Martin, Steve:
This is a big issue. I have written a bit about it. Chapter 11 ('Our
knowledge of actions') in *The Act of Thinking* is about it. And so are the
last three paragraphs of the essay at
http://www.derekmelser.org/essays/essayverbal.html
The primary interpersonal attitude is the side-by-side one, the attitude of
fellow-participants in some shared activity. Our perception of others'
actions occurs under the aegis of this fellow-participant (or would-be
fellow-participant, empathic) attitude; it is the light in which we see
actions. Now and then we defect into an objective (distancing, reifying,
alienating) attitude towards others. Rigorously maintained, this objective
attitude reduces a person to a biological phenomenon. But biological
phenomena don't perform *actions*, they merely exhibit derivative biological
phenomena.
Science is the rigorous maintenance of objective attitudes and observation
methods. My paradigm examples of 'science' are the physical sciences:
chemistry, physics, biology... There are disciplined academic studies of
history, law, fine arts, literature, education in which the topic is
people's actions and in which objectivity and empathy alternate, in roughly
equal measure. But these disciplined academic studies are not normally
thought of as sciences. The thing about sciences is that they stick
rigorously to objective methods. Why would you want to put psychology
alongside biology, rather than alongside, say, history or education? Of
course, you could call any disciplined academic investigation a 'science'.
Anyway, it is impossible to write briefly on such a large topic without
pontificating, so I'll stop here.
Derek
*http://www.derekmelser.org*
2009/1/16 Steve Gabosch <stevegabosch@me.com>
Derek, I have been wanting to ask you about your thoughts about how aspects
of human behavior that can only be comprehended through empathy are
therefore inaccessible to science. Assuming, for the sake of discussion,
that you are right, that empathy is a necessary component of accurate
observation and understanding, why does employing empathy exclude doing
science? Marx said (something like) "nothing human is alien to me." That
attitude isn't "empathy," strictly speaking, but it is certainly on the way.
Not that it is an easy or automatic thing to do, but why do you seem to
feel that we **can't** learn how to use our powers of empathy in social
science?
- Steve
On Jan 15, 2009, at 4:20 PM, Martin Packer wrote:
Derek,
It depends of course on what one means by empathy. I've been arguing for
years that all the social sciences draw implicitly on our human capacity
for
*understanding* the actions of others (Einfühlung?), and that our
investigations can and should be interpretive, hermeneutic. Of course many
others have made similar points. To say that genuine science is not
interpretive would be in my mind simply a false claim.
Martin
On 1/14/09 4:20 PM, "Derek Melser" <derek.melser@gmail.com> wrote:
Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, if mind/consciousness/thinking is
an
action, then, because our perception of others' actions always requires
empathy, and because empathy is not an acceptable observation method in
the
sciences, there will never be a genuine science of
mind/consciousness/thinking. But at least we'll no longer be bamboozled
by
the mind/body problem...
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