Who Needs Emotions? The Brain Meets the Robot

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more about them, their reason for taking the plane (e.g., going on a business
trip or on vacation), their mood, etc.
Originally, the term empathy was translated by Titchener (1908) from
the German term Einfühlung. In the texts of 19th-century German philosophers
and psychologists, like Theodor Lipps (1903), Einfühlung was used to
designate an implicit process of knowledge, different from the rational mode
of knowledge, which gave access to the esthetic or the emotional content of
a situation. The viewer of a painting or the listener to a piece of music, for
example, resented its beauty not through an act of perception but, rather,
through a modification of his or her own emotional state. The same concept
of empathy eventually became used in the context of clinical psychology
(see Pigman, 1995). Lipps considered empathy to be the source of
knowledge about other individuals, to the same extent as sensory perception
is the source of knowledge about objects. His idea was that we understand,
for example, facial expressions displayed by other persons not because
we compare them with our own expressions, which we cannot see, but because
the vision of an expression on the face of someone else “awakens [in
the observer] impulses to such movements that are suited to call just this
expression into existence” (Lipps, 1903, p. 193; see Pigman, 1995). Note
that empathy, as defined here by Lipps, fits the concept of communication
between individuals at the level of embodied selves rather than of narrative
selves, a distinction which was the starting point of this paper.
The concept of empathy, and its consequences for behavior, is taken by
the simulation theorists as equivalent to mind reading, the ability for normal
people to understand and predict the behavior of their conspecifics, which
we mentioned earlier. Gallese and Goldman (1998) proceeded one step
further in proposing an explanation of mind reading in terms of brain mechanisms:
they proposed that the observed behavior would activate, in the
observer’s brain, the same mechanisms that would be activated were that
behavior intended or imagined by the observer. They state that “when one
is observing the action of another, one undergoes a neural event that is qualitatively
the same as [the] event that triggers actual movement in the observed
agent” and, thus, “a mind-reader represents an actor’s behavior by
recreating in himself the plans or movement intentions of the actor.” Gallese
and Goldman’s view is close to that heralded in the field of linguistics to
account for perception of speech by a listener: the general idea is that the
listener would implicitly repeat the auditory message and access the spoken
message via a subliminal activation of his neural and muscular speech mechanisms
(the so-called motor theory of speech perception; Liberman &
Mattingly, 1985). Thus, the simulation theory would encompass a number
of propositions coming from different fields, with the common aim of
explaining communication between people.