Empathy, Emotions, and Perspective-taking

In her book *The Space Between*, Heidi Maibom develops an account of perspective-taking that is based on our capacity to grasp another person’s emotion through empathy, arguing that emotions are perspectives. While this approach is promising for some forms of perspective-taking, it risks occluding the relevance of others: when it comes to understanding the perspective not of individuals, but of groups of persons or even of more abstract entities like scientific theories, empathy does not seem to play a relevant role. “Perspectives” are often defined as techniques of representation. In my contribution, I will follow this definition and suggest that in order to understand what the world looks like for groups of persons or a specific scientific theory, we need to reconstruct how the relevant aspects of our shared environment are represented when adopting the relevant technique of representation.