Reduction In John Stein's 'On The Problem Of Empathy'

It may now be helpful to work through a second example of phenomenological reduction. In On the Problem of Empathy, Stein applies the reduction to examine what empathy is. She poses the problem as follows: “A friend tells me that he has lost his brother and I become aware of his pain. What kind of an awareness is this?” (Stein 1989, 6). By performing the phenomenological reduction, Stein is interested not in the perceptual inference of how we might come to realize a friend is sad. The knowledge used in the inference, as well as the empirical mechanisms by which humans might infer emotions, would be bracketed as part of the reduction. Rather, we should focus on empathy as it can be represented in pure consciousness.
Stein describes empathy as
In the first stage, I see that my friend is melancholy. In this case, the content of my experience is the proposition that my friend is melancholy. In the second stage, I take the place of my friend who is melancholy. The content that now faces me is the proposition that a brother has died. Regarding the third stage, Stein says, “And only after successfully executed clarification, does the content again face me as an object” (1989, 10). Clarification implies that I now see why my friend is melancholy. The content that now faces me is the proposition that my friend is melancholy about the loss of his brother.
According to this phenomenological account, an inference that resulted in the conclusion of the third stage is insufficient. For example, suppose there was an artificial intelligence system designed to recognize facial expressions and scenes. Suppose such a system saw a frown in the backdrop of a funeral and concluded that a person was sad about the death of a loved one. This would not be empathy, primarily because the second stage of empathy was never met. It was never the case that the system took the viewpoint of the other person, even though it happened to make an accurate