Mirroring Minds: Hume on Sympathy

Abstract

Hume’s account of sympathy has often been taken to describe what the discovery of so-called mirror neurons has suggested, namely, that we are able to understand one another’s emotions and beliefs through experiences that require no mediating thoughts and exactly resemble the experiences of the observed person. I will oppose this interpretation by arguing that, on Hume’s standard account, sympathy is a mechanism that produces ideas and beliefs prior to the emergence of shared feelings. To stress this aspect of Humean sympathy is to show that the experiences, which mirror neurons apparently cause us to have, may well count as inferentially derived emotion-laden beliefs, thus undermining the opposition between experience-grounded and inference-based accounts of mind-reading.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 27 citations exist upstream.