How Does it Feel? Interpersonal Understanding and Affective Empathy

根据YouGov最近的一项研究，大多数英国人担心他们和他们的同胞越来越无法相互理解，并且在情感上“设身处地地为他人着想”。这些无能似乎与困扰西方民主国家的政治文化中令人不安的宗派主义密切相关。但理解他人到底是什么，又是什么阻碍了理解他人的能力呢？项目“感觉如何？”《人际理解和情感共情》旨在通过提供迄今为止很少讨论的人际理解现象维度的哲学描述，为人际理解理论做出重要贡献：(1)掌握他人在某些情况下的感觉或感觉：现象性理解；（二）赞同或者接受他人的感情、动机或者行为的；(3)通过情感上或情感上与他人共情来实现这些目标，其中情感共情被认为是履行认知角色，从而有助于现象级理解，或者为认可的评价或准评价现象提供支持。三个子项目将分别处理这三个方面。为了做到这一点，他们将汇集并发展迄今为止独特的见解组合，这些见解来自认识论（关于理解的本质及其与知识的关系），来自心灵哲学（关于人们如何识别和掌握主观经验），来自元伦理学（关于认可或欣赏他人的心理状态）和哲学心理学（关于成功和失败的移情的类型和机制）。总而言之，该项目有望发展人际理解理论的关键组成部分，在我们这个派系林立的政治时代，这种现象的资源和价值似乎被严重低估了。

According to a recent study by YouGov, a majority of Britons are worried that they and their compatriots are increasingly incapable of understanding each other and of emotionally "putting themselves in others' shoes." These inabilities seem intimately tied up with the disturbing sec-tarianism of political culture afflicting Western democracies. But what precisely is it to under-stand another person and what is it that blocks the ability to do so?The project How Does it Feel? Interpersonal Understanding and Affective Empathy aims to make a crucial contribution to a theory of interpersonal understanding by providing philosophi-cal accounts of hitherto barely discussed dimensions of the phenomenon: (1) grasping what it is like or how it feels for another to be in some situation: phenomenal understanding; (2) en-dorsing or accepting another's feelings, motivation or action; and (3) achieving these as a result of emotionally or affectively empathising with the other, where affective empathy is conceived as either fulfilling a cognitive role, thus contributing to phenomenal understanding, or feeding into the evaluative or quasi-evaluative phenomenon of endorsement.Three subprojects will tackle each of these three dimensions. In order to do so, they will bring together and develop a thus far unique combination of insights from epistemology (on the nature of understanding and its relationship to knowledge), from philosophy of mind (on how people identify and grasp subjective experiences), from metaethics (on endorsement or appre-ciation of another's psychological state) and from philosophical psychology (on the types and mechanisms of successful and failed empathy).All in all, the project promises to develop key components of a theory of interpersonal under-standing, a phenomenon whose resources and value appear dangerously underappreciated in our factious political times.