Intellectual Humility and Empathy by Analogy

Abstract

Empathy can be terribly important when we talk to people who are different from ourselves. And it can be terribly important that we talk to people who are different precisely about those things that make us different. If we’re to have productive conversations across differences, then, it seems we must develop empathy with people who are deeply different. But, as Laurie Paul and others point out, it can be impossible to imagine oneself as someone who is deeply different than oneself—something that plausible definitions of empathy seem to require. How then, can these terribly important conversations take place? I argue that philosophical and psychological work on intellectual humility can show us a way to empathize and have these conversations even when we can’t imagine ourselves as the other.