Eros Corassa examines “Empathy and Psychological Characterizations”
Eros Corassa examines “Empathy and Psychological Characterizations”
SSHRC Grant 2006 – Research Profile
Eros Corassa, Department of Philosophy
Project Title: “Empathy and Psychological Characterizations”
Eros Corassa is researching linguistic and psychological data in his SSRHC funded project entitled “Empathy and Psychological Characterizations.” He outlines his research focus with an example.
To report Jon’s utterance “I am tall” we make an ascription like “Jon said that he (himself) is tall” where ‘he (himself)’ though coreferential with ‘Jon’ cannot be replaced by it. If we report: “Jon promised to come but the idiot missed the train”, the epithets ‘the idiot’ is also coreferential with ‘Jon’. Both ‘he (himself)’ and ‘the idiot’ are attributive anaphors. While an attribution with ‘he (himself)’ is de se, an attribution with an epithet like ‘the idiot’ is de re.
Corassa intends to show how this difference helps us to characterize a variety of linguistic and psychological data. These linguistic data will ultimately be accounted for in referring to discourse consideration involving notions such as point of view, perspective and empathy. When the reporter empathizes with the attributee s/he is unlikely to use an epithet in characterizing the attributee.
Corassa’s research objectives are:
* to develop the most extensive and detailed theory contrasting de se and de re attributions appealing to the psychological notion of empathy understood as the capacity we have to assume someone else’s perspective;
* to show the advantages of such an approach over other theories of attitude ascriptions;
* to show how this approach enables us to handle some interesting linguistic data concerning anaphoric resolutions.