Theory as behaviour: Why empathy research needs horizontal, mutualistic habits of seeing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
I propose that theory, typically understood as a mere intellectual position, is also a habit of seeing (in the Deweyan sense). It is a form of behaviour organized through person–environment collaboration that reshapes both person and environment, facilitating and constraining subsequent potentials for action. I discuss two of psychology’s habits of seeing and their effect upon empathy research: (a) the vertical worldview, a habit of searching for reality at higher or lower levels, which neglects the empathizer’s context and (b) dualism, a habit of treating organisms as distinct from environments, which creates the problem of other minds. I present two alternative habits of seeing: (a) van Dijk and Withagen’s horizontal worldview, which looks outward to empathizers’ contexts and (b) organism–environment mutuality, which approaches organisms and environments as processes rather than entities. These latter habits, I conclude, better afford psychologists the possibility of addressing the practical problem of nonempathetic behaviour.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".