List,
Gene's post in this thread had much to say about "empathy" - considered as something that can be measured and quantified for populations of students, so that comments about trends in "empathy" among them can be taken as meaningful and important. I wonder about that. My wondering was given more definite shape just now when I came across this passage in a recent book about consciousness by Evan Thompson: [[ In practice and in everyday life . we don't infer the inner presence of consciousness on the basis of outer criteria. Instead, prior to any kind of reflection or deliberation, we already implicitly recognize each other as conscious on the basis of empathy. Empathy, as philosophers in the phenomenological tradition have shown, is the direct perception of another being's actions and gestures as expressive embodiments of consciousness. We don't see facial expressions, for example, as outer signs of an inner consciousness, as we might see an EEG pattern; we see joy directly in the smiling face or sadness in the tearful eyes. Moreover, even in difficult or problematic cases where we're forced to consider outer criteria, their meaningfulness as indicators of consciousness ultimately depends depends on and presupposes our prior empathetic grasp of consciousness. ]] -Thompson, Evan. Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy (Kindle Locations 2362-2370). Columbia University Press. Kindle Edition. If we don't "infer the inner presence of consciousness on the basis of outer criteria," but perceive it directly on the basis of empathy, how do we infer the inner presence (or absence) of empathy itself? In the same way, i.e. by direct perception, according to Thompson. I think Peirce would say that these attributions of empathy (or consciousness) to others are perceptual judgments - not percepts, but quite beyond (or beneath) any conscious control, and . We feel it rather than reading it from external indications. To use Thompson's example, we can measure the temperature by reading a thermometer, using a scale designed for that purpose. But we can't measure the feeling of warmth as experienced by the one who feels it. Now, the statistics cited by Gene may indeed indicate something important, just as measures of global temperature may indicate something important. But what it does indicate, and what significance that has, depends on the nature of the devices used to generate those statistics. And I can't help feeling that empathy is more important than anything measurable by those means. (I won't go further into the semiotic nature of perceptual judgments here, but I have in Turning Signs: http://www.gnusystems.ca/TS/blr.htm#Perce.) Gary f.
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