Empathy as a Tool for Learning about Evaluative Features of Objects

It is generally agreed that empathy can give us knowledge about others. However, the potential use of empathy as a tool to learn about features of objects in the world more generally, as opposed to learning only about others’ internal states, has not been discussed in the literature. In this paper I make the claim that empathy can help us learn about evaluative features of objects in the world. I further defend this claim by comparing empathy to testimony. Then I present and respond to two possible objections to this analogy.