Empathy as Direct Perception

This paper defends a perceptual account of empathy in opposition to purely cognitive theories on how we grasp the emotion of another. Empathy has to start with the perception of another human being before us. However, the often favored simulation argument (in which we imagine "what it's like" to be "in their shoes") seems to propose that perception stops right with surface features. We perceive there is someone in front of us, but the knowledge of their pain comes from simulation, the argument goes. While I do agree that simulation is likely employed across the spectrum of empathic experience and importantly adds to it, I see no reason that part of the understanding can’t come from perception itself. Instead, I argue two main points: one, it is possible to perceive, not infer, meaning, or emotion, just with visual stimuli (such as faces); two, environmental and physical regularities bias what we grasp and thus partially determine what we empathize with. The second point is supported by a causal story, provided by Mitch Green, in which forms of expression and communication arose due to evolutionary benefit and incur “organic meaning.”Bachelor of Art