Pierre Jacob: Can One Share Another's Pain?

The goal of this paper is to sketch an account of empathetic pain. The experience of empathetic pain is a species of vicarious experiences of pain. Empathetic responses to another's affective state of kind S are vicarious experiences of affective states of kind S. There are presently two prevalent approaches to empathetic experiences in both cognitive science and philosophy: a mimicry approach (based on the discovery of mirror neurons) and the direct perception approach. Both approaches face insuperable objections. I argue instead for an imagination-based account of vicarious pain and turn to some neuroscientific findings in order to try and account for the distinction between two kinds of vicarious experiences of pain: contagious experiences and empathetic experiences.