Intellectual Humility and Empathy
Many theorists who study discourse, from journalists to linguists to political scientists, agree that empathy is important for fruitful dialogue (Jorgensen, 2002; Morrell, 2007; Ryfe, 2003).
Empathy helps interlocutors to overcome biases, to be more reciprocal in conversations, and to decrease egocentric behavior.There is good reason to think that these effects are helpful in producing fruitful dialogue, especially between interlocutors who don't antecedently agree. Just what empathy is, however, is contentious.Some hold that affect matching (or affect approximation) is necessary for empathy (De Vignemont and Jacob, 2012; De Vignemont and Singer, 2006; Snow, 2000). Affect matching occurs when the empathetic agent feels the emotions of the target agent in a particular way.5 If affect matching is necessary for empathy, then an agent who does not feel what the target agent feels fails to be empathetic. If affect matching is sufficient for empathy, then all an empathetic agent needs to do is to feel (exactly or approximately) what her target feels (I am not aware of anyone who holds this view, but it is available in logical space). Others argue that a cognitive component is necessary or sufficient (Goldie, 1999; Rameson and Lieberman, 2009).This cognitive component involves taking on the perspective of the target agent, and making inferences in light of their values (Ickes, 2003). If this is necessary, then agents must share perspectives with their target to be empathetic. If it is sufficient, then this is all they must do.Whether one or the other (or both of these) is necessary, whether either is sufficient, or whether they are jointly sufficient is one point of contention.6
Despite this disagreement, most views agree that empathy typically or at least often involves, among other things, taking on or sharing the perspective of another.
Indeed, when we want to train people to be more empathetic, we train them to imagine what it would be like from the others' point of view (Anςel, 2006; Webster, Bowers, Mann, and Marshall, 2005). So, one ingredient that helps one person to be empathetic with another is for her to assume that other's perspective.7It can be quite difficult to assume the perspective of someone whose viewpoint you take to be limited, or whose perspective differs greatly from your own. In many cases, I will have a hard time imagining what it would be like to experience something from the perspective of someone radically different from myself. L.A. Paul's work has deep and thorough discussions of this phenomenon (Paul, 2014). It is, she argues, very hard to imagine having drastically different values. I cannot, prior to having a child, imagine what it would be like to have the values that parents have.The experience of becoming a parent so alters one's values, on her account, that if I am childless, I cannot imagine my way into the parent perspective. Insofar as one's values are part of one's perspective, then, it will be difficult to imagine having someone else's perspective. And, because taking on someone else's perspective is necessary for one kind of empathy, it will be very difficult to empathize with someone whose values are drastically different from my own. This makes having dialogue with them difficult. However, I want to suggest that humility — in particular intellectual humility — may be able to mitigate against the impact of this problem.
Remember that for an agent to have intellectual humility, as we're understanding it, that agent must own the limitations of her epistemic state. If she can own her own limits, she might be able to imagine what it would be like to have a perspective that was limited, but in different ways.That is, if an agent is able to realize the limits of her experience, and of her epistemic state, she can then assume the perspective (to some extent) of someone else that she takes to also be limited.
By owning her own intellectual limitations, she can to some extent empathize with someone who she takes to be limited in (somewhat) similar ways.The agent can empathize with someone she takes to be limited by realizing that they have intellectual and experiential limits in common.An example might help here. Consider a middle-class white woman who disagrees with a poor white man about some matter of feminist politics. This woman might consider her interlocutor's perspective to be limited, and so find it difficult to immediately empathize with him on the basis of shared values. If, however, she reflects on her own limitations — she might consider, for example, that she's not experienced discrimination on the basis of class — she can identify corresponding limitations in her interlocutor's perspective. Owning her own particular limitations allows her to imagine what it would be like to be limited in the ways she takes her interlocutor to be.Thus, intellectual humility facilitates empathy.
Three objections might arise, here. First, this strategy seems to suggest that to empathize with someone you disagree with, you should focus on their intellectual limits. But surely in the target cases, fruitful discourse isn't thwarted because the interlocutors who disagree fail to see each other as intellectually limited. Surely, in other words, emphasizing our disagreeing interlocutors' limits won't help.
This objection, however, gets the strategy a bit backwards.The idea is not that realizing our own limits allows us to see new limits in our interlocutors. The idea is, rather, that when we see our interlocutor as limited, and then can see and own analogous limits in ourselves, we gain some insight into their perspective.We can empathize with them precisely because we see their limits as analogous to limitations in our own perspectives. I'll call this kind of empathy negative empathy.
Negative empathy isn't negative because it is bad, or because it is focusing on negative characteristics.
Negative empathy is negative because it involves aligning the gaps in one's experience, evidence, and rationality with analogous gaps in one's interlocutor.The second objection is that the strategy I described above won't be available to one subset of the population: people who have never experienced systematic subordination.That is, there will be people who, because of their social identities, won't have the relevant experiences from which to draw the kinds of analogies that might help them realize their own limitations. And we might worry that people who have never experienced social or political subordination are the most in need of a strategy for developing empathy.
This is a reasonable concern, and it would be a serious problem for my view if the strategy I've outlined were unavailable to many or most people. Fortunately, for the strategy to be entirely out of reach for an agent that agent would a) have to be maximally socially privileged and b) have to never have realized a gap in their own experiences. I think there are probably very few such agents. All an agent really needs to take advantage of this strategy is to have had an experience that demonstrates his or her limited perspective. Experiences of comparative social subordination can help highlight an agent's intellectual limits, but they are not necessary for intellectual humility, or for empathy by analogy. I suspect that there are comparatively few agents who have never had such an experience. I admit, though, that for those agents who do, the strategy is out of reach.
The third objection is that intellectual humility doesn't get us terribly far in terms of either empathy or productive discourse. Even if intellectual humility can help an agent take on the perspective of her interlocutor, perspective sharing is only one part, or — depending on one's preferred model — one kind of empathy. In other words, at best, perspective taking only gets us as far as cognitive empathy. Nothing about intellectual humility seems to help much with affective empathy.
Further, the objection might continue, it seems that cognitive empathy won't take us as far as productive discourse. Many other steps will need to be taken before my father and the religious conservative can have a fruitful conversation.This, too, is a reasonable concern, but it is not an objection to the reasonability of the hypothesis I've suggested. I've been offering a strategy to move agents toward empathy. Many theorists claim that empathy is necessary for fruitful discourse. Neither I, nor those theorists, claim that it is sufficient for fruitful discourse. Even if the strategy helps to enable empathy in deeply different agents, many other conditions may be necessary before discourse between them can be fruitful.
Despite not being concerned with these objections, it is important to be clear that the extent to which intellectual humility helps facilitate the development of any kind of empathy is an empirical matter.We'd want work from psychologists testing the relationship between the two traits. Preliminary work from psychologists working on intellectual humility suggests that having the trait does contribute to empathy (Krumrei-Mancuso, 2017), however, more work is needed. So far, my claim remains, at best, a reasonable and attractive hypothesis.
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