RECLAIMING THE ANCESTORS OF SIMULATION THEORY

Abstract

Collingwood's account of re-enactment is not often invoked as a source of inspira tion in contemporary action It was thus a pleasant surprise to come across an attempt to connect current research in cognitive psychology with the historical debate about the nature of action explanation that took place in mid-century, and to reclaim the centrality of Collingwood's work to contemporary theorizing about the nature of folk-psychological explanation. Stueber's Rediscovering Empathy articulates an interesting and highly original defense of empathy as a distinctive method of explanation in the social sciences. In so doing it contests a philosophical trend that has tended to dismiss the method of empathetic identification for relying on an implausibly Cartesian conception of the mind and on the employment of mysterious telepathic powers that lie beyond the scope of verification. Stueber's defense of empathy unfolds in the context of the contemporary debate in analytic philosophy of mind between and theory. Oversimplifying the matter somewhat, the issue at stake for theory theorists and simulation theorists is whether the ability to predict the be havior of other human beings depends on the employment of a theory about how human beings typically tend to react in certain circumstances (theory theory), or whether it is only necessary to empathize with them and ask how we would act if we found ourselves in their situation. In most cases simulation theory and theory theory have been presented as empirical hypotheses to be tested in experimental conditions. The testing ground for this debate has been developmental psychology, where experiments carried out under controlled conditions have shown that where as children around the age of three are unable to accurately predict the behavior of agents who hold beliefs different from their own, children aged five and over have no problems in performing this task. The question at stake is whether the five-year old as opposed to the three-year-old ability to predict the behavior of persons with a different set of beliefs from their own depends on the possession of a fairly so phisticated theory about how people generally act (as the theory theorists claims), or whether this ability is connected less with the child's cognitive development and more with the child's emotional development, that is, with his or her ability to empathize with others and take their point of view (as simulationists claim).