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 machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.018 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.054 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.021 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".