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Figurative Language – Intersubjectivity and Usage
Edited by Augusto Soares da Silva
[Figurative Thought and Language 11] 2021
► pp. 19–40

Second-order empathy, pragmatic ambiguity, and irony

| University of Leuven
If first-order empathy is the ability of Self to take into account Other’s point of view, second-order empathy may be defined as the ability of Self to take into account Other’s point of view as including a view of Self. The paper argues that the possibility for the hearer to choose between a first-order empathic and a second-order empathic interpretation of speaker utterances introduces a principled and pervasive indeterminacy in speaker-hearer interactions, illustrated with examples of referential ambiguity, speech-act-related ambiguity, and sociocommunicative ambiguity. With representative speech acts, the interaction of degree of empathy and convergence/divergence of beliefs yields six interpretative configurations: assertion, mistake, agreement, disagreement, irony, deception. Thus, irony finds a systematic position within a broader calculus of intersubjective interaction.
Keywords: empathy, irony, ambiguity, assertion, mistake, agreement, disagreement, deception, phenomenology, theory of mind
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Demarcations
  • 3.Ambiguities
    • 3.1Referential ambiguity
    • 3.2Speech-act-related ambiguity
    • 3.3Sociocommunicative ambiguity
    • 3.4Non-verbal empathic ambiguity
  • 4.Representatives
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgement
  • References
Published online: 19 May 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ftl.11.01gee
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