Intersubjectivity in infancy: A second-person approach to ontogenetic development

ABSTRACT

The aim of this paper is to present the principles of intersubjectivity as a second-person relational account of mind, set against individualist first- and third-person accounts of the sharing of mental representations. I will set out a summary of these positions and defend the claim that understanding proto-conversations as “expressive communications” allows one to understand them as genuine communications, as in, mutually manifest communications that entail intersubjectivity. To support this interpretation, I will propose a novel explanation of expression, understood as constitutive of the mental state.

KEYWORDS:

• Intersubjectivity
• second-person
• communication
• expression

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my sincere thanks to my PhD supervisor Manuel de Pinedo, to Naomi Eilan, Cristina Borgoni and José Ramón Torices for their helpful comments to the previous versions of this paper. I am also grateful to three anonymous peer reviewers whose comments and suggestions were crucial for the improvement of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I use the relationship of the infant with the mother as the most common case. Henceforth, the term ‘mother,’ in this context, is to be understood as referring to the person who is taking care of the infant, to the caregiver, or to the adult with whom the infant interacts, whether it is the mother or not.

2. However, it should be noted that Mahler and colleagues did not claim that the symbiotic period included the first weeks of life. “This corresponds to the entry into that period which we have named the symbiotic phase. While primary narcissism still prevails, in the symbiotic phase it is not so absolute as it was in the autistic phase (the first few weeks of life)” (Mahler et al., 1975, p. 46).

3. Thanks to an anonymous referee for forcing me to make this point explicit.

4. There is even evidence of turn-taking vocalizations in pre-term infants. A study carried out with pre-term infants, still admitted to the NICU, showed that, at 32 weeks of gestation, infants produce reciprocal vocalizations, supporting the hypothesis that taking turns is an innate human ability (Caskey, Stephens, Tucker, & Vohr, 2011).

5. The existence of this emotional substratum, underpinning linguistic narratives evident in later life, suggests an ontogenetic continuity or invariance (see, for example, (Delafield-Butt & Trevarthen, 2015; Trevarthen et al., 2011). I thank an anonymous referee for making this point clearer to me.

6. I choose to use the term ‘condition’ rather than ‘aspect’ because, although they have the same meaning in this context, the term ‘aspect’ has a different sense in Wittgenstein, which I want to avoid. According to Wittgenstein, ‘noticing an aspect’ is related with seeing something through seeing another thing: “I contemplate a face, and then suddenly notice its likeness to another. I see that it has not changed; and yet I see it differently. I call this experience ‘noticing an aspect’” (1953, part II, section xi, p. 193).

7. As Wittgenstein highlights: “The epithet “sad,” as applied, for example, to the outline face, characterizes the grouping of lines in a circle. Applied to a human being it has a different (though related) meaning. (But this does not mean that a sad expression is like the feeling of sadness!” (1953, part II, section xi, p. 209). There is not a relation of similarity, resemblance or of any other kind. Feeling of sadness and expression of sadness are in the same ontological realm because they are two conditions of one and the same thing. The former is the internally felt condition while the latter is the communicative condition of sadness. It is worth noting that this does not imply that the expression always has to be there. For instance, sometimes we do not feel fatigue but it is expressed in our face, and, conversely, sometimes we feel pain without it being expressed.

8. Regarding the possibility to hear a mental state, Wittgenstein states: “Think of this too: I can only see, not hear, red and green, – but sadness I can hear as much as I can see it” (1953, part II, section xi, p. 209).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research project Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte [Programa Nacional deFormación del Profesorado Universitario (FPU13/03355)]Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación [Research project"Expresivismos Contemporáneos y la Indispensabilidad delVocabulario Normativo: Alcance y Límites de la HipótesisExpresivista" (FFI2016- 80088-P)]; Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte [Programa Nacional deFormación del Profesorado Universitario (FPU13/03355)]

Notes on contributors

Jose Ferrer de Luna

Jose Ferrer de Luna is aGraduate Teaching Assistant and PhD candidate at the Departmentof Philosophy I of the University of Granada. He is memberof the research project Expresivismos Contemporáneos y laIndispensabilidad del Vocabulario Normativo: Alcance y Límites dela Hipótesis Expresivista (FFI2016- 80088-P) and of the researchgroup Filosofía y Análisis (FYA) HUM-975. He is currently writing athesis on the epistemology and teaching Philosophy of Mind.