Interpersonal Understanding and Endorsement

Interpersonal understanding seems to have an evaluative dimension. That is, it seems to require an element of “endorsement” of the target person, her mental states, or her behaviour. This becomes particularly evident in negative cases of avowals of lack of understanding, in which subjects express that they really cannot understand how X could do Y, even though they can give an adequate explanation of X’s behaviour. While positive cases of avowals of understanding, such as “I really understand you”, are less common, this evaluative dimension is also elucidated by the fact that interpersonal understanding is often taken to be closely related to morally valuable relationships. Interpersonal understanding is, for example, frequently connected to forgiveness as evidenced by the German phrase “Wir bitten um Verständnis” as well as the French proverb “Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner”. Moreover, being an understanding person is often seen as a moral virtue, which would be puzzling on a purely epistemic view of interpersonal understanding. The subproject aims at constructing a theory of the evaluative component of interpersonal understanding referred to as “endorsement” as well as a related account of the virtue of being an understanding person.

Interpersonal and Phenomenal Understanding

Although both explanatory understanding and recognizing another person’s mental states are clearly important for interpersonal understanding, the guiding assumption of this sub-project is that interpersonal understanding involves more than these two components. In particular, I assume that an essential aspect of interpersonal understanding is understanding what it is like or how it feels for another to be in some situation. I will focus primarily on affective states, firstly, because it is relatively uncontroversial that affective states have phenomenal qualities. Secondly, affects play a central role in a person’s psychology, so that understanding a person’s affective states is a key aspect of interpersonal understanding.

What it means to understand affective states depends on the fact that affects are essentially conscious; it is primarily in virtue of this fact that there is a specific form of understanding which focuses on what it is like for a person to be in her specific state. According to my working hypothesis, then, this is a key reason why interpersonal understanding cannot be reduced to explanatory understanding or propositional knowledge about the target’s mental states. The aim of the subproject is, accordingly, to develop an account of phenomenal understanding of other persons’ psychological, particularly affective states. In doing so, phenomenal understanding will be examined in its relations both to phenomenal knowledge and to other types of understanding, in particular, explanatory understanding.