ABSTRACT
As the phenomenologists have laid out, empathy and the subjective attempt to interiorize the other's point of view may be considered a “foundational human trait.” Walsh Matthews and Osborne offer a biosemiotic reading of the processes involved, focusing on the special relationship between empathy and language. Language (borne out of the capacity for sign-making) provides a generative medium for modeling “the subjective state of another […] through the subject's own neural and bodily representations.” More specifically, language enables the complex “sharing of mental spaces.” As sign-relations and sign-making processes are common to all biota, biosemiotics “is an investigation into meaning at the very cellular level.” More specifically, empathy as a foundational human trait can also explain “the explosive use of signifying systems” in ensuring the human survival. In considering the relationship between language and empathy, of special interest is its connection to theories of phenomenology and embodiment, as well as its continued mutability and context specificity found in multiplicitous and highly mutable forms of cultural expression.
