Intentionalism, intentional realism, and empathy

Journal of the Philosophy of History

Volumn 3, Issue 3, 2009, Pages 290-307

  Stueber, Karsten R ^a  

^a Department of Biology   (United States)

Author keywords

Action explanation; Empathy; Folk psychology; Human sciences; Intentionalism; Narrative

Indexed keywords

EID: 75149153437     PISSN: 1872261X     EISSN: 18722636     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1163/187226309X461542     Document Type: Review

References (27)

1. R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946), 219
2. For a survey about the multi-dimensional and often ambiguously used concept of empathy in philosophical and psychological discourse see my entry on empathy in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy at http://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/sum2008/entries/empathy/
3. See in this context also K. Stueber, Rediscovering Empathy: Agency, Folk Psychology, and the Human Sciences (Cambridge, Mass.: 2006)
4. For further evidence in this regard see particularly A. Mele and P. Livingston, "Intentions and Interpretations", MLN 102 (1992), 931-949
5. See in this respect H.G. Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1989)
6. and J. Grondin, Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994)
7. See particularly Q. Skinner "Motives, Intentions, and the Interpretation of Texts", in J. Tully (ed.), Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics, 69-78 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988)
8. H. White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1978) 111
9. For a debate about narrative anti-realism see the papers in Br. Fay, P. Pomper, and R.T. Vann (eds.), History and Theory: Contemporary Readings (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998)
10. For the realist response see particularly the papers by David Carr, Noel Carroll, and Chris Lorenz. For an analysis of analyzing narrative through the lens of folk psychology see also M. Bevir "Historical Explanation, Folk Psychology, and Narrative", Philosophical Explorations, 3 (2000), 152-168
11. I address the issue regarding the objectivity of historical narratives in K. Stueber, "Agency and the Objectivity of Historical Narratives," in William Sweet (ed.), The Philosophy of History: A Reexamination, 197-222 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Press, 2004)
12. L. Mink "History and Fiction as Modes of Comprehension" in Br. Fay, P. Pomper, and R.T. Vann (eds.), History and Theory: Contemporary Readings, 129 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998)
13. P. Roth, "Varieties and Vagaries of Historical Explanation," Journal of the Philosophy of History, 2 (2008), 225
14. The following considerations considerably expand on my ideas that I have first briefly mentioned in my response to the above paper by Paul Roth. See my "Theories Explain, and so do Historical Narratives: But there are Differences," Journal of the Philosophy of History, 2 (2008), 237-243
15. I am quite aware of the fact that my argument so far is philosophically insufficient to fully establish the causal efficacy of mental properties. Within contemporary philosophy there is indeed a rigorous debate about the causal potency of mental properties and the question of whether or not psychological explanations should be granted an explanatory autonomy. I tend to think that we should grant such autonomy to such explanations and have argued so in K. Stueber, "Mental Causation and the Paradox of Explanation", Philosophical Studies, 122 (2005), 243-277 2005 and in the first two chapters of Stueber Rediscovering Empathy. In the context of this essay, I am only interested in addressing the question of whether any of the interpretive disputes in the philosophy of history and the dispute about intentionalism in literary theory and so on forces us to give up on the assumption of intentional realism. In that case, I would loose my basis for arguing for an essential epistemic difference between the human and the natural sciences. Fortunately, I do not see any good arguments for giving up on the assumption of intentional realism in this context
16. But see also K. Stueber, "The Psychological Basis of Historical Explanation: Reenactment, Simulation and the Fusion of Horizons", History and Theory, 41 (2002), 24-42
17. and "Reasons, Generalizations, Empathy, and Narratives: The Epistemic Structure of Action Explanation", History and Theory, 47 (2008). In the last article, I also delineate some additional contributions that narratives make for our understanding of individual agency
18. See particularly part I, chap. 4 of E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937)
19. V. Brown, "Historical Interpretation, Intentionalism, and Philosophy of Mind", Journal of the Philosophy of History, 1 (2007), 25-62
20. E. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967)
21. See for example M. Bevir "How to be an Intentionalist". History and Theory, 41 (2002), 209-217. I am however a bit unsure about Bevir's characterization of post-foundationalism. He suggests that it implies that "we have access only to our interpretations of the world, not to real objects" (215). To my ear such formulation comes close to expressing a version of linguistic idealism. I would prefer to speak about our access to the world as being linguistically mediated. But that does not mean that we do not have access to the real world
22. Bevir "How to be an Intentionalist", 212ff
23. Bevir however agrees with Davidson that our folk-psychological notions are constrained by normative principles of rationality that do not have any equivalent in the physical sciences. Yet this implies only that the folkpsychological idiom is irreducible to the categories of the physical sciences. It does not have any implications for the structure of justification. See M. Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 177-187
24. Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas, 125
25. Collingwood, The Idea of History, 266-274
26. P. Roth, "Beyond Understanding: The Career of the Concept of Understanding in Human Sciences" in S. Turner and P. Roth, The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 311-333 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2003)
27. See also P. Roth, "The Object of Understanding" in H.H. Kögler and K. Stueber (eds.), Empathy and Agency: The Problem of Understanding in the Human Sciences, 243-269 (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000)