Joint attention and understanding others

2014

The Theory of Mind Debate has seen a recent shift of focus from social observation towards social interaction. Defenders of so-called second-person accounts claim that social interactions reveal an understanding of another person which is different in kind to merely knowing that the other has a particular mental state. The aim of this paper is to specify this (allegedly) new form of understanding. In the first part, I criticize attempts to describe it as the knowledge of how to react to the other’s mental state, i.e. as the exhibition of a social skill. In the second part, I develop an alternative proposal which is based upon the work of Cavell and Thompson. I suggest that understanding another person in a social interaction is to be conceptualized as the propositional nexus of acknowledging his mental state to him.

Joint attention is an inconspicuous psychological phenomenon occurring when two or more people are jointly attending to an object. On a first view there is little remarkable about it. What makes it philosophical interesting is the fact that there is a general agreement in the relevant literature that it is characterized by a certain openness. This openness is supposed to mean that it must be transparent to all the involved that they are jointly attending. It is this openness that makes the analysis of joint attention such a challenge. The most self-evident attempts to cash out the openness will almost inevitably end up as implausible analyses in terms of common knowledge: X must that know that Y knows that X knows that Y knows and so on with out a genuine possibility of ending the infinite iterations of mutual knowledge ascriptions. One of the most innovative recent proposals to capture this openness without falling into the trap of an analysis in terms of common knowledge stems from John Campbell. In line with his naïve realist picture of perception Campbell argues that we would best analyze joint attention as a three-place-experiential relation. On his account the co-attention of each of the attenders is constituted by the other’s co-attention. Because of this constitutive relation one can only experience being in a joint attention situation, if one really is in a joint attention situation. I begin my thesis with a detailed interpretation of Campbell’s argument before I reject his preclusion of reductive-experiential accounts of joint attention. I proceed to investigate further potential motivations for Campbell’s proposal as much from the Philosophy of Mind as from the Theory of Collective Intentionality. For both fields I can show that they offer no compelling reasons to give a relational account of joint attention. Lastly, I criticize Campbell’s proposal extensively and show that we a.) cannot explain it in a way consistent with its own presuppositions and that it is b.) build at least in part on an implausible phenomenological picture of the experiential warrant joint attentional experiences transmit to the agents. Closing, I offer a short argument for the development of a comprehensive account of joint attention in terms of an assumption-based theory of joint attention.

Frontiers in Psychology

We consider the second-person or interactive approach to social understanding, conceived as an understanding of intentional relations. We identify five forms of secondperson information-self-directedness, contingency, reciprocity, affective engagement, and shared intentions-that occur only in interactions. We assess the extent to which these forms of information are available to observers of interactions as well as to the participants of an interaction and conclude that whereas observers may gain some second-person information, interactive participants have a privileged position. We also ask whether these forms of second-person information can deliver social understanding in terms of the understanding of intentional relations that are descriptive of persons. We argue that whereas none of these forms alone is sufficient for understanding intentional relations, they all play an important role in the developmental processes that enable the construction of social understanding. Therefore, the second-person approach, understood as theorizing how second-person information available in interactions is used in the development of social understanding, is a critically important approach to a full theory of social understanding.

Frontiers in Psychology, 2023

Ordinary language in Western and non-Western cultures individuates shared mental states or experiences as unitary interpersonal events that belong to more than one individual. However, a default assumption in modern Western thought is that, in this regard, ordinary language is either illusory or merely metaphorical: a mental state or experience can belong to only one person. This assumption is called Cartesian eliminativism and is often taken to be foundational in psychology. It follows that any view that contradicts Cartesian eliminativism is a priori suspected of being “mysterious,” i.e., of not meeting scientific standards. This paper suggests that the very opposite may be the case. The straightforward view explains how individuals assemble and experience a shared mental state as a unitary whole whose components are distributed among the participants. The naturalistic advantages of such a view are brought to light by focusing on developmental science. Since it explains early shared emotions, goals, and attention merely by relying on domain-general, associative processes, the straightforward view is more parsimonious than current psychological theories. Indeed, it abandons the cumbersome postulates of (i) multi-level recursive mindreading and (ii) a special, conceptually elusive phenomenal quality. I outline the distinctive developmental predictions of the view and discuss how it accounts for the functions of shared mental states. As a reductionist, non-eliminativist approach, the straightforward view promises to be viable also for cognitive scientists who have so far worked within the Cartesian framework due to a lack of a rigorous and sufficiently developed alternative.

Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology, 2011

It is one thing for two or more persons to perceive the same object, and it is quite another for two or more persons to perceive the same object together. The latter phenomenon is called joint attention and has recently garnered considerable interest from psychologists. However, contemporary psychological research has not succeeded in clarifying how persons can share perception of an object. Joint attention thus stands in need of phenomenological clarification. Surprisingly, this has yet to be offered. Phenomenologists have provided thoroughgoing analyses of perceptual experience, but have overlooked the perceptual experiences of co-perceivers; and while a number of well-known phenomenologists have offered accounts of how one encounters other persons, they have neglected the phenomenon of perceptually attending to an object with other persons. This paper addresses a shortcoming of both contemporary psychological research and the phenomenological tradition by providing a phenomenological analysis of joint attention.

Perspectiva Filosófica

Openness is a distinctive feature in the episodes of joint attention. In such an episode, everything is in the open, nothing is hidden (PEACOCKE, 2005, p. 298). But what is this metaphorical description supposed to grasp? On the common knowledge approach, openness is characterized by an infinite list of iterated perceptual knowledge attributions. This approach overloads the cognitive costs of joint attention. On the relational approach, openness is a primitive notion; the phenomenon results from the fusion of perceptions between the agents, a singular experience of co-percipience that explains joint attention for free. This paper aims to argue for an intermediate approach to explain openness. We offer here an account of openness in terms of nonwellfounded situations. We shall argue that it not only fully characterizes mutual awareness in a finite adequate way but that it also preserves the low cognitive burden of the co-presence situation.

Perception, Causation, and Objectivity, 2011

Unlike any other species, humans can think about perspectives that are not currently their own. They can put themselves in the "mental shoes" of others and imagine how they perceive, think, or feel about an object or event. Perspectivity in its mature, adult form even goes beyond the ability to determine a specific person's point of view at a certain moment in time.. It entails the general comprehension that one and the same thing or event can be viewed or construed differently depending on one's standpointwhether this is a visuo-spatial, episternic, conceptual, or affective standpoint (perner, Brandl, and• Garnham, 2003). Fro.m a developmental perspective, the question arises when and how children acquire this knowledge. We offer a new look at the early ontogeny of understanding visual perception and experiences-with a major emphasis on the ability to take and understand the perspectives of others. The central claim we aim to develop is that human children first learn about perspectives within the context ofjoint attentional engagement. Infants' ability and motivation to jointly attend to objects and events with others allows them to share perceptions and experiences from very early on in life (Tomasello, Call, Carpenter, Behne, and Moll, 2005). This sharing sets the ground for later perspective-taking. Developmental inquiries ofjoint attention and perspective-taking have mostly been conducted in separation: The term "joint visual attentio~" is often used as a synonym for the specific case of gaze following, which is rarely looked at in terms of its relation to later perspective-taking; and models of perspective-taking have failed to recognize early joint attentional skills as a foundational first step towards perspectivity (but see Martin, Sokol, and Elvers, 2008). We want to bring these two strands together and argue thatjoint attention is a necessary condition for appreciating perspectives. Perspectival differences, however distinct and incompatible they may be-in the sense that they cannot consistently be held by one person at the same time-necessarily converge on one and the same object (where "object" can refer to a thing, an event, a state of affairs etc.

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’...

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 2017

In the debate about the nature of social cognition we see a shift towards theories that explain social understanding through interaction. This paper discusses autopoietic enactivism and the we-mode approach in the light of such developments. We argue that a problem seems to arise for these theories: an interactionist account of social cognition makes the capacity of shared intentionality a presupposition of social understanding, while the capacity of engaging in scenes of shared intentionality in turn presupposes exactly the kind of social understanding that it is intended to explain. The social capacity in question that is presupposed by these accounts is then analyzed in the second section via a discussion and further development of Searle's 'sense of us' and 'sense of the other' as a precondition for social cognition and joint action. After a critical discussion of Schmid's recent proposal to analyze this in terms of plural pre-reflective selfawareness, we develop an alternative account. Starting from the idea that infants distinguish in perception between physical objects and other agents we distinguish between affordances and social affordances and cash out the notion of a social affordance in terms of Binteraction-oriented representations^, parallel to the analysis of object affordances in terms of Baction-oriented representations^. By characterizing their respective features we demonstrate how this approach can solve the problem formulated in the first part.

Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2003

Joint attention to an external object at the end of the first year is typically believed to herald the infant's discovery of other people's attention. I will argue that mutual attention in the first months of life already involves an awareness of the directedness of attention. The self is experienced as the first object of this directedness followed by gradually more distal 'objects'. This view explains early infant affective self-consciousness within mutual attention as emotionally meaningful, rather than as bearing only a spurious similarity to that in the second and third years of life. Such engagements precede and must inform, rather than derive from, conceptual representations of self and other, and can be better described as self -other conscious affects.