15 - Folk Psychology and Jaspers’ Empathic Understanding: A Conceptual Exercise?

Summary

Peter Zachar argues that one of the challenges to accurate empathic understanding that Campbell identifies, that these imaginative reconstructions might be fictional just-so stories, is not resolved by one of his proposed solutions – adopting R. G. Collingwood’s critical approach to writing history by reconstructing the thoughts and motivations of important historical figures. In contrast to the notion of reconstructing another’s internal thought processes, Zachar claims that most of the information we use to understand others is based on third-person information, which is largely how psychotherapists are taught to understand others. He compares this process to Karl Popper’s notion of critical rationalism.