Making Sense of Empathy with Social Robots

Social robots exploit human-like behaviors so that people might form emotional bonds with them. Ostensibly, such bonding is an empathic response on the part of the person toward the robot. However, as philosopher Catrin Misselhorn points out, it's conceptually problematic to say that people empathize with robots, for the social robots of the present arguably don't possess human-like emotions. To address this concern, Misselhorn proposes that empathy with robots is possible owing to a sort of interplay between perception and imagination that she calls "imaginative perception." In this paper, I shall make a preliminary sketch of a conceptual framework that, I argue, serves as a clearer, more conceptually straight-forward alternative to imaginative perception. On this framework, empathy with social robots is the result of a kind of perceptual illusion, rather than the result of the imaginative perception of emotion.