Embodied approaches to mindreading have tended to define themselves in contrast to cognitive approaches to social mindreading. One side effect of this has been a lack of engagement with key areas in the study of social cognition—in particular the topic of how we gain an understanding of the referential nature of others’ thoughts, and how that understanding develops from infancy. I argue that embodied accounts of mindreading are well equipped to enter into this debate, by making use of the notion (...) of a joint mental state, but that doing so will require taking a less antagonistic attitude towards mainstream cognitive approach. (shrink)

In this paper, I am going to be concerned with the capacity of human beings to act jointly. In particular, I will focus on the phenomenal aspect of collective action. I shall suggest that the experience of being jointly engaged with another is complex: it comprises both a practical grasp of oneself and of the other person as single agents participating in the joint pursuit, and an experience of collective immersion in the activity, which includes a sense of joint control. (...) This suggestion gives rise to a number of puzzles: firstly, what is the relation between jointly engaged agents' awareness of self and other and their sense of a joint engagement? Secondly, how are we to substantiate the idea of a sense of joint control if it is also obviously true that I don't, however close our psychological and bodily attunements, have control over your doings? I shall argue that a satisfactory solution to these puzzles is possible only if we take seriously the notion of a perceptually constituted “intersubjective perspective” that is shared by the participants in joint activities and gives rise to an attitude of mutual trust. (shrink)

The question of what is shared in joint action has been discussed mainly with reference to the notion of collective intentionality. The problem of how to account for intentional states that are shared between two or more jointly engaged creatures is particularly relevant for actions that involve distal intentions. Yet there is another important kind of joint action, which so far has received less interest, at least by philosophers. This kind of action can be described in terms of a shared (...) motor engagement of two or more creatures with their surroundings. In this paper, I address the question of what is shared in such motor engagements. I suggest that joint motor actions come off through sharing particular kinds of feelings. In order to flesh out what it means to share feelings, I introduce the notion of ‘cross-creature embodiment’—the idea that a certain type of embodied mental event is constitutively tied to the body state of another, perceptually present creature in broadly the same way in which it is tied to the experiencing creature’s own. I end by suggesting that this notion makes available a new, albeit tentative, interpretation of recent neuroscientific evidence. (shrink)

In The Paradox of Self-Consciousness, Jose Luis Bermúdez presents an abductive argument for what he calls ‘the Symmetry Thesis’ about self-ascription: in order to have the ability to self-ascribe psychological predicates to oneself, one must be able to ascribe psychological predicates to other subjects like oneself. Bermúdez discusses joint engagement as a key phenomenon that underwrites his abductive argument for the Symmetry Thesis. He argues that the ability to self-ascribe is “constituted” by the intersubjective relations that are realized in joint (...) engagement. I will argue in §1 that although Bermúdez may be correct that these phenomena support the idea that pre-linguistic infants and non-linguistic animals possess primitive forms of self-consciousness, for conceptual reasons, his account of joint engagement cannot be used to argue for the Symmetry thesis. I will argue in §2 that while Bermúdez is correct that joint engagement is significant for the constitution of self-ascription, his description of that phenomenon is too robust, because it requires that the infant have a mental representation of the other as a psychological subject of perceptions. I argue that Bermúdez’s description requires an iteration of representations each of which requires a form of self-reference, which goes against Bermudez’s aim of avoiding the paradox of self-consciousness. In presenting his argument for the Symmetry thesis and his account of joint engagement, Bermúdez critiques P. F. Strawson’s argument for the Symmetry Thesis. In §3 of the paper, I turn to the positive project of presenting a constructive argument for the Symmetry thesis. In a variety of sources, P. F. Strawson and Gareth Evans present a transcendental argument for the Symmetry thesis. I suggest that an argument for the Symmetry thesis is available in Strawson’s notion of the primitiveness of the person. In §4, this leads to a corresponding account of joint engagement. Instead of the robust account of joint engagement presented by Bermúdez, I suggest that the infant perceives the mother’s acknowledgement of the infant without the capacity for self-reference that the Bermúdez’s iteration requires. I reconstruct an account of other-ascription in terms of what I call “person perception,” relying on a recent discussion of Strawson’s view by Axel Seemann (2008). On the Strawsonian account that I provide, an adult summons a child to recognize and acknowledge a form of life in which it participates as a person. In closing, I consider how my account of other-ascription differs from two classic accounts— the theory-theory and the simulation theory— and discuss how my account provides a genuine third alternative: the Persons theory. I would argue that the Persons theory offers a new approach to key issues in philosophy and psychology concerning self-consciousness and intersubjectivity. (shrink)

In this paper I criticize theory-biased and overly individualist approaches to understanding others and introduce the PAIR account of joint attention as a pragmatic, affectively charged intentional relation. I argue that this relation obtains in virtue of intentional contents in the minds of the co-attenders, and – against the received understanding of intentional states as propositional attitudes – that we should recognize what I call “subject mode” and “position mode” intentional content. Based on findings from developmental psychology, I propose that (...) subject mode content represents the co-attenders as co-subjects, who are like them and who are at least disposed to act jointly with them. I conclude by arguing that in joint attention we experience and understand affective, actional and perceptual relations at a non-conceptual level prior to the differentiation of mind and body. (shrink)

In regard to the explanation of actions that are governed by institutional rules, John R. Searle introduces the notion of a mental “background” that is supposed to explain how persons can acquire the capacity of following such rules. I argue that Searle’s internalism about the mind and the resulting poverty of his conception of the background keep him from putting forward a convincing explanation of the normative features of institutional action. Drawing on competing conceptions of the background of Heidegger and (...) Wittgenstein, I propose to revise Searle’s conception. The background of institutional agency can only provide a convincing explanation if it includes the context of actions and intersubjective structures of a shared life-world. I suggest that a further development of this idea would lead to the identification of the background with a web of social recognition. (shrink)