Second person thought

Abstract

There are modes of presentation of a person in thought corresponding to the first and third person pronouns. This paper proposes that there is also thought involving a second person mode of presentation of another, which might be expressed by an utterance involving ‘you’, but need not be expressed linguistically. It suggests that co-operative activity is the locus for such thought. First person thought is distinctive in how it supplies reasons for the subject to act. In co-operative action there is first person plural intending and judging. So there is a way of thinking of another, when openly co-operating with him or her, which plays the distinctive role of giving reason for contribution to the co-operative activity. In slogan form, ‘you’ is ‘we minus I’. The way children learn to use second and third person pronouns is naturally explained on this view. Contrasting less sophisticated kinds of co-operative activity with more sophisticated forms, and considering some issues about common knowledge and common purpose, help to fill out the proposal.

Keywords:

• modes of presentation
• second person
• ‘you’
• co-operation
• first person plural
• ‘we’
• learning pronouns
• common knowledge
• common purpose

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Naomi Eilan for encouraging me to think about this topic and to colleagues at Warwick, including Guy Longworth, Matthew Nudds, David Smith and Matt Soteriou, for helpful discussion of an early version. Thanks also to colleagues in Glasgow, including Ben Colburn, Fraser MacBride, Martin Smith and Alan Weir, for illuminating comments on another early draft.

Notes on contributor

Jane Heal is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St John's College. She is the author of Fact and Meaning (Blackwell, 1989) and a collection of papers Mind Reason and Imagination was published by CUP in 2003.

Notes

1. Some classic discussions in this area are by Anscombe (1975), Evans (1982, chs. 6 and 7) and Shoemaker (1968).

2. See, for example, Darwall (2009), Longworth (2013), Moran (2013) and Roedl (2007). For a response to Moran, somewhat related to the themes of this paper, see Heal (2013b).

3. See, for example, Bratman (1999, Part Two), Gilbert (2013), Roth (2004), Velleman (1997) and Tuomela (2006).

4. It is, of course, possible to have an unuttered thought about some stranger, the vehicle of which is one saying to oneself ‘You are F’. For example, when passing a drunken stranger in the street, the words ‘You've had a few too many’ may occur in my mind. But, as Peacocke points out (Peacocke 2013, 10), this does nothing to show that there is second person thought, in the sense which interests us. For sure, in some sense we have here ‘addressing’. But it is in a form which is both in imagination only and also linguistic. Hence, the case gives us neither real openness nor the second person in thought as opposed to language.

5. The claim here is not that learning the words ‘I’ and ‘you’, or something directly equivalent in another language, is necessary for conceptual mastery of first and second person thinking. Languages have a variety of ways of making such thinking explicit. The point rather is that learning the pronouns we use is sufficient.

6. Mastering indexicals has, of course, complexity over and above that of mastering words for lengths or positions, in that the child needs to grasp that it is not always right to repeat the words the carer has uttered, but that sometimes instead an appropriately permuted expression must be used. This presents challenges and children may go through a short phase of saying ‘Want to sit on my lap’, when expressing the desire to be lifted up. But the need to tease out these complexities is present in mastering all indexical contrasts, ‘here’ and ‘there’ as much as ‘you’ and ‘I’, and so does not provide any argument for favouring the sceptic about second person thought over the believer.

7. We have already noted some of the extensive literature on co-operation in endnote 2. On common knowledge see the article by Vanderschraaf and Sillari (2013) and the bibliography there. Also there is much of interest in Eilan et al. (2005),

8. Roedl (2007, ch 6) explores similar thoughts.

9. See Heal (2005, 2013a) for related thoughts.