Empathy is sensitivity for what our neighbor is doing or suffering. For an animate being to be empathic with another one means that the former puts himself into the other's shoes. Empathy presupposes that the other being is similar to the empathic being. A human being is most empathic with another human being and decreasingly empathic with other mammals, other vertebrates, insects, molluscs ...¹ Another factor is the status of the other as an individual: there is no empathy with an unindividuated mass (Lehmann, K. 2024: 248). On the other hand, empathy is not a human privilege; elephants, apes, dogs and rats show empathy with their like. Empathy probably has a physiological basis in the mirror-neuron system.

Empathy has an emotional and a cognitive dimension (Lehmann, K. 2024: 208). Emotional empathy manifests itself most clearly in the pity we have with others, but also in our propensity to join in their laughter. Cognitive empathy underlies our ability to form a theory of mind. We do inferencing about the likely intentions of others. Adult humans are best in this; children learn it. To the extent that symptoms of theory of mind are found in chimpanzees and even dogs, such capacities are a consequence of domestication; this modifies their type of intelligence.

A further aspect of empathy is altruism and cooperativity. This is presupposed by the sharing of information. Imparting information to others may be helpful for them. Thus, although it is altruistic in a first approximation, it is also appreciated by recipients, enhances the sender's prestige and may therefore constitute a selection advantage (Hurford 1999). Taking everything together, empathy has a function in social behavior, especially in the development of shared intentionality, which, in its turn, is the ground on which language develops (Tomasello 2008): sharing of information entails the imparting of declarative speech acts.

¹ The same continuum is known as the animacy continuum in neuroscience (Thorat et al. 2019).