Mutual recognition, common knowledge and joint attention

Synthesis philosophica, 58, 235–251, 2015

In this paper I criticize theory-biased and overly individualist approaches to understanding others and introduce the PAIR account of joint attention as a pragmatic, affectively charged intentional relation. I argue that this relation obtains in virtue of intentional contents in the minds of the co-attenders, and – against the received understanding of intentional states as propositional attitudes – that we should recognize what I call “subject mode” and “position mode” intentional content. Based on findings from developmental psychology, I propose that subject mode content represents the co-attenders as co-subjects, who are like them and who are at least disposed to act jointly with them. I conclude by arguing that in joint attention we experience and understand affective, actional and perceptual relations at a non-conceptual level prior to the differentiation of mind and body.

2021

What is the relation between joint attention and common knowledge? On the one hand, the relation seems tight: the easiest and most reliable way of knowing something in common with another is for you and that other to be attentively aware of what you are together experiencing. On the other hand, they couldn’t seem further apart: joint attention is a mere perceptual phenomena that infants are capable of engaging in from nine months of age, whereas common knowledge is a cognitive phenomenon involving (so it seems) complex, overlapping metarepresentational states that require the kind of sophisticated mindreading skills that developmental psychology has shown to be beyond the capabilities of young children. In The Shared World: Perceptual Common Knowledge, Demonstrative Communication, and Shared Social Space, Axel Seemann attempts, inter alia, to make sense of this conundrum. The general answer that Seemann provides is what might be called a “bottom–up” one: joint attention, on Seemann’...

Philosophical Psychology, 2024

One of the main positions in the contemporary debate on joint attention is John Campbell's relationalist account. This account has been welcomed as extremely promising in some strands of philosophy and cognitive science, but it has recently been subject to renewed criticism. In this paper, I take a sympathetic approach toward Campbell's relationalism and I provide support for it by means of a naturalistic theory of the individuation of joint-attentional states. I start from examining some recent objections raised against Campbell's account. I suggest that, although these objections do not undermine the account, they point to questions that current relationalism leaves unanswered. Specifically, current relationalism does not provide an explanation of the psychological processes through which a jointattentional experience is individuated, i.e., assembled and experienced, in such a way that it can constitute an immediate justification for a coordinated action. I propose that such an explanation can be found in a phenomenologicalinteractionist approach to shared intentionality.

Topoi, 2024

In order to understand what we are talking about when we talk about joint attention, I will scrutinize how the mainstream view that builds on representational and intentionalist theories of mind is constituted. My aim is to show that much of the theory of joint attention is quite narrowly constructed and comes with tacit disciplinary biases that exclude much of what is existentially important in our practices of sharing our perceptions and guiding others to attend to the world in novel ways. By using the frameworks of classical phenomenology and enactivist theories of mind, I aim to show how we, in our interactions, share our perceptions even with beings that are distinctly different from us. And, that this difference in our personal worldview, our cognitive capacities, and our sensory modalities should be seen as a constitutive aspect of our practices of shared attention. I will articulate attention as a revelatory practice that aids us in discovering a shared world through the plurality, rather than similarity, of our perceptual actions. Attention is, in this sense, not solely driven by subjective intentions; it is also formed and co-constituted by my being addressed by the other.

Axel Seemann (ed.), Joint attention. Perspectives and Developments, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, January 2012, pp. 205-242.

In Wehrle, M., Solomonova, E. and D'Angelo, D. Access and Mediation. A New approach to Attention, De Gruyter., 2022

Cognitivist approaches to joint attention conceptualize it as a form of triangular interaction, between two agents and one object. When describing the interpersonal dimension of this triangle they frame it as a form of simulation, theorizing or both, involving representations of the other agent's mental states-representation of representations-and inferences. In this paper, we advocate a different framework for understanding shared attention, the ecological psychology framework that understands attention through the notion of 'affordance'. Affordances are relational and not representational. They are direct relationships between agents and their environments. While some authors have pointed to the notion of 'social affordance' (Heft 2007, 2017; Rietveld & Kiverstein, 2014; Moreira de Carvalho, 2020) for understanding phenomena related to shared attention, the notion remains general and imprecise. The problem is that the notion is used indistinctively to refer to a number of different phenomena that involve social attention in very different ways. To address this issue, we offer an initial classification of different kinds of social affordances, from dyadic relations between agents, and different forms of triangular interactions, reciprocal and non-reciprocal, that provide direct and indirect information about common environments to one or both agents, all the way to collective affordances that lie at the basis of socio-cultural forms of life. We argue that this account is better placed than the standard cognitivist alternative to account for both shared attention and joint action in a noncognitively demanding way. In addition, we show how these forms of shared activity are, in turn, fundamental for the acquisition of the socio-cultural norms that come to permeate human perception.

European Journal for Philosophy of Religion

This article takes up the proposal that action and expression enable perceptual knowledge of other minds, a proposal that runs counter to a tradition of thinking that other minds are special in that they are essentially unobservable. I argue that even if we accept this proposal regarding perceptual knowledge, there is still a difference between knowing another person and knowing other things. I articulate this difference by pointing out that I can know another person by sharing knowledge with her. Such sharing is expressed in the use of the second-person pronoun. Thus, I argue, other minds are indeed special as objects of knowledge, but not in the way the tradition has supposed.

Journal of Pragmatics, 2007

We demonstrate that ''joint attention'', usually conceived of in the psychological sciences as indicative of such minded processes as the capacity for understanding the intentional, goal-directed behavior of others, is fundamentally an interactional process, one that cannot be extricated from the ongoing flow of social activity. We examine very young children's actions of showing objects to others, and explicate the practical procedures by which they draw and sustain another's attention to an object, and convey ''what for''-that is, what another should do in response. At issue is how children in a natural social setting (here, a daycare center) track the activities of others for felicitous moments to present objects, and design and position their actions by reference to the ongoing preoccupations, commitments, and distractions of others. Further, drawing another's attention poses sequential implications for children's actions which structure opportunities for parties (child and other) to display, and modify, their understandings of what sort of social exchange is transpiring between them. #

Proceedings of the 30th …, 2008

We document a new phenomenon: participants' eye movements are influenced by the belief that they are either looking at pictures alone, or that a person next door is looking at the same pictures. The pictures were in sets of four. One had a positive and one a negative valence, and others were neutral. On a trial by trial basis, eye movements to the negative versus the positive pictures were modulated by participants' belief that they were looking alone or jointly. A second experiment manipulated the beliefs participants had about the person in the next cubicle, in an attempt to tease apart possible explanations for this effect of 'joint perception'. In each case, a minimal sense of cooperation with another appears to produce distinct cognitive effects, in manner similar to that found in studies of 'joint action'. We conclude that there may be a pervasive effect of social context upon cognitive and perceptual processes.

Topoi, 2024