Recent epistemology has focused almost exclusively on propositional knowledge. This paper considers an underexplored area of epistemology, namely knowledge of persons: if propositional knowledge is a state of mind, consisting in a subject's attitude to a (true) proposition, the account developed here thinks of interpersonal knowledge as a state of minds, involving a subject's attitude to another (existing) subject. This kind of knowledge is distinct from propositional knowledge, but it exhibits a gradability characteristic of context-sensitivity, and admits of shifty thresholds. (...) It is supported by a wide range of unexplored linguistic data and intuitive cases; and it promises to illuminate debates within epistemology, philosophy of religion, and ethics. (shrink)

Any complete theory of “what we owe to each other” must be able to adequately accommodate directed or bipolar obligations, that is, those obligations that are owed to a particular individual and in virtue of which another individual stands to be wronged. Bipolar obligations receive their moral importance from their intimate connection to a particular form of recognition respect that we owe to each other: respect of another as a source of valid claims to whom in particular we owe certain (...) treatment and, at the very least, an apology if we fail to accord that treatment. While some of the most prominent accounts of interpersonal morality fail to adequately accommodate bipolar obligations, I here investigate a recent proposal that explicitly seeks to improve on these accounts—Stephen Darwall’s second-personal theory of morality. Ultimately, I object to Darwall’s theory on the grounds that his second-personal theory normatively ties bipolar obligations too closely to non-directed moral obligations or those that we are under, period. The problem for Darwall’s account is that any obligations that at first appear to be bipolar and owed to someone in particular turn out to be instances of non-directed moral obligations period that have their normative source in the representative authority of the moral community. Adequately accommodating bipolar obligations requires taking seriously a novel second-personal approach, according to which we locate the normative sources of our interpersonal obligations in the claims and demands particular persons and deliberate from what I call the pairwise or bipolar standpoint. (shrink)

The Problem of Obligation is the problem of how to explain the features of moral obligations that distinguish them from other normative phenomena. Two recent accounts, the Second-Personal Account and the Relational Account, propose superficially similar solutions to this problem. Both regard obligations as based on the claims or legitimate demands that persons as such have on one another. However, unlike the Second-Personal Account, the Relational Account does not regard these claims as based in persons’ authority to address them. Advocates (...) of the Relational Account accuse the Second-Personal Account of falling prey to the Problem of Antecedence. According to this objection, the Second-Personal Account is committed to the implausible claim that we have an obligation to φ only if, and because, others demand that we φ. Since the Relational Account’s proposed solution to the Problem of Obligation does not face the Problem of Antecedence, its advocates argue that it is dialectically superior to the Second-Personal Account. In this paper, I defend the Second-Personal Account by arguing that, first, the Relational Account does not actually solve the Problem of Obligation and, second, the Second-Personal Account does not fall prey to the Problem of Antecedence. (shrink)

This paper introduces the special issue 'The point of view of shared agency', a collection of papers that develops, and critically assesses, a striking development in recent philosophy of mind, epistemology, and developmental psychology, that is, the fundamental reappraisal of the time-honoured distinction between a ‘first-person' and a ‘third-person perspective' on our mental lives. In recent years, the nature of the ‘second-person standpoint' has become a major focus of work across a range of disciplines. More recently, the idea of ‘first-person (...) plural knowledge', has received some attention, for example in considering knowledge of what ‘we are doing’ when we are doing things together. This collection explores collective agency, self-knowledge, and knowledge of other minds, from this plural and relational point of view. (shrink)

The first-person access to the self has been widely recognized by philosophers. But a competing idea arises, challenging the first-person givenness, from those who argue that self-interpretation and self-knowledge are acquired through the third-person perspective. I argue that these two dichotomous perspectives of the self can be mediated by the second-person perspective through dialogical semiosis of narrative. Peirce’s semiotic perspective on the self emphasizes the role of a semiotic subject that participates in sign processes as an interpreting agent. In this (...) sense, the concept of self is acquired through semiosis of narrative and at the same time it is interpreted in narrative world, taking the role of character. It is character which makes a person identifiable as a person, since character is not substance but quality as a recognized pattern or type through time, which becomes a habit of act and thought, thus forming personal identity. Within this context, I argue that from the first-person perspective a deliberate subject of self as “subjective I” and from the third-person perspective a dynamic object of self as “objective I” are mediated by the relationship between self and other as an imaginary relation in narrative world, just like an imaginary line of identity, connecting word with thing. From the second-person perspective, oneself as another forms teridentity (co-identity) in textual world. I shall illustrate the interlock between the semiotic self and narrative identity through Peirce’s semiotic approach to the self and Ricoeur’s theory of narrative identity, analyzing the filmic narrative text of Burning (2018). (shrink)

Authority figures permeate our daily lives, particularly, our political lives. What makes authority legitimate? The current debates about the legitimacy of authority are characterised by two opposing strategies. The first establish the legitimacy of authority on the basis of the content of the authority’s command. That is, if the content of the commands meet some independent normative standard then they are legitimate. However, there have been many recent criticisms of this strategy which focus on a particular shortcoming – namely, its (...) seeming inability to account for who can legitimately command whom. This is the basis of the second strategy, which attempts to characterize the normative relationship that underlies and makes possible authoritative commands. The central point of Part I is that these two strategies are, in fact, not opposed and both raise questions which a theory of legitimacy must answer. If this is the case, then we need to ask: how ought we to determine the legitimacy both of the content of commands as well as who can command whom? Part II will answer this question. Starting with the question of standing, I argue that we ought not to look for normative principles outside of the institutions in which authority is embedded. Rather, one ought to start by elaborating the ontology of institutions in which a sui generis form of normativity arises. A joint commitment account of social ontology provides the tools necessary to see how the direction obligations emerge concurrently with the formation of institutions. Similarly, the question of content can be answered by paying close attention to the social ontology of institutions. We need not look beyond the internal constitutive standards of the institution itself. The constitutive standards provide an internal criterion by which the legitimacy of commands can be established. (shrink)