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Empathy and Analogy

Allison Barnes and Paul Thagard

Dialogue / Volume 36 / Issue 04 / September 1997, pp 705 - 720

DOI: 10.1017/S0012217300017613, Published online: 13 April 2010

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abstract_S0012217300017613

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Allison Barnes and Paul Thagard (1997). Empathy and Analogy. Dialogue, 36,
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Empathy and Analogy5

ALLISON BARNES and PAUL THAGARD University of Waterloo

RESUME: Nous defendons Videe que la meilleure facon de concevoir Vempathie est
de la voir comme une pensee analogique du type qui est decrit par la theorie multi-
factorielle de Vanalogie proposee par Keith Holyoak et Paul Thagard (1995). Notre
explication montre que le debat entre ceux qui confoivent Vempathie comme I'appli-
cation d'une theorie et ceux qui la voient plutot comme une simulation repose sur une
presupposition fausse et qu'il est formule en termes trop simples pour rendre compte
de I'attribution d'etats mentaux. L'empathie est toujours une simulation, mais elle
peut en mime temps mettre en jeu I 'application d'une theorie. En specifiant de
maniere adequate les processus analogiques de Vempathie et les contraintes qui les
regissent, nous sommes en mesure de montrer comment se trouve determine le degre
de theorie requis pour ressentir de Vempathie.

The distinguished psychologist Robin Dawes (1994) recently surveyed the

empirical evidence concerning the effectiveness of psychotherapy. He
determined that therapy does help people, but that the training and
approach of the therapist have no statistically significant influence on the
success of the therapy. Length of therapy is also unrelated to success.
Dawes concluded, however, that "empathic" therapists are more effective,
although he did not provide an account of what constitutes empathy.
The difficulties that psychotherapists have met in explaining empathy
are shared by philosophers. Philosophical discussion of empathy largely
takes place in the phenomenological tradition (e.g., Stein 1964, Woodruff
Smith 1989). Recently, however, Alvin Goldman has argued convincingly
that an appreciation of empathy is important for ethical questions such as
altruism, and also for the epistemological problem of understanding
other minds. Put to use in the other-minds problem, Goldman's work on

Dialogue XXXVII (1998), 705-20

© 1997 Canadian Philosophical Association/Association canadienne de philosophie
706 Dialogue

empathy is part of a lively debate on the nature of mental state ascription.2

Goldman develops an account of empathy which is intended to deflate the
well-established position (known as "theory theory" or TT) that under-
standing other people is a matter of applying some "theory of mind" to
them. According to TT, our ability to ascribe states to others reflects the
fact that we possess a primitive theory of mind, often called a "folk psy-
chology." The "simulation theory" (ST) that Goldman espouses as an
alternative says that we habitually understand others' actions in the
absence of any theory of mind by using the resources of our own minds
to simulate the beliefs and intentions of others. Goldman's alternative
claims that we understand others by simulating them in a way that pro-
duces empathy, but, like the psychotherapists, he is not able to describe in
sufficient detail the nature of empathy or of simulation.
Like Goldman, we believe that an accurate account of empathy can
help solve philosophical questions about the nature of mental state
ascription. We contend that empathy is best viewed as a kind of analogical
thinking of the sort described in the multiconstraint theory of analogy
proposed by Keith Holyoak and Paul Thagard (1995). Our account of
empathy as analogy shows that the assumption that TT and ST are mutu-
ally exclusive alternatives is false. Empathy always involves simulation,
but may simultaneously include theory application. By properly speci-
fying the analogical processes of empathy and their constraints, we are
able to show how the amount of theory needed to generate an accurate
simulation is determined. As we shall see, empathy is independent of
theory application when an analogue of the other's mental state is easily
retrieved from memory. Processes of rule-based reasoning are required
when empathy is achieved by constructing an analogue. The constraints
of analogical mapping determine when an analogue is likely to be
retrieved and when it is likely to be constructed. We conclude that the
debate between proponents of ST and TT is effectively transformed, since
we can ascertain the balance of simulation and theory for any single act
of empathy. Moreover, our account indicates how this balance can be
determined in other sorts of mental state ascription.
After presenting a conceptual study of empathy, we will show how
empathy is a cognitive process that is fundamentally analogical. Our
account explains why empathy can be difficult to achieve, but also sug-
gests how it can be possible between people of different backgrounds, and
even with animals.
The Concept of Empathy
Historically, the sense of the term "empathy" has wandered, so that defin-
ing it is difficult and somewhat arbitrary. Still, a core formation can be
reached by looking at etymology, and by focusing on conceptual differ-
ences between empathy and closely related terms, primarily sympathy.
 Empathy and Analogy 707

The concept of sympathy has a long history—Aristotle used it—but the

term empathy is quite recent. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, Rudolph Lotz and Wilhelm Wundt used the German term Ein-
fiihlung in an aesthetic doctrine which was then elaborated by Theodore
Lipps.3 For Lipps, Einfuhlung is a mode of inner imitation. When empa-
thizing with a work of art, the beholder physically imitates the object and
imaginatively projects himself into it. Lipps also extended Einfuhlung to
the domain of interpersonal understanding. 4 E. G. Tichener, a student of
Wundt, coined the English translation "empathy" in 1910.
The German Einfuhlung has a distinctive meaning of "feeling into" some-
thing. Unfortunately, Einfuhlung was often translated as "feeling with,"
which is the usual meaning of Mitfuhlung (sympathy). M. F. Basch (1983)
notes that, in the Greek derivation of empathy, the prefix "em-" means "in"
or "within," while the prefix "sym-" means "with," "along with," or
"together." Etymologically, therefore, sympathy means to share an expe-
rience with someone else. When one sympathizes with others, one "feels
with" or shares their suffering. Einfuhlung, in contrast, is a more extensive
concept. It signifies the ability to comprehend another's state without
actually experiencing it. Basch tells us, "its German synonyms, sich
hineinversetzen (to put oneself in another's place) and Fremdwarhmeh-
mung (to come to know the other or the stranger), imply an understand-
ing of another person that includes, but is not limited to an affective
experience, and there is nothing of the irrational or primitive implied by
these terms" (1983, p. 110). The term sympathy, then, refers to our aware-
ness and participation in the suffering of another person, while empathy
refers to the attempt to comprehend either positive or negative states of
another. Lauren Wispe (1991, p. 80) describes the difference this way:

In empathy the self is the vehicle for understanding, and it never loses its iden-
tity. Sympathy, on the other hand, is concerned with communion rather than
accuracy, and self-awareness is reduced rather than enhanced . . . In empathy
one substitutes oneself for the other person; in sympathy one substitutes others
for oneself. To know what something would be like for the other person is empa-
thy. To know what it would be like to be that person is sympathy. In empathy
one acts "as if" one were the other person . . . The object of empathy is under-
standing. The object of sympathy is the other person's well-being. In sum,
empathy is a way of knowing; sympathy is a way of relating.5

Sympathy is performed with altruistic ends, but empathy may or may not
be motivated by good intentions. Indeed, one may empathize solely with
narcissistic ends. It is said, for example, that Hitler empathized with the
Jews in order to annihilate them.
Centrality of feeling distinguishes empathy and sympathy from other
kinds of interpersonal acts. Other concepts in this category are emotional
contagion and emotional identification; both overlap with sympathy, but
708 Dialogue

have the added sense of being involuntary. One undergoes emotional con-
tagion, for example, when one passively becomes jubilant in a crowd of
people. Other modes of mental state ascription involve no feeling what-
ever. What we shall call "ordinary mental state ascription" is a pure intel-
lectual process consisting of a dispassionate inference or simulation.
Beyond this, there is little consensus as to what constitutes empathy. We
will now argue that achieving empathic understanding involves making a
comparison of emotions. We will show how the process of "feeling into"
is essentially analogical.
Analogy as a Cognitive Process
In most informal logic textbooks, analogy is viewed as a comparison of
objects that have similar features in common. Research in cognitive sci-
ence, however, has produced a much richer account of analogy as a com-
putational process of finding correspondences between complex structures
that involve relations between objects and causal relations between rela-
tions.6 For example, Darwin's analogy between natural selection and arti-
ficial selection, which played a major role in the development of his theory
of evolution, involves a mapping between structures such as the following:

Source Target

select (breeders, organisms) select (nature, organisms)

name: select-1 name: select-2

develop (breeds) develop (species)

name: develop-1 name: develop-2

cause (select-1, develop-1) cause (select-2, develop-2)

Just as artificial selection by breeders using the natural variability of

organisms explains how new breeds of plants and animals can arise, so
variability and natural selection explain how new species arise.
The analogical comparison in this example involves more than seeing
the correspondences between attributes such as develop and relations such
as select. The explanatory power of the analogy derives from the corre-
spondence between the high-level causal relations: just as the human
selection of traits causes new breeds to develop, so natural selection of
traits causes new species to develop. In this example, natural selection is
the target analogue which needs to be understood and developed, while
artificial selection is the source analogue which is intended for further
explanation and problem solving. Adapting distinctions made by Dedre
 Empathy and Analogy 709

Gentner and Graeme Halford, Holyoak and Thagard (1995) use the term
system mapping to describe analogical comparisons that involve corre-
spondences between relations among propositions such as "causes" and
"implies." In the next section we will describe the role of system mappings
in empathy.
In addition to mapping between structures, analogical thinking
involves stages of selection, evaluation, and learning. Faced with a target
problem, a thinker must somehow select a source analogue to contribute
to a solution. Often, selection comes by retrieval from memory, when the
thinker recalls a similar problem that can be applied analogically to the
target. This application requires mapping the source to the target to make
the appropriate comparisons. Ideally, mappings are isomorphisms,
involving a perfect structural correspondence between source and target;
but analogy generally has to be moreflexibleand has to settle for imper-
fect correspondences. The evaluation stage requires the analogist to step
back and critically ask how effective the analogy really is in accomplish-
ing its purpose. Finally, if the analogy is effective, the analogist can learn
from the identified correspondence and produce a schema abstracted
from the source and target analogues for general future use.
Holyoak and Thagard argue that all four stages of analogical thinking
can be understood in terms of three cognitive constraints: similarity,
structure, and purpose. Such constraints are essential because, in princi-
ple, anything can be viewed as similar to anything else in some trivial
respects. The problems of retrieving potential source analogues from
memory and of mapping between complex structures are both computa-
tionally intractable unless constraints are applied. To summarize briefly,
the constraint of similarity encourages the finding of correspondences
between objects that have properties which are perceptually or semanti-
cally similar. A cat is more likely to map to a dog than to a fish, for exam-
ple, since cats and dogs share perceptual features such as legs and fur and
semantic features such as both being mammals. There is much more to
analogy than this, however. As in the Darwin example, we want source
and target analogues to have corresponding structures, especially those
involving higher-level relations such as cause. The third constraint on ana-
logical thinking is purpose: the value of an analogy depends ultimately on
whether it accomplishes its cognitive end, which may include problem solv-
ing, explanation, or communication. An analogy may be useful even if it
only weakly satisfies the constraints of similarity and structure. Holyoak
and Thagard have described how these constraints operate at all stages in
many different kinds of analogical thinking, including children's prob-
lem-solving, scientific explanation, political decision-making, and cul-
tural uses of metaphor. They have also developed computational models
that show precisely how the different constraints can be simultaneously
710 Dialogue

satisfied. Here, we have provided only enough detail to set the stage to
show how analogy is essential to empathy.
Empathy as Analogy
We can have empathy for literary characters as well as real individuals. To
take a familiar example, consider Shakespeare's Hamlet. One of the rea-
sons that this character is so compelling is that many people can under-
stand his distress and indecision not only abstractly, but empathically: we
can feel an approximation to Hamlet's emotions. How this comes about
requires an appreciation of the multifaceted nature of emotion.
Keith Oatley (1992) has presented a theory of emotion which incorpo-
rates the phenomenological and physiological aspects of emotions, but
which nevertheless emphasizes their cognitive aspects. Building on his
work with Philip Johnson-Laird, he contends that the basic human emo-
tions are all intimately connected with goals: happiness occurs when indi-
viduals are accomplishing their goals; sadness occurs as a result of failure
to accomplish goals; and anger is directed at whatever blocks the accom-
plishment of goals. We can put his insights about the relations between
goals and emotions to work in seeing how empathy operates analogically.
When we watch or read Hamlet, our ability to "feel-into" the lead char-
acter requires our being able to produce a system mapping between his
situation and some aspect of our own life. Like analogical processing in
general, the production of this mapping may be unconscious. Our under-
standing begins with an appreciation of his situation: his uncle has killed
his father and married his mother:
To be, or not to be—that is the question;
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep—
No more—and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to.
Although few have experienced Hamlet's exact situation, most people can
imagine what it would be like to be in his shoes. Most people have expe-
rienced situations where loss has made us sad, betrayal has made us angry,
and difficult situations have made us indecisive. For Hamlet as the target
analogue, we can easily retrieve from memory potential source analogues
of varying degrees of similarity. These might include having been aban-
doned by a lover, or having been fired from a valued job. The important
thing is that these source analogues should have involved situations in
which you experienced an emotion that you can project onto Hamlet. In
line with Oatley's theory, projection involves mapping over the system of
 Empathy and Analogy 711

causal relations that ties together the situations (including beliefs and
behaviour) and goals with the emotions produced. Here is a rough
approximation to what might be involved, presenting propositions and
their names to express the causal relations between propositions:

Source: You Target: Hamlet

fire (boss, you): si-fire
lose (you, job): s2-lose
cause (si-fire, s2-lose): s3
angry (you): s4-angry
depressed (you): s5-depressed
cause (s2-lose, s4-angry): s6
cause (s2-lose, s5-depressed): s7
indecisive (you): s8-indecisive
cause (s5-depressed, s8-indeci-
sive): s9
kill (uncle, father): tl-kill
lose (Hamlet, father): t2-lose
marry (uncle, mother): t3-marry
cause (tl-kill, t2-lose): t3a
angry (Hamlet): t4-angry
depressed (Hamlet): t5-depressed
cause (t2-lose, t4-angry): t6
cause (t2-lose, t5-depressed): t7

Here we have used extended predicate calculus to make clear the relational
structure of the source and target, including the crucial causal relations.
On the multiconstraint theory of analogy, mapping between source and
target does not require a semantic identity of relations such asfireand kill,
or an exact structural correspondence between source and target. (Note
the mismatches: the boss fired you, but the uncle killed the father, not
Hamlet.) Holyoak and Thagard's computer program ACME (Analogical
Constraint Mapping Engine), which implements the multiconstraint the-
ory of analogical mapping, would have no problem taking the above struc-
tures as input and concluding not only that you correspond to Hamlet and
your boss corresponds to Hamlet's uncle, but also inferring that Hamlet
will be indecisive. This last inference involves a process that Holyoak and
Thagard call "copying-with-substitution": to expand the Hamlet target,
we copy over from the source the predicate "indecisive," and substitute
Hamlet for you on the basis of the mapping already established.
The crucial difference between someone who has only a theoretical
interest in Hamlet and someone who understands him empathically is that
the analogical transfer involves not only a verbal correspondence but a pro-
jection of emotions. Your memory of being fired involves not merely the
fact that you were angry, but also your feeling of being angry, and you
712 Dialogue

attribute to Hamlet an image of this feeling. Thus, empathy involves an

unusual sort of analogical thinking, in that the correspondences involve
emotions as well as verbal representations. Extending analogical thinking
beyond verbal thinking should not be surprising, since analogies can be
visual and even auditory.
Analogical transfer need not be based on unique cases. Holyoak and
Thagard describe how it is often effective to use multiple analogues to
understand a complex situation. A full understanding of Hamlet may,
accordingly, require you to map his situation to a number of situations
you have faced in order to capture the causal complexity of his emotional
situation. In addition, transfer can take place not from a particular case,
but from a schema that is constructed from two or more previous cases.
As we mentioned in our discussion of learning, the fourth stage of ana-
logical thinking, abstract schemas, can be formed from two or more anal-
ogous cases. One may, for example, have a loss schema formed from what
is common to losing a job and losing a lover, including the crucial com-
mon information that loss causes anger and depression. For the purposes
of empathy, the representation of these emotions must not be purely ver-
bal, but should involve some approximation to the feeling that goes with
the original experiences from which the schema was formed. Then map-
ping the loss schema to Hamlet's situation will have the desired empathic
result: you actually simulate what Hamlet feels.

The Elusiveness of Empathy

We have seen how empathy can be possible when a system mapping draws
correspondences between two persons' situations, goals, and emotions.
But our account also explains why empathy is often not achieved. The
basic pattern of empathic explanation of a person P's situation is:
The person P is in situation S, which is like your situation S'.
P has goals G which are like your goals G'.
When you faced situation S' which affected your goals G', you felt
emotion E'.
(S' and G' caused E'.)
So P is probably feeling emotion E, which is like your E', caused
by S and G.
Putting it this schematically is misleading. What is important for empathy
is not that you know explicitly that your situation S' and goal G' caused
my emotion E'—you do not need to have Oatley's theory of emotion—
but only that you remember that when faced with S' and G', you felt E'.
That is usually enough for you to know what P is feeling.
 Empathy and Analogy 713

Empathy can involve not only inferring that someone has an emotion,
but also using the attribution of the emotion to explain or predict
another's behaviour. Having understood that P is feeling E, you can then
predict P's behaviour as the result of the possession of that emotion.
Empathy with Hamlet, for example, produces an appreciation of his emo-
tional distress, which can then explain his subsequent odd behaviour, such
as spurning Ophelia. Again, the explanation pattern can be analogical,
based on a system mapping:
The person P has emotion E in situation S.
When you were in a similar situation S' with a similar emotion E',
you did action A'.
(S' and E' caused you to do A'.)
Hence, P's emotion E may lead to a similar action A.
This kind of empathic understanding is important in legal trials when a
jury refuses to convict, for example, a battered wife for a crime such as
the killing of her husband; they may feel they would have done the same
thing under similar circumstances. A complex act of empathy, such as that
performed by a sensitive therapist in extended treatment, will produce
understanding of a whole complex of interacting emotions and actions.
But empathy can easily fail, either because the source analogue does
not correspond to the goals, situations, and emotions of the other person,
or because a retrieved source does not correspond well and should be con-
structed instead. During the 1992 Canadian election, Prime Minister Kim
Campbell told the residents of a shelter in Vancouver's Skid Row that she,
too, had known loss and disappointment; she had once wanted to be a
concert cellist. Perhaps from her perspective this was the best source ana-
logue available, but it maps poorly to the long-term situation and dispar-
ate goals of the inhabitants of the shelter. According to the multi-
constraint theory of analogy, the success of an analogy depends on how
well it satisfies the constraints of similarity, structure, and purpose. Empa-
thy will be weak to the extent that the source analogue of the empathizer:
1. has disparate goals, situations, and emotions from those in the tar-
get analogue;
2. has causal relations with a different structure than those in the tar-
get analogue;
3. does not contribute to the cognitive purposes of the empathizer.
We shall see how these constraints determine the balance of simulation
and theory-application in empathic understanding.
714 Dialogue

Cognitive Architecture
In order to address further questions about the nature of mental state
ascription, we need to locate the processes that produce empathic under-
standing in a general account of mental operations. In current cognitive
science, there are two main accounts of mental structures and processes.
Initially, the most influential kind of cognitive architecture involved rule-
based systems—that is, systems in which the major structures are
IF-THEN rules and the major processes involve selecting rules and firing
them to make inferences (Anderson 1983; Holland et al. 1986; Newell and
Simon 1972). An alternative, connectionist view of cognitive architecture
conceives of thinking not as rule firing, but as parallel constraint satisfac-
tion in networks of units connected by excitatory and inhibitory links
(Holyoak and Thagard 1995; Rumelhart and McClelland 1986). These two
views of cognitive architecture are not necessarily incompatible, for it can
be argued that human thinking involves both the highly parallel associa-
tive processes modeled by connectionist networks, and the more serially,
more constructive kinds of inference modeled in rule-based systems
(Thagard 1996).
In particular, empathic understanding can involve both relatively auto-
matic parallel constraint satisfaction and more deliberate rule-based rea-
soning. In cases in which you want to gain an emotional understanding of
someone whose nature and experiences are like yours, you merely need to
activate some elements of your experience to produce an emotional repre-
sentation of the person you are trying to understand. If a friend is strug-
gling to make a difficult decision that requires the integration of various
actions and goals, you may be able to appreciate his or her anxiety by
retrieving a situation in which you were also struggling with a difficult deci-
sion and felt anxiety. Retrieving and mapping analogues can be modeled
in terms of parallel constraint satisfaction (Holyoak and Thagard 1995),
and so can decision making (Millgram and Thagard, 1995). Emotions are
important to this sort of process, since we have no conscious access to the
mental operation of parallel constraint satisfaction, and feelings such as
happiness, relief, fear, and anxiety provide consciousness with a reading of
the overall state of constraint satisfaction. (This view is compatible with
recent accounts of the cognitive function of emotion offered by Damasio
1994 and Oatley 1992.) Your emotional reaction is what tells you how the
process of parallel constraint satisfaction went for you, and, by analogy,
how the process of parallel constraint satisfaction went for the person you
are trying to understand. Obviously, you do not need any theory of how
your mind works to be able to simulate your friend's decision, nor do you
need to know the person's emotional state already in order to retrieve a rel-
evant analogue, since other aspects of the situation serve as retrieval cues
 Empathy and Analogy 715

that bring to mind an analogue enabling you to infer the other's emotional
state.
But empathic understanding, like thinking in general, is not always so
automatic. If parallel constraint satisfaction fails to come up with a
coherent analogue of another's situation, a more deliberative, construc-
tive process produces new hypotheses and new concepts that establish
new elements and constraints to contribute to parallel constraint satisfac-
tion. If you fail to retrieve from your own experience a situation relevant
to that of the person you are trying to understand, you may be able to use
your general knowledge of people and yourself to construct a new situa-
tion in which you can imagine placing yourself. This process of construc-
tion requires the kind of rule-based reasoning that is often used to
account for human problem solving, planning, and explanation. Thera-
pists trying to understand their clients may need to make many inferences
based on rule-like knowledge of human psychology before being able to
place themselves in the situation of the clients and simulate what they feel.
Both parallel constraint satisfaction and rule-based reasoning often
result in mental state ascriptions with no corresponding feeling. Empathy
is more than ordinary mental state ascription, since it involves having an
emotion that is analogically ascribed to someone else. The feeling pro-
vides a deeper level of interpersonal knowledge than does ordinary men-
tal state ascription.
Achieving empathic understanding by parallel constraint satisfaction
and by rule-based reasoning both involve having feelings, both involve an
analogical mapping from one person's situation to another's, and both
involve a kind of simulation of the other person. But the simulations are
different, in that parallel constraint satisfaction is relatively automatic and
unconscious, and does not apply explicit knowledge and inference. In con-
trast, the simulation of someone's emotions requiring rule-based reason-
ing will typically be more deliberate and theoretical. We will now show that
appreciating these two ways of achieving empathy reconciles two views of
mental state ascription that have previously been taken to be competing.

Simulation Theory versus Theory Theory

To conclude, we want to use our analogical account of empathy to con-
tribute to a recent controversy concerning how people attribute mental
states to other people.7 Goldman has argued that the simulation heuristic
he sees at the basis of analogy provides an alternative to "theory theory"
(TT), according to which people use an implicit theory of mind to under-
stand what other people are thinking or feeling. Simulation theory (ST)
holds that interpreting other people requires no folk-psychology, and no
possession of any conscious or unconscious theory. Rather, says Gold-
man, we ascribe states to others by feigning their beliefs and desires and
feeding these inputs into our own practical reasoning mechanisms. The
716 Dialogue

output states we generate are subsequently taken "off-line" and attributed

to the other person. Goldman sees empathy as a special case of simulation
in which the output states are emotions.
Our analogical account of empathy could be construed as a more
detailed version of ST, where the practical reasoning mechanisms are spec-
ified as analogical processes. What we shall call "local" analogies, or cases
in which empathy is easy, appear to involve little or no theoretical work.
(I do not need much theory to understand that my best friend was angry
when she missed her flight, especially since I was angry when I missed my
flight last year.) However, although we believe ST loosely describes what
is happening when we claim to know what another person is feeling or
thinking, we also believe that the hypotheses of TT are also compatible
with our account. "Long-distance" analogies inevitably involve the appli-
cation of theory to compensate for disparate situations and goals, as well
as missing target information. In these cases, rule-based reasoning guides
the construction of an appropriate analogue, thereby making simulation
possible. The proportion of theory involved in intermediate cases will
again be determined by the constraints of analogical mapping.
Suppose you are trying to understand the feelings of someone of a dif-
ferent culture, or someone who is physically or mentally impaired.
Because the other person is very different from you, it may be difficult to
find a source analogue from your own experience that has features and a
causal structure similar to the other person's. Empathy is particularly
likely to fail if you are not motivated to go to the effort of constructing an
appropriate source analogue when simple retrieval produces inaccuracy.
Consider empathy with an autistic person. In her recent autobiography.
Donna Williams describes how her autistic traits (averted gaze, blank
expression, and anti-social behaviour) were almost always misunderstood.
She writes: "I learned eventually to lose myself in anything I desired—the
patterns on the wallpaper or the carpet, the sound of something over and
over again . . . Even people became no problem. Their words became a
mumbling jumble, their voices a pattern of sounds" (1992, p. 4). For non-
autistic people, an empathic understanding of Donna's affective state will
require a constructed source analogue or affective schema that includes,
at minimum, feelings of intense isolation and frustration. Empathy with
autistics is an example of a "long-distance" analogy. Only those of us who
are intrinsically shy or withdrawn will be able to simply retrieve situations
when the goal of unfettered interaction with others caused an emotion
similar to Donna's. For many of us, empathy with the affective life of autis-
tics will remain elusive. An attempt to empathize with Donna's experience
will require background theory in the form of rule-based reasoning, spe-
cifically about the nature of autism. Rule-based reasoning is needed to
bridge the disparity between goals and situations and direct the creation
of an appropriate, more sophisticated analogue.
 Empathy and Analogy 111

Surprisingly, empathy with another species may be easier to achieve

than empathy with autistic people. Suppose we wish to interpret the affec-
tive states of East African Vervet monkeys. Empathy with another species
involves immediate dangers of over-anthropomorphizing our analogies.
In their recent work, How Monkeys See the World, however, Cheney and
Seyfarth (1990) insist that, in the case of Vervet monkeys, anthropomor-
phizing works. Cheney and Seyfarth argue that the features and structure
of human family relations are analogous in many respects to those of
Vervets. To take a simple example, a human mother's emotional need to
nurture and protect her infant is easily mapped to the Vervet mother's
defence of infants who show signs of distress. Vervet grooming habits are
understood roughly in terms of human situations and goals; as the female
members of a human family preserve their friendships through various
rituals, the Vervets throughout the maternal line maintain close social
bonds which are expressed by grooming. Empathy with Vervets is an
intermediate case of analogy, involving less rule-based reasoning than in
the autistic case to generate an accurate simulation.
Empathy with Vervet monkeys and with autistic people are examples
of analogies that require greater conceptual leaps. They are just as possi-
ble in empathic understanding as they are in scientific understanding.
Empathy is of course much easier when it is based on "local" analogies,
ones which offer a high degree of similarity between the concepts in the
source and target analogues. Empathizing with a friend who has similar
experiences and aspirations will often be effortless. It will be a simple task,
for example, to empathize anger in a best friend who has missed an im-
portant appointment because of traffic conditions. Local analogies are
accomplished by pure simulation, and no rule-based reasoning is needed
to retrieve a source analogue. Rather, retrieval is spontaneously guided by
the close similarity of features and causal structure.
It might be objected that analogy is not really necessary for empathic
simulation: you just place yourself in someone's situation and see how you
feel. But the placing in fact requires that there be a systematic correspond-
ence between the situations of the empathizer and the other, so that pro-
cesses of analogical mapping, which may be conscious or unconscious,
are required. In order to imagine ourselves in another's shoes, it is neces-
sary to use the materials of our own experience. Selecting which bits of
experience to use may or may not involve the use of a theory. Sometimes
we interpret or understand people by using quick simulations, sometimes
we use more sophisticated models, and sometimes we resort to dispassion-
ate theory-laden explanations. As we have shown, we can make generali-
zations about the conditions under which these various mental processes
obtain based on the constraints of analogical mapping. The ST/TT
debate is transposed once mental state ascription is viewed as an analog-
ical activity.
718 Dialogue

We can see now that the assumption that ST and TT are mutually exclu-
sive is untenable.8 Adults undoubtedly have theories, and are likely to
apply them when making long-distance analogies. Our investigation has
shed light on when empathy is easy, when it is hard, and how understand-
ing the connection between empathy and analogy changes the debate
between proponents of ST and TT.
Notes
* We thank two anonymous reviewers for comments on an earlier draft of this
paper. This research is supported by a grant from the Natural Sciences and
Engineering Research Council of Canada.
1 Empathy is studied extensively in psychoanalytic theory and clinical psychol-
ogy. See, for example, Kohut 1959; Lichtenberg, Bornstein, and Silver 1984; and
Truax 1967.
2 The debate is documented in Mind and Language (1992).
3 Engell 1981, p. 157. His etymology is confirmed by Wispe 1987, pp. 17-37.
4 For a more complete account of Lipps's use of empathy, consider Katz 1963.
5 For more on the distinction between empathy and sympathy, see Wispe (1987)
and Chismar (1988).
6 The psychological and computational literature on analogy is vast. For reviews,
see Gentner (1983,1989); Hall (1987); Holyoak and Thagard (1989, 1995); and
Thagard, Holyoak, Nelson and Gochfeld (1990).
7 There are slightly different versions of ST and TT. Here, we will use these terms
as they are defined by Alvin Goldman.
8 Gordon (1992), and Stich and Nichols (1992) consistently maintain that ST and
TT are mutually exclusive. Goldman (1992) seems to waver on the issue, although
he thinks simulation can provide a "uniform account" of all interpretations. Paul
Harris (1992), however, claims that children improve their grasp of folk psychol-
ogy by means of simulation, although he does not state that both theory applica-
tion and simulation could be present in the same act of understanding.

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