Empathy and Agency

"How do we, as interpreters and theorists in the human and social sciences, understand agency? More specifically, how can we as interpretive analysts employ our own cognitive capacities so as to render the beliefs, intentions, and actions of other human beings intelligible? These are the leading questions that a group of well-established social philosophers explore in this volume in light of the most recent (and hotly debated) findings in cognitive science, developmental psychology, and philosophy of mind.

In particular, the debate concerning simulation - whether agents interpret others by means of implicit theoretical assumptions, or whether they instead simulate their behavior by putting themselves in their shoes - has produced a wide set of important empirical and philosophical insights. This book takes up those insights and discusses their impact in the context of the most important paradigms in social methodology today."--BOOK JACKET.