deep understanding.
I still think empathy is worthless as a tool for understanding people and that is probably generous. More accurately, in most situations, it's a harmful tool that sets you behind from the start.
2. Empathy is not equal as a starting point and 3. Empathy is not going to help us progress from starting point.
So we know little but we are making an effort to know more, we make some initial observations with empathy, using imagination mixed with some knowledge and experience, creating theories to be confirmed or forgotten. Now we must confirm the theories (I don't think most people actually do confirm them but let's be generous) and to do this we need to set empathy aside and start doing some real investigation. Asking questions, reading people, learning more information, challenging our assumptions and so on.
We have some theories that we are looking to confirm or deny, this is already kind of a problem. For you, it might not be but people don't like to have wrong theories. To go back to the soldier example I gave, which you can find on page 2 of this thread just search soldier, we have these ideas about what we're looking for, initial premises that serve as foundations for our investigation and theories. All of this is probably wrong when you constructed them with imagination and assumptions (empathy).
Your imagination and your assumptions were never going to provide you with truthful premises or sensible theories. You should never have had these biases to begin with.
You aren't starting at an equal point to alternatives at all. You could have made initial premises and theories using statistics, interviews, reports, bare-bone causal arguments and leaned more on what you knew rather than your speculation. Doing this means you're going to be asking the right questions and without a false understanding causing tunnel vision and bias. It would be better to start with no ideas than bad ones.
I realise that statistics, for example, don't provide you with absolute information. For example, the number one cause of divorce is cited to be money problems. So it might be reasonable in your questioning to focus on that when talking about divorce with someone who is getting divorced. This is better than trying to empathise with the person and using your experience or imagination to direct your investigation. I think this is pretty obvious. People who don't understand this are going to struggle to be successful at anything. You need to structure your thinking around the best evidence available.
I am not really sure what your position is, whether you are trying to help me overcome some problems you perceive in me or you are actually trying to argue empathy is a useful tool for understanding people. If it's the latter, this could just be /thread, empathy is at best a mediocre and unhelpful starting position and it definitely isn't going to help advance us from the starting position. Really, only Josh Alfred (page 2) gave a convincing argument for why empathy is a useful tool for understanding others and it's really more why empathy is a good tool for extracting information out of others but all the same, it's a good argument.
My argument against empathy could really be simplified as an argument against using imagination to understand truths (rather than for creation). These other things you bring up (gut feel, not questioning initial beliefs) are things I somewhat believe in and may have spoken about but do not serve an important role in my argument.
To this idea of the dichotomy between "imagination, theory and sentiment vs facts". So I'd change that to imagination and theory based on bad logic or false premises often created by imagination vs facts but not a big deal.
Quoting Joshs
You will find most of my posts in this thread arguing this same point with others, it is refreshing to hear some sense with regards to the importance of interpretation. I appreciate your technical retort to the way I've used the word "facts" and I am clearly in the wrong here (with my language). I didn't mean facts in the traditional sense, I really just meant at least attempting to interpret things (or using others' interpretations) observed by your senses or someone else senses in a way which passes your standards for acknowledging the validity or possible validity of that interpretation and its implications.
I talked a bit about how reading body language isn't empathy but it is useful for understanding people. How you interpret someone's body language is hardly an exact science, it's not a fact that if someone crosses their arms then they are suggesting something to you yet you may interpret it in a specific way.
I am actually happy for people to use this kind of information and call it credible (although requiring confirmation and not good by itself yada yada). So this is the contrast I wished to make between imagination and endeavour to understand things through better means.
I also want to mention that context is important here, we don't always necessarily have a lot of time to figure something out as we do in philosophy. So I am okay with going with your "gut feel" when you have no information, no time and you need something to go on. However, I really just don't see anything for empathy as a tool for understanding people. It's clearly horrible in contexts here you've got a lot of time and it's fairly horrible even if you've got no time.
I might trust someone intelligent to use empathy, I might not think it will betray them and lead them to falsehood. There may be antidotes to the dangers of empathy as a tool for understanding but for those who don't have them, they will be lead into falsehood and ignorance, among other things I haven't laid the groundwork to say.
As a social tool, empathy has unbelievable importance. It's a powerful instrument used to condition and manipulate, befriend, resolve disputes and it makes people more compassionate and courageous and so much more.
Yes or no, do you understand that no one is proposing that you'd literally have the other person's perspective? If you understand that, we can figure out what the idea is instead of that.
Although talking to you is clearly not going to produce any intellectually stimulating or informative discussions, there is a comedy to you that keeps me coming back.
I, Judaka, do solemnly here swear, that I do not and have never thought that Terrapin Station was suggesting empathy allows us to literally have another person's perspective.
I would ask God to encourage Terrapin Station to read what I write, instead of using his imagination and assumptions to inform himself about my views, so that we can get through a single idea without it requiring me to repeat myself several times.
Exploration is great, when I was younger I wanted to explore the world. As I got older, I guess I just got boring.
I didn't ask you what I was suggesting, but what is conventionally being referred to.
Okay, so if we're not talking about literally having another person's perspective, what are we talking about? Any idea?
Conventionally? You think you follow convention, do you?
Do I really need to explain to you that I don't believe in magical powers that people to LITERALLY see other peoples' perspectives? Are you out of your mind? Do you even know what literally means?
I never said anything about seeing things from other peoples' perspectives - YOU DID. You told me that empathy allows us to understand different peoples' perspectives. You asserted "The idea of empathy is not that you're literally going to have someone else's perspective. That's obviously not possible".
In my OP, there's nothing about that. In none of my comments either. I've been patient and explained no to you despite the absurdity and you still don't seem convinced.
Do you think you're being reasonable? I can't tell you what we're talking about, I know you don't understand me and I don't understand you, that much is obvious.
Here's the question I'm interested in you thinking about: "Okay, so if we're not talking about literally having another person's perspective, what are we talking about? Any idea?"
(Feel free to respond with a few hundred words that just ignore answering the question, though.)
Quoting Terrapin Station
Quoting Judaka
Quoting Judaka
Quoting Terrapin Station
Quoting Judaka
Quoting Terrapin Station
I probably missed some good ones but I find this funny, perhaps I have a bad sense of humour. I mean you might not be able to understand my answer to your question from this but let's be honest, there wasn't much chance even if I just answered simply anyway.
If I said that I'm surprised you didn't answer "Okay, so if we're not talking about literally having another person's perspective, what are we talking about? Any idea?" would you believe me?
No.
At least you have some insight about that. :razz:
...
I like the brevity, at least.
Nah. Some things aren't worth pursuing. One who does not comprehend the words he reads isn't worth arguing with. You've quoted numerous things and then asked questions that were answered within the quote.
Meh.
Are you serious...? You haven't even understood that you've spent most of your time in this thread arguing against positions I don't have.
What a donkey.
You've claimed that empathy cannot lead to better understanding people.
That's one thing you're wrong about.
You've claimed that no one can empathize with and/or understand a group of people because they are all different people with different personal experiences, or some such...
That's another thing you're wrong about.
When we empathize with a group of people, say young American blacks, it means that we understand the all too common difficulties that group faces on a daily basis. We can know that young black men get harassed by police far more than whites. We can know that young black men get sentenced far more often and for much longer sentences for the same crimes as whites. We need not know anything at all about their personal particulars to be able to empathize with them as a group, based upon what is common to the group.
:kiss:
This is so stupid, hurts my eyes to read.
Groups are comprised of individuals, who are not just black men being harassed by police officers. You are clearly trying to imagine what it's like to be subjected to a specific action or event and that's all.
Once again, same question, what do you think you've learned by empathising with them? Tell me one thing. It's a nuisance to be harassed by police officers? Great insight.
You wouldn't try to use your imagination to learn about any other complicated topic like even basic chemistry or biology. Why would anyone try to use it for something as complicated as understanding other people? Only an idiot would try.
Even if you came up with an idea of how it feels, you still need to contend with the fact that not every African-American man is even subjected to police harassment and those who are will have dramatically different perspectives about it. Logically, at best, you have the ability to understand a possible interpretation/reaction/feeling towards police harassment and even THEN you could have just listened to people who have been subjected to police harassment to get a clear understanding of how other people have perceived it in the past and the effects.
I think the main part of your argument relies on incredulousness that mainstream ideas aren't being taken for granted as true. Not uncommon on forums like these but characteristically leaves you supremely lacking in any justification for any of your assertions which makes for poor conversation.
All things are fundamentally founded in Chaos, awaiting Order to structure Chaos for better understanding, moving toward the objective of the universal Law of Order. An objective which seeks sustainability.
Therefore, the judgment that empathy is worthless for understanding people is fallacious in its assertion per Nirvana Fallacy that since it is imperfect it is undoubtedly worthless. But imperfect by who’s standards? One who possesses the pinnacle of empathy? Or one who may believe they possess a certain degree of empathy? Possibly truer- very limited amount. Again- fallacious.
The only worthless notion is in committing such an intellectual blunder. But then again, the blunder educates the perceiver of a great many things about the blunderer; so not worthless in and of itself, per se, just in reference to the initial declaration.
Speculation? Possibly. But out of the ten truths I have gathered based on the initial post, I can successfully posit at least three facts.
Fact 1: There are differing degrees of possessed empathy.
Fact 2: Perfectionists possess underdeveloped cognition (a sign of youth or ignorance; possibly both).
Fact 3: Trying to judge empathy as worthless based on faulty understanding precluded by one’s fallible subjectivity is fallacious.
Truth 1: Sometimes ad hominem to counter ad hominem is the correct course of action in bringing things back to order (or is at least entertaining).
Truth 2: There is a general lacking in both better understanding and usage of empathy for understanding people.
Truth 3: Condescending pseudo-intellectual arrogance is unbefitting.
Truth 4: Redundant realism will rear its all too familiar head.
Truth 5: Test me and you will be made a fool.
Truth 6: This is quite a first post.
Truth 7: I am badass.
In light of this: your original statement of empathy being worthless for understanding people is true in a sense. Here’s why:
One does not seek to empathize with people. One empathizes with a person. One does not empathize with homeless people. One empathizes with a homeless person. Taken in this truer context, empathy is a highly useful and worthwhile tool for assessing individual circumstances and situations; not fully understanding. Nothing alone will allow one to understand someone else. It is a collective, multifaceted effort. Even then it is impossible to fully and completely understand someone, but closer is better than farther. The effectiveness, of course, will be determined by the level or degree of empathy an individual possesses- imagination to intuition ratio (?). Though I may have taken you too literally when you said “people” when you probably meant person.
Pursuant to the logic aforementioned, empathy works in understanding specifics, not generalizations.
You think too broadly; may I suggest taking your own advice about specificity?
OT: And the number one cause of divorce is actually marriage. Again, practice specificity.
How do you act/react regarding others? In other words how do you deal with people and know how what and when to do something? Empathy? I guess in the world today empathy isn't that important as it's the rule rather than the exception to tread on people's dreams.
I hope you haven't forgotten I am talking about empathy as a tool for understanding people. Half the people in this thread either forgot or never bothered to read OP.
I think empathy as a guide for behaviour is an interesting topic that would take a while to really unpack.
One on hand, a teenager who can't understand why their parent wants them to keep their room clean (because they themselves don't care about having a clean room) seems irrelevant to the overall issue that they should care about what their parents want because well, their parents are doing so much for them and it's not a big deal to clean your room. So empathy just becomes guessing if you can't relate and it's a bit silly.
However, on the other hand, it's a fairly good indication that you shouldn't do something to somebody if you imagine they won't like it - they probably won't, it's just a good assumption to make.
I usually deal with sentiments, follow social conventions and reading body language and etc. In scenarios where I really know nothing, I use something similar to empathy, whereby I make assumptions based on common interpretations. Like if your husband calls you useless, the marriage probably isn't going well. That's just putting 1+1 together really.
Empathy has a big impact on me for many moral considerations though. When I think about how it must feel to be beaten by your husband, molested by a father/uncle, fired by a company you've been loyal to. That really can bother me at times and without empathy, I don't know if I'd care as much.
Ok.
Josh, I'm surprised you didn't peg me with Habermas rather than Gadamer. I respect both, but the only influence I acknowledge is Plato.
I am not presenting criticism in this thread towards empathy as a motivator. If you say the world would be a worse place without empathy, I would not disagree with you.
Let me share one of my theories with you too, when you go into the ring swinging wildly and with eyes closed, your punches are going to miss. The whole first half of your post is prefaced upon this idea that I've said empathy is flawed therefore we can't use it. I challenge you to quote where I've written anything like this.
When you can do that perhaps we can discuss more on what you've written. I don't think your post deserves much attention because of how - dare I say it - fallacious, the whole thing is. You call opinions facts, you strawman, you are blabbering on about "imperfection" and such that is completely missing from anything I've talked about. The concept of using imagination to gain complicated knowledge and understanding is stupid and I've talked extensively about why that is, what alternatives exist and why empathy is a terrible tool for understanding people.
Ironically, you criticise me for bringing up that people can't empathise with groups like it's another fallacy of mine. Many people in this thread are still to this very day, in disagreement with me that you can't empathise with groups. Evidence that people try to empathise with groups is everywhere, this is a thread criticising that idea among other things.
I am currently talking with Joshs about the idea of empathy being used as a contributor among other things to gain understanding. You can read my replies to him about this, empathy is not as good of a starting position for understanding as alternatives and it doesn't help to further your understanding from the start position. Nobody in this thread has been able to contest these ideas in the slightest and most people just stop responding to me when I ask them to give me good counterarguments to these ideas.
You're a badass though right? Read my last response to Joshs or creativesoul and you give me an answer.
If you care at all, you're employing empathy.
empathy has nothing to do with understanding, but rather an abstraction of what's understood.
You can be beguiled by others actions, should you be empathetic is not always answered based on graphic, but is to be used tactically. Graphic definitely comes into consideration when the probability is that it's true graphic nature, but not empircally; graphic is second in the heirarchy - but first is ego or compulsion.
Am I emphathetic to you reader when considering your eyes? Yes, I am, but there is also a learning curve where I have performed a certain way; so empathy can also be a enhancing process.
Empathy could only lead to understanding if you were a spy, in that context. However, Empathy has a second process, that's enhancing. Therefore, Empathy is worthless for understanding others, but not for personal learning; it's good to be wisely empathetic.
I wouldn't go that far in all situations but for me personally, I probably wouldn't care at all about people being beaten and abused as long as it was far away from me, without empathy being a factor.
Josh,
Plato has been done to death? Well empathy is "dialectic", isn't it?
Making of any fundamental condition of reason a practical tool for understanding particular circumstances is to run ahead of oneself, and to abandon philosophy.
Bathos, for instance, is an effort to jump to worthless conclusions, from a, maybe, worthy intuition. That distinction, I think, will bring a bit of clarity to this discussion. It is analogous, I suppose to imagining your thesis proved by the fact that it has yet to face a suitable trial-and-error test. Scientific intuition is the driver of material understanding. To deem it worthless would be to condemn a lot of potential knowledge to oblivion.
Depending on information necessary to confirm or refute we could be capable or incapable but there are contexts which are fairly uncontentious.
For instance, incorrect characterisations in so far as incorrect but plausible interpretations of cause for expressing emotion. The baby as an example, believing it is crying because it is has an itchy rash because you perceive/imagine through empathy the qualities of causing "crying" in the rash but the baby only stops crying when given milk bottle, supporting idea the baby was crying because it was hungry. Could probably think of more concrete examples if needed.
As we go into adults, they can specifically recount their reason for display of emotion and offer corrections to imagined reasons obtained through empathy. This occurs too with actions such as with the soldier not wishing to talk about his experience in war; presumed to be because of traumatic experiences but the individual soldier could recount "bored of talking to people about his experiences" or "feeling tired and don't want to talk at all".
Things only become harder to confirm/refute incorrectness when we are talking about the "experience" of things but in most cases, we can verbalise feelings with some accuracy and observe disparities which lean towards different experiences. My anger may occur due to different reasons, it may manifest itself differently and it may result in different motivations - most of this can be identified.
I can only imagine higher requirements for confirmation/refutation than communication to result in an inability to confirm/refute correct or incorrectness of claims made through empathy but even that only covers just some claims. There's possibiy examples where we legitimately can't confirm/refute and in that case, you may have a point.
In conclusion. there is not much need for "imagining" empathy to be wrong when we have methods of knowing when it was or wasn't.
In this capacity, some are more accurate than others. It is disturbing when one encounters a person who sees even when one has a good mask to hide behind.
Challenge accepted:
Along with the title "Empathy is worthless for understanding people" should be a self-evident assertion of your stand in and of itself, no?
What I love about this forum is the seeming ability to edit previous posts without an indicator that such editing has occurred. At least per my limited experience. ;-)
Another aspect of this forum seems to be no notification of a response to posts. At least per my experience. Here I thought you had forgotten about me. :(
And yes, I am badass. Strategy is ever my forte, so my posts to anyone is a feeling out of sorts. The initial post is always one of seemingly closed-minded argument with some truths asserted. How you took it and attempted to conceal was quite revealing in itself. (I am revealing this to you because my time here is done.)
The editing of posts for more sound construction and argument is noted and appreciated- this means you are developing; seeking more solid foundations which is a proponent of wisdom aiming but at the same time the action of editing without an acknowledgment of prior falsities is slight-handed/misleading. If you claim your post to be of the same intent, then the proof of this intent will be evident somewhere in this thread- eventually.
With this said, the structure of this forum is lacking for my personal tastes, so I will excuse myself. Carry on.
I asked you to find a quote of me saying that the problem with using empathy as a tool for understanding is because it is imperfect... what the hell is this quote? Also, what do you think I edited? My OP hasn't been edited since you responded to me lol. You just made some stuff up which doesn't jive with any of my posts in this thread and there are many. I'm not going to go through them all and edit them for any reason.
I’m not sure if it’s done to quote yourself, however, what I meant was that to believe you can understand someone through empathy is just projecting. Empathy is not a lot different from making soothing noises to a crying baby. Empathy makes the world a better place to live in but it doesn’t help you understand an individual. I’m not sure if a psychologist is really achieving much by empathising. Could he do the same thing without empathising? Maybe.
Well, I was explicit in allowing you the opportunity to reject the evidence of the individual's testimony, though stronger evidence is available in some cases. I am not entirely sure what you are talking about with regards to your premise, not sure how the act of inference denatures a premise or what signposts are moving.
You can question your premise whenever you want, sometimes you will be forced to question your premise and that's far better than taking your premise for granted. Empathy isn't nearly as problematic in the hands of people like Joshs who intend to question what they learn from it. It's more of a problem when people take a premise from empathy and start building conclusions and using that conclusion as a premise in more conclusions and it all started from some really weak premises which got taken for granted as true.
We are of the same mind on this Brett, I can see where you're coming from, to simplify someone else's existence to the level required for empathy does mean that you're characterising them based on just a small bit of information. As though a homeless man is JUST a homeless man and not "Bill" who's really so much more than that.
Quite possibly it’s still around because it satisfies this narcissistic experience. Which is not to deny, as a consequence, that it has also contributed to society, but not to understanding people in the way Judaka is referring to.
If I create two AI with same features wouldn't one understand the other by understanding itself. Of course it's very difficult to imagine what it's like to be a bat but we're not bats.
So, are you saying we’re, all of us on this forum, or most of us, purposely misunderstanding each other?
I've heard of people who reject biological differences b/w people but not both nature and nurture differences as would be with AI (possibly).
Empathy isn't perfect. We can't read minds but we can make a rough estimate of the physical and mental state of other people. Can't we? We can't be 100% right but empathy has an accuracy of over 50% meaning its better than just random guessing.
What could the basis for empathy?
From an evolutionary viewpoint it must've been selected for in social creatures that need to co-operate for survival. The fact that a particular social species are similar in biology makes empathy much easier and effective. Dogs are social creatures and they seem to have empathy in that they can read eachother and even us humans who reciprocate in a similar manner.
Another thing is there are rules in a social structure. These rules are created through consensus on ethics, etc. Once any social rule gains currency we can use empathy to understand eachother. Nobody likes internet trolls and flamers for example.
Oh the irony...
Therefore, the OP statement is false.
Quoting TheMadFool
I can’t just accept those figures at random like that. Nor do I think anyone could come up with any percentages.
But, yes, we can make a rough estimate of the physical and mental state of other people. And that would contribute enough to enable people to co-operate, which is all that’s required for survival, besides the obvious. But I wouldn’t call it, necessarily, an understanding
A social rule doesn’t need any understanding, it only needs agreement or adherence. Nor, I imagine, are social rules always agreed to by concensus, or necessarily based on ethics. Sometimes they’re enforced through violence.
It’s interesting about dogs, because they may seem to have empathy, but does an animal of that intelligence really understand another dog? Is cowering in deference to a bigger dog an understanding or instinct?
I know how much I value self-direction, freedom, the ability to improve my life's circumstances. I know this because I recognize the undeniable benefits that these things add to my life. By virtue of my knowing this, I can imagine what I wouldn't be able to do without them.
I certainly can imagine how unfulfilling life may be in a slave's eyes. I can certainly imagine how fearful for one's own health, well-being, and safety one may be when they are under the thumb of one who cared little to nothing at all about them as a person.
I've never been a slave. I could not imagine any of this if I didn't care enough to hear the words from the people with whom I empathize. Empathy most certainly can lead to better understanding an other.
Imagining what an other's life may be like can consist of true thought/belief.
If person A has a set of true thoughts/beliefs about an other's life, feelings, attitude, hopes, disappointments, etc., then person A has some understanding of an other.
That’s the problem, it’s just your imagination.
What makes that a problem?
Your saying it is so does not make it so... ya know?
You'll have to do better than that. Address one of the arguments.
Yes. Those are my numbers. You agree though that our empathy works well as a rough estimate.
Quoting Brett
For a rational being any rule must be reasonable. We can make arbitrary rules but these usually fall into disuse with time and, sometimes, even incite revolution. History proves this.
I mentioned ethics because I think empathy is most relevant to the subject. Empathy is mainly about getting a sense of another person's situation especially regarding happiness/suffering and isn't that an ethical issue?
Because you are using imagination in place of certain knowledge. You’re not directly experiencing the situation of the other, you’re experiencing ideas of the other, your ideas.
I’m not sure which arguments I should be addressing.
So 50% of the time we can have a rough estimate of the physical and mental state of others. Is that really an understanding?
Listening may lead to partial understanding. I’m not sure what you mean by better understanding. Better than no understanding?
This is true. You can get a sense of another person’s situation.
The accuracy is higher than 50% i.e. we're likely to be correct about our assessment. People gamble with lesser odds so this level of correctness is acceptable. Don't you think?
Again. Says you. Your saying that it is so does not make it so... ya know?
All imagination consists in/of thought/belief.
Some thought/belief is true.
Some imagination is true.
Some true thought/belief is well grounded.
Some true imagination(s) is(are) well grounded.
All well grounded true belief is knowledge.
Some well grounded true belief is imagination.
All well grounded true imagination(s) is(are) knowledge.
QED
Start there.
More is better. There is no such thing as complete understanding. Leading to more is arriving at better.
The OP is just plain false. It works from a few utterly inadequate conceptions... All of the germane ones! Everyday fact contradicts it at every turn.
We're dealing with yet another logical fiction, and that's being quite generous in the assessment... granting coherency and/or lack of self-contradiction.
You wouldn't dare apply your absurd logic about imagination to any other field, you wouldn't use it to try to understand any science field, to learn any game to do anything where we could clearly see whether you were good/understood that thing or not.
I'm not criticising someone like Einstein using imagination, he's doing that for inspiration and to explore possibilities which he will then confirm or investigate. I also use imagination like this for people, if I see someone crying, I may come up with some reasons why that might be and then either confirming or not confirming but hardly saying I understand something because I did that.
Only because you have never witnessed the results of whether empathy is giving you correct answers or not, do you presume it could be effective. I do think if you make an effort to empathise with someone and they are in a situation where they wanted you to empathise with them, you're not going to receive a detailed account of your inaccuracies.
When you're not talking about imagination; reading body language, seeing expressions, interpreting sentiments, you're not talking about empathy. Trying to apply causal arguments to the existence or denial of freedom is similarly, not empathy.
I'm not getting anywhere with imagination so instead let's consider how something like slavery is not the same for everybody.
Surely, it matters who enslaved you and how you're being treated - are you being fed, are you being beaten/raped, how gruelling are the tasks you are forced to perform, were you constantly injured/sick, how educated you were. were you being regularly humiliated and so much more? Surely, all these things matter in how someone is experiencing slavery?
Then people with different temperaments, personalities, levels of intelligence and all the reasons for varying interpretations and emotional proclivities surely experienced those individual things differently? Not everyone who is raped feels exactly the same way about it. People experience it, react and are changed by it differently, surely you see that?
Then people like TheMadFool tell me there's a 50%+ chance of understanding what's going on, I wonder exactly what he's talking about? Understanding whether someone is sad or not? As though empathy is the only way to draw a connection between emotions and sentiments.
You are at best imagining a single possibility for how someone experienced and was impacted by slavery and realistically the whole topic is too complicated for you to do anything but understand sentiments. You'd be much better off just reading a diary from a few slaves/former slaves, you'd already be miles ahead of someone who was using empathy.
Is there a valid refutation in the midst of that? A valid criticism? An argument of your own perhaps?
Edit:Nope.
So many games you could play, where winning is all that matters and yet you're here, how perplexing.
Perplexing... you say???
What you say here is contradicted everyday all day long by actual events.
Hmm, there is not much winning to be had in arguments about philosophy. It is rare beyond belief to see someone admit they are wrong but very common to see both sides of the debate believing they won it just as I suppose we both think now. I am not here to win any debates, I want to see the strength of my arguments and perhaps see the weaknesses in my arguments as pointed out by others.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaRUALK3550&t=189s
So, here is a pretty good example showing what empathy does do and what it doesn't do, in everyday life.
The reality tv show kitchen nightmares shows Gordon Ramsay meeting an owner after having argued a lot about what changes need to be made to the restaurant. He goes to visit her and tries to understand her better and get on the same page. I think he does a good job of it but look carefully at what actually occurs.
Firstly, he is responding to:
1. Expressed sentiments
2. Knowledge he has about the restaurant business and the likely effects of owning a failing business.
3. Information he has about her and her son
She says that things are very stressful for her, she feels let down by her son and a lot of personal information which she considers relevant. Gordon takes her side, empathises with her difficulties and tries to pick her back up and comfort her.
I think this is great but let's look at exactly what he understood and how he understood it. He says:
1. She's dealing with a lot of stress
2. She's agitated and deeply concerned
3. She's letting the negativity of the business impact her
None of this knowledge is being acquired with imagination, it's all been laid out before him and he is making statements backed up by quite a lot of evidence. She expressed all those things with her body language and statements, it's likely that someone with a failing business and debt is going to be stressed and deeply concerned about that.
He isn't really promising to understand these things in any detail beyond what has been laid out for him. He hasn't ventured into the realm of imagination and started deducing beyond what is well-evidenced. Although he clearly empathises with her on an emotional level, the basis for his understanding is intellectual and is based off on his understanding of her sentiments, body language and the situation.
I think this is how empathy should operate and it can only really work with a single individual rather than a group. That's not to say you can't expect owners of failing businesses to be stressed and concerned. You can do that, I'm just saying that there's a difference between making a causal argument and using empathy (putting yourself in that situation) even if the answer is similar, empathy just goes too far in its predictions.
I will read over what I've said in this thread later with fresh eyes and keep copies of my responses which I want to use to better my argumentation and understanding. You can continue to win against me in your mind, I would imagine a real victory that can be attained in a game would be more satisfying but each to their own.
Does anyone really empathise with someone who is arrogant, rude, cynical, just plain dislikable. Very rarely I would think.
All imagination consists in/of thought/belief.
True.
Some thought/belief is true.
True. But you don’t yet know which one.
Some imagination is true.
True. But you don’t know which parts.
Some true thought/belief is well grounded.
When it’s been tested against certain knowledge.
Some true imagination(s) is(are) well grounded.
Ditto.
All well grounded true belief is knowledge.
After it’s been tested against certain knowledge.
Of course there is.
Quoting Judaka
I’m going to try and empathise with you, because you appear to want to win something here at all costs. I don’t know you so I’m going to use my imagination and what I can glean from your posts.
Sometimes you seem quite aggressive, almost like there’s issues of anger with those who disagree with you. I don’t know, I’m just using my imagination. Maybe you have some issues with your past that cause this aggressive nature. I imagine that those issues with people who disagree with you may have something to do with issues of authority. Could be teachers, parents, the boss, I’m not sure, but I do empathise with your situation. Authority is something we all have to live with. Maybe you might consider previous experiences with authority, was it you or was it them? I don’t know, I’m just using my imagination and my own experiences with authority when I was young.
If you’d like to share thoughts and feelings I’d be happy to listen.
Excellent analysis :lol:
You can't question your premise without yielding inferences already assumed to confirm it. But if not, how does a premise form to begin with? As you exchange posts with the other contributors here, your terms alter in ways you cannot keep track of. It is that untraceable growth in the meaning of terms and the ability to engage them that is the meaning we, partially, recognize in the concept of "empathy". Do you suppose you have a right to be understood? Where could such a supposition possibly come from but an inability to trace the source of your terms, either to your own Humpty-Dumpty dogma, or as a mystical gift from the community or from some divine or regulatory authority? Empathy, as I say, is a, partial, recognition of this untraceable source of the terms by which we suppose we understand and suppose we have a right to be understood. Synthesis is the ultimate term of an untenable supposition in the continuity of analysis. That is the enigma that got philosophy going to begin with and that still is yet to be resolved. Not really even kept sight of. I don't read posts carefully if they are not addressed to me, and if the thread is extensive, but from what I can see in a cursory browsing of this discussion it seems your "solution" is very far from being philosophically well-founded, and more like a kind of techno-babble folk psychology.
What terms? What's that got to do with empathy?
Quoting Gary M Washburn
....
Have I said I think I have a right to be understood? I have argued against the use of empathy as a tool for understanding people because I think it leads people towards falsehood, not because I felt it was giving me a bad shake. What terms are you referring to?
Quoting Gary M Washburn
What?
Quoting Gary M Washburn
I'm not going to answer this for you, I completely expect you to run away. I want you to construct for me some semblance of what you think my solution is. I am not asking for the whole thing, just enough to prove your point.
Imagination doesn't lead to understanding though... so you say.
:smirk:
Empathy can lead to understanding. It does not always. But it can.
I'm out.
Your quote doesn't even mention using imagination. I'm sure he's talking about the expressed views of the characters, knowledge about their history provided in the book and other things of that nature.
I disagree strongly with your position but I know of a lot of smart people who agree with you, no hard feelings.
I’m not sure what you’re referring to as Judaka’s “solution”. Solution to what?
He wanted to test the idea of empathy being worthless for understanding.
Let me break this down.
1) Engaging with the terms, what they mean, is the actual meaning of empathy that, in part, exists in
the idea of empathy.
2) Empathy is, partly, engaging with the terms and their meaning about empathy.
What might some of these terms be? Caring, listening, concern, sharing?
So “the terms” take us back to the meaning of empathy. What is it?
Which means you’re statement is a question about what empathy means.
Is that right?
It’s because the writer creates the character, (in a God- like way) that he understand it fully. That’s my point. Because he creates it he understands every aspect of it. Whereas in reality we live outside the lives of people around us.
It mentions a fictional character. Fictional characters are imagined.
Fictional characters give greater understanding.
You also argue the following...
Imagination is useless for understanding other people.
The problem is clear.
Fictional characters are imagined. Therefore, those two claims contradict one another. At least one of them is false.
I might have created another problem by introducing the novel. But it’s here so I might as well deal with it.
The two claims are only contradictory in the light you’re seeing them.
Yes the writer uses imagination to create a character, and that character might seem real. But it’s still a fictional character, not real except in the world of that novel, also not real. This is probably the great quality of great fiction, it gives us the rare experience, not at all real, of getting inside someone’s mind. Great writers produce characters who seem to live on outside the book as if they are real.
But the writer is still the creator of the character, just, as it seems to me, you are creating the character of the person you are empathising with by taking what signals they give and what your own experiences are. So you are both creating a character that you then respond to.
Judaka’s question, to me, is just the eternal question; can we understand the world through our feelings and ideas?
Nah. You didn't create another problem. Rather, it simply highlighted the inherent issues in the position you've been arguing for.
Use it wisely.
Realize that sometimes imagination can indeed lead one to better understanding an other. Revisit your position and make the necessary adjustments. It's not a big deal...
Just a matter of changing "all" to "some"...
No need.
Judaka and you both seem to me to be working from a few mistaken notions... The position requires a strong, sharp, and complete dissection of imagination from knowledge...
It's quite simply not possible... at all... to divorce the two.
Both consist of thought/belief, as does understanding.
Nah. No hard feelings.
You may feel strongly. But your disagreement does not have strong justificatory ground. The argument you've presented is not strong at all. Full of conviction. Yes. But weak when compared to actual events.
I’m assuming you don’t mean that imagination and knowledge are the same thing, but that they are linked. For instance Einstein imagined himself sitting on a photon of light then went on to write his formula for relativity.
Would that be a fair statement of what you mean?
Close.
Both consist entirely of thought/belief. Not all thought/belief is true. Knowledge must be. Imagination need not be. Not all thought/belief is well grounded. Knowledge must be. Imagination need not be.
So, no...
Imagination and knowledge are not equivalent. Rather, they are both kinds of thought/belief.
Well, you may have decided not to leave the thread but I don't have much more to say to you. You tell me I'm working on mistaken notions but you don't say what, I give you the problems of empathy and you don't give counterarguments.
At this point, since there's so much I've said that you haven't argued against, there's no reason for me to change my argument just because you're ignoring it, all that's left is for me to repeat myself. You act as though I haven't provided any arguments but realistically if they're so weak you would have just dismantled them rather than ignoring them.
I think that there are situations where you could have provided some stronger arguments for your position. Such as an actual slave trying to empathise with another slave. However, nobody in the thread has actually provided counterarguments to the specifics of my argument. Many come here and assert their own positions, which is fine, but don't tell me my argument is weak when most people just left the thread before even trying to justify their positions against my arguments.
The only people who remain sadly, are people who don't feel that they need to deal with my arguments. You, themadfool and gary. I don't think any of you are even capable of explaining my position. You just say they're invalid without even saying what was invalid and really, they're clearly relevant problems.
Until you actually deal with my arguments, it's just an endurance contest. I didn't create this thread for that.
That's just not true.
The simple counter-arguments have been given, without subsequent due attention. Those arguments do not negate everything you've claimed. Nor do I disagree with everything you've claimed. I've argued against the parts that I disagree with.
Any and all claims that rest their laurels(that are grounded upon) the mistaken ideas that a)empathy is useless for understanding an other, and b)imagination is useless for understanding an other.
Neither is sufficient, all by itself. Both are necessary.
I'm trying to help you formulate a better understanding of what you're talking about.
But from what I understand here you said our mistake was to dissect imagination from knowledge, to separate them, that it’s not possible to divorce the two.
May I suggest that you read this page a bit more carefully?
Yes...
And?
Well it seems to me you are saying knowledge must be true, imagination need not be. Those are almost opposite things, even if they consist of thought/belief.
Well, imagination can be false. Knowledge cannot. However, imagination can consist of well-grounded true belief...
Imagination can be knowledge.
Why what?
"Why" is a psychological interrogative.
Suit yourself.
"How" is a better question.
I imagine all this... then I go help. While there I talk to them and hear their story, see their hope return, watch them smile...
Some of my imaginings were true at the time I imagined them. Others became true(prediction/expectations were verified). All were partially grounded upon my own experience, partially grounded upon my imaginings. This was the experience they were still having. It was not a complete understanding of their situation, yet the empathy led to acting, driven by imaginings. The result was greater understanding...
Always is.
Try it sometime.
I am not criticising as a motivator, I agree that people make an effort to understand each other only because empathy caused them to care in the first place. I consider this to be the strongest counterargument to my position, it was something I knew already but my interpretation is that empathy as a motivator is not helping you to understand, it's just making you want to understand but I will respect disagreement on this issue.
I think you had many opportunities to bring up less contentious examples than things like slavery and police targetting of black youth, which are fairly preposterous examples that are easy to dismantle.
Take something like empathising with someone losing their car keys, it's annoying to you so it's a fair assumption that they find it annoying too. Everyone decided to bring up trying to empathise with groups or empathise on complex issues and represented the worst in utilising empathy as a tool for understanding people.
I am sure in the cases where you listen to what people are saying, you read their body language and try to confirm/deny assumptions you're making - that you reach a greater understanding. The question remains as to whether empathy did anything to help. If you had gone and talked to someone, asked them what's wrong, listened to them and asked them how they felt about it - you've already got all the information you wanted to get by using empathy. So what was the point of imagining it?
I think empathy for better or worse, suffers from implicit biases which are extensive and you may take what they say and try to imagine what it's like but it's more likely you're wrong than right and by quite a margin. You may get pieces of the truth which you could then further seek to confirm/deny but once again, why didn't you just ask more questions instead of imagining things?
As for groups, go do some research, listen to people and try to understand the facts. I don't know what information you're seeking to attain through empathy that you can't get a far more accurate picture by just doing a little research or investigation (by asking questions for example). I've asked you but you haven't given answers.
If you want to agree to disagree then it's probably for the best, we've been going in circles for a while now.
EDIT: I always want to mention that you can make logical conclusions without empathy.
Another Kitchen Nightmares example which I think is pretty instructive on this you can watch if you want but I'll just explain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUvl9D_IMW8
Sushi Ko is a failing Japanese restaurant with an old chef as an owner named Akira who no longer cooks. When Gordon Ramsay eats there, he thinks the food is disgusting but he already knows that Akira should be aware that the food is awful. Usually people either defend the food (denial), act defeated (given up) or accept they're wrong and don't know what they're doing.
When Akira a chef who should know better didn't argue back, it seemed obvious for Gordon to assume he's given up and when he talked to the family and they agreed, this seemed all but confirmed.
We don't need to empathise with Akira, his actions speak for themselves and with a little insight, we can make strong causal arguments that didn't require us to just believe everything Akira says.
I've offered an argumentative refutation of the OP's title. I've argued that imagination can be knowledge. None of this has been given due subsequent attention.
Imagination is useless in the pursuit of knowledge. Not always. I'm granting some of the things you've argued. Sometimes, that is the case.
However. at other times, it is clearly not the case. That is what you're failing to grasp here.
One can remember previous times. One can remember previous difficulties. One can recognize when another is going through the same sort of thing. All of this consists of thought/belief. One's recollection can match another's experience. One's account of a shared event can be similar enough to another's actual current experience in the same event/situation.
One can use empathy as a means for better understanding an other. Sometimes, it is a successful endeavor without much effort. Other times the success is impeded a bit, and it takes a bit more...
I understand what you're saying creativesoul, I've met many who've argued the same things. I am willing to grant you that you may be able to add to your pool of theories with empathy in a manner which is useful, in contexts where you have experience. My title is hyperbole.
I think we may also disagree on what empathy is and what it isn't, here's an example. I am introvert and for the life of me sometimes, I can't fathom how an extrovert thinks. Intellectually I understand but I'd feel much more comfortable trying to understand an introvert than an extrovert because I have my own experience as an introvert. So when an extrovert talks about their experiences, I got no idea what they're talking about emotionally.
This doesn't mean I will try to empathise with any introverts I see but I can relate to their experiences. Is that empathy? I would argue it's not but we may disagree on this? I think it would be very difficult for me to understand an alien than another human for these reasons but I still I will at best use empathy to create theories. I don't agree with how others have said that they would use empathy and if everyone used empathy in the way I'm describing, this thread wouldn't exist.
I don't think that we will agree on what empathy can accomplish, how useful it is and how harmful it is as a tool for understanding people. You've provided mostly examples of where empathy is not only useless but harmful, such as understand people you've never met, who went through experiences very different from yourself.
I think what you'll find is that people will appreciate that you've made an effort to empathise with them and gloss over inaccuracies or specifics to show appreciation. The shallow understanding achieved through empathy is not something entirely required by empathy and the deeper down the rabbit hole you go, the more we see important differences which will probably never show up in anything but a very deep conversation.
People accuse me in this thread of not being capable of empathy but this is unfair, I am a keen observer of people and I have the natural ability like anybody else. If we're talking about lower level examples, I think where I disagree with people is at the level of specificity. I also disagree that empathy is needed to understand anything at the surface level and it's conflated with other tools like reading body language, listening and understanding contexts.
If we're talking about understanding complicated issues using empathy, understanding groups or understanding people outside of a specific context, forget it.
Quoting Judaka
The first statement above false. As a result, the second is as well.
Introvert/extrovert?
Those are useless for understanding an other...
Hmm, this isn't going anywhere, my response would lead us back to where we started.
Thx for chat but I'm done here.
You could always address the arguments.
The difference between analysis and synthesis is philosophy 101. The terms I refer to are every word you type at us. Yes, you have stated a belief you have a right to be understood. You have stated, quite explicitly, empathy plays no worthwhile part in your understanding others or, presumably, in your expectation of our understanding you. Well, who could empathize with that? But the question remains, where the hell do you think the terms of your understanding come from? Our empathy for you seems a likely candidate! Rather more likely than whatever these "other ways of understanding" you may think you mean. But, I'm afraid that wrangling with dogmatists is futile.
Your response was much like I expected, lazy and pathetic. You didn't paraphrase any of my views but only continued to act as though you know me well enough to make the assertions you do.
I don't know where your ideas about me came from but you seem to think you understand me well. This thread was never about me whining about people misusing empathy to understand me, if you want to make assumptions and roll on with them then go ahead. I am here to learn and practice philosophy, continue to revel in your ignorance and only stop at your leisure. However, it is not possible to learn about anything when someone is off in their own little world is it?
What is the argument you made which has not been addressed?
The reality is that I could go through each post and find multiple lies in each one, the latest is that I asked for empathy, that I have conflated the claims of empathy as a pre-requisite to understanding with it being conclusive and that I deny both. Last post you made up a lot, I asked you to back up your words and not only do you fail to do that but you lie even more. You still haven't stopped misrepresenting me. There is a discussion going on between Gary and Gary's Judaka but I'm not involved and really, I don't care.
You've made a lot of good points Robson. I can see that if you see continuity between what you think you would do in a situation and what someone else is doing in that situation, you may gain insights into what they could be thinking, particularly if the reason seems obvious.
The question really becomes, just how many thoughts are capable of causing that action? The limitations of empathy as a tool for understanding in such a context are clear when you:
1. Apply it to groups.
2. Apply it to people you don't know
At least, it seems you understand the problems with doing that which mostly comes down to incomplete information and multiple possibilities of "why" with no way of eliminating any of them (with empathy). Even with people we do know, where we have some information, the problem becomes how specific we need to be. The greater the specificity needed, the greater the knowledge requirements are and mostly this can only come from that person specifically. Realistically if we have the ability to ask questions, we should just ask them how they feel and why rather than make assumptions.
I think that if you know someone well though, empathy is possibly not the best because you actually know them well enough to not use empathy. For example, I know my dad doesn't like criticism - even if I'm okay with criticism, I know how he will not like it if someone complains about something he has done.
As a result of my understanding, my predictions become more accurate than what they would be if I used empathy (at least your definition for it).
I do agree that the idea of empathy has become very politicised and people misuse it to mean "understanding people for the sake of viewing them more favourably" even though empathy doesn't mean that at all. The problem is that when you "put yourself in someone else's shoes" you have put a presumably reasonable, unemotional person in place of someone who is emotional and is not thinking logically. It makes people seem better than they are when you use empathy like "here's a possible reasonable explanation for why this person is acting this way". It's also true that you (as a person in their shoes) have nothing to do with what is happening to you. I think for those reasons it is such a popular word politically.