Making Sense of Empathy with Sociable Robots: A New Look at the “Imaginative Perception of Emotion”

In this chapter, the author examines a philosophical contribution toward making sense of empathy with robots, namely: Catrin Misselhorn's proposal that empathy with robots occurs through the interplay between perception and imagination. He argues that although Misselhorn's explanatory framework captures something true about why people feel empathy for robots, such emotional responses are better conceived of as analogous to perceptual illusions rather than as cases of imaginative perception. The author subsequently modifies Misselhorn's framework to accommodate this, and explores whether this modified framework can help account for another emotional response toward robots, the uncanny valley phenomenon. He draws from some examples of empirical research on the uncanny valley. The author shows that people can (mis)perceive that robots possess attributes like animacy, emotion, and mentation. Finally, he concludes that examples of people feeling empathy for robots are not genuine cases of empathy.