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Knowing Other People’s Mental States as if They Were One’s Own

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Handbook of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science

Abstract

As trivial as it may seem, James’ thought experiment highlights the irreducible privacy of the mind. Each of the 12 men is aware only of his own word, and he is not aware of the others’ words. Let us imagine now that we take 12 men and pinprick each of them. They will not be directly aware of what the others feel. Consequently, they will not be able to compare their pain with the others’ pain and they will not be entitled to assume that they all share the same sensation. The problem of other minds arises from the privacy of the mind. It is important, however, to distinguish different versions of the privacy claim (Ayer 1963). Mental states are not private in the sense that one would be the only one able to detect one’s own states. The men know that they are all in pain. The privacy of the mind does not entail the logical impossibility of mindreading. Nonetheless, the men do not detect the pain sensation in others in the same way that they detect pain in themselves. Mental states are private in the sense that one has a direct access to one’s own mental states that nobody else has. There is an asymmetry between self-knowledge and knowledge of other minds.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The content of shared representations of action can be described as follows: <x, action, object>, x as the unfulfilled parameter of the agent.

  2. 2.

    This question is made even more salient by the fact that brain imaging studies reveal only partial overlap between execution/experience and observation. It is not everything that is shared.

  3. 3.

    This is indeed what makes the difference between empathy and sympathy (de Vignemont and Singer, 2006). Empathy and sympathy are often taken as synonymous. However, in sympathy, one does not feel the same type of emotion as the other. For instance, I feel sorry for you because you feel jealous, depressed or angry but I am not jealous, depressed or angry myself, unlike in empathy.

  4. 4.

     Neuroscience cannot yet provide an unambiguous answer. Some empathy studies find only activity in the affective component of the pain network (Singer et al. 2004; Jackson et al. 2005), whereas others show reduced motor excitability specific to the muscle that the subjects observed being hurt (Avenanti et al. 2005). Likewise, a recent study of empathy for touch revealed activation of primary sensorimotor cortex that was somatotopically mapped (Blakemore et al. 2005), contrasting with another study showing only secondary somatosensory cortex activity (Keysers et al. 2004).

  5. 5.

    This comes closer to emotional contagion. The only difference is that mirror empathy is directed toward other: we feel happy with the other and we are aware that the other is happy. For a discussion about the relationship between mirroring, emotional contagion, and empathy, see de Vignemont (2009).

  6. 6.

     Here I focus on affective mirroring, which is the most common during pain observation (Singer et al. 2004; Jackson et al. 2005), rather than on sensorimotor mirroring (Avenanti et al. 2005), which is closer to emotional contagion than to empathy.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut Jean-Nicod, EHESS – ENS – CNRS, 29, rue d’Ulm, 75005, Paris, France

    Frédérique de Vignemont

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  1. Frédérique de Vignemont
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. FB Philosophie und Philologie, Universität Mainz, Jakob Welder-Weg 18, Mainz, 55128, Germany

    Daniel Schmicking

  2. Dept of Philosophy & Cognitive Sciences, University of Central Florida, Colbourn Hall 411, Orlando, 32816-1352, U.S.A.

    Shaun Gallagher

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de Vignemont, F. (2010). Knowing Other People’s Mental States as if They Were One’s Own. In: Schmicking, D., Gallagher, S. (eds) Handbook of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2646-0_16

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