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What Is It like to Feel Another's Pain?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Frédérique de Vignemont  and
Pierre Jacob
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Abstract

We offer an account of empathetic pain that preserves the distinctions among standard pain, contagious pain, empathetic pain, sympathy for pain, and standard pain ascription. Vicarious experiences of both contagious and empathetic pain resemble to some extent experiences of standard pain. But there are also crucial dissimilarities. As neuroscientific results show, standard pain involves a sensorimotor and an affective component. According to our account, contagious pain consists in imagining the former, whereas empathetic pain consists in imagining the latter. We further argue that awareness of another's standard pain is part of empathetic pain, but empathetic awareness of another's standard pain differs from believing that another is in standard pain.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 79 , Issue 2 , April 2012 , pp. 295 - 316
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the conference on Self and Other in Social Neuroscience and Philosophy of Mind in Alghero (Sardinia), at the Mind and Language seminar at the Department of Philosophy at New York University, and at the Philosophy Department of the Central European University in Budapest. We are grateful to the reactions of audiences there and particularly to Ned Block, Tim Crane, Kati Farkas, Alvin Goldman, Christophe Heintz, and Jesse Prinz for their comments. We also wish to acknowledge the support of a grant from the French Ministry of Research (ANR-BLAN SOCODEV). We dedicate this article to the French cognitive neuroscientist Marc Jeannerod, who died on July 1, 2011.

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