Expression and empathy

Abstract

The ongoing debate about the nature of social cognition has been dominated by two competing positions, the theory theory of mind and the simulation theory of mind. Although these positions are regularly depicted as being quite divergent, I will in the following discuss what I take to be a shared assumption, namely a certain conception of the mind-body relation. I will criticize it and, drawing on thinkers like Scheler, Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein, I will argue that our understanding of others is crucially dependent on our understanding of their expressive behaviour. © 2007 Springer.