Joint Attention, Collective Knowledge, and the “We” Perspective

Abstract

In this paper, I am concerned with the practical aspect of joint attention. In particular, I ask what enables us to engage in joint activities, and go on to suggest that on a representational account of joint attention, this question cannot be satisfactorily answered. I explore John Campbell’s “relational” approach and suggest that if one couples it with Peter Hobson’s notion of “feeling perception”, one may be in a position to account for the action‐enabling aspect of joint engagements. This approach can usefully be thought of as describing a practical kind of collective knowledge.

Keywords:

• Joint Attention
• Mutual Attention
• Collective Knowledge
• Feeling Perception
• Person Perception
• Intersubjectivity

Acknowledgements

The author is indebted to Bentley College for a summer grant that enabled him to write this paper. The author wishes to thank the participants of John Searle’s seminar on Social Ontology for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. Thanks are due in particular to Jennifer Hudin.

Notes

[1] Exceptions are John Campbell (2005) and Christopher Peacocke (2005).

[2] For two important (and conflicting) accounts, see Herbert Dreyfus (1999) and John Searle (1983, esp. 141–60).

[3] At this juncture a regress arises, whose classical formulations can be found in Lewis (1969) and Schiffer (1972). I am going to sidestep the debate about whether this regress is vicious, since I will argue that the model of a triadic representation as the starting point of a joint involvement with (or collective knowledge about) the world that gives rise to this regress is fundamentally deficient.

[4] For instance, Trevarthen adopts a representational account of perception in his study of primary intersubjectivity (1979, esp. 330).

[5] One important feature of this kind of perception is that it depends on what one may call a “mutuality constraint”. There is a fundamental difference between perceiving a person who is attending to someone else, and the perceptual experience available to persons attending to one another. It is this latter kind of experience that is of relevance for a non‐representational account of joint attention.

[6] For example, Trevarthen (1979)

[7] For example, Maurice Merleau‐Ponty (1981).

[8] For example, Jürgen Habermas and Maeve Cooke (1998).

[9] This sweeping claim needs to be qualified, for it is obviously possible to conceive of a scenario in which I pretend to share your sense of calm wonder while secretly plotting to kill the swan. Or you and I may jointly attend to the polka‐dot tie you have given me as a present, even though your excitement is matched by a sensation of horror on my part. The suggestion is that instances of mutual or joint attention in which the co‐attenders' subjective attitudes are aligned with one another constitute a paradigmatic case—the sort of scenario that is in place when mothers and infants mutually attend to one another, or (later on) jointly to an object. Persons’ capacity to engage in joint or mutual acts of attention in situations where their subjective attitude is not aligned with that of their co‐attender might then be understood as developing out of their earlier skill to engage in such acts in the paradigmatic case. I am obliged to Kay Mathiesen for pointing out the problem.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Axel Seemann

Axel Seemann is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Bentley College in Waltham, MA. He is interested in social cognition and is currently exploring the relevance of Joint Attention for a theory of collective action.