The Disambiguation of “Empathy”: Affective and Cognitive Conceptions

Before proceeding, a caveat. The use of the terms “affective” and “cognitive” to distinguish between the two broad forms of empathy considered here is not entirely felicitous. “Cognitive” classically refers to representational or predicative thinking and is held to stand in contrast with mental states that are “affective” or consisting in emotions or feelings (and, additionally, with “conative” or mental states of desire) (cf., e.g., Dunlop, 1984). The tendency to view cognitive and affective states as somehow strictly dichotomous and mutually opposed rather than being merely analytic categories or, even worse, to assign qualitative priority to either type of mental states as “ways of knowing” (cf., e.g., Alcoff & Potter, 1993; Code, 1991; Jaggar, 1996; Longino, 1991) risks being projected onto the difference between the two forms of empathy to which the cognitive-affective empathy distinction draws attention. This would be an unfortunate misunderstanding. At the very least, empathy understood as affect or feeling as well as emotions generally have a cognitive dimension in virtue of being intentional—that is to say, they have object (e.g., a person) who has a certain property or properties (e.g., suffering) understood to be a component of the affective experience (e.g., empathy) (cf., e.g., de Sousa, 1987; van Dam & Steutel, 1996). Hence, empathy understood as an affective response to another person’s situation, far from precluding those cognitive processes recruited in order to gain insight into another person’s inner states or being a distinct mode of knowing different from cognitive perception, in fact presupposes them. In sum, the contrast between affective and cognitive conceptions of empathy does not point to rival conceptions vying for analytic or normative superiority but intends rather to draw attention to which dimension of a conception of empathy, the affective or the cognitive, seems to be predominant.