Naomi Eilan

This introductory paper sets out a framework for approaching some of the claims about the second person made by the papers collected in the special edition of Philosophical Explorations on The Second Person . It does so by putting centre stage the notion of a ‘bipolar second person relation’, and examining ways of giving it substance suggested by the authors of these papers. In particular, it focuses on claims made in these papers about the existence and/or nature of second person thought, second person reasons for action and second person reasons for belief and about possible connections among thought-theoretical, ethical and epistemological issues and debates in this area

Sometime around their first birthday most infants begin to engage in relatively sustained bouts of attending together with their caretakers to objects in their environment. By the age of 18 months, on most accounts, they are engaging in full-blown episodes of joint attention. As developmental psychologists (usually) use the term, for such joint attention to be in play, it is not sufficient that the infant and the adult are in fact attending to the same object, nor that the one’s attention cause the other’s. The latter can and does happen much earlier, whenever the adult follows the baby’s gaze and homes in on the same object as the baby is attending to; or, from the age of six months, when babies begin to follow the gaze of an adult. We have the relevant sense of joint attention in play only when the fact that both child and adult are attending to the same object is, to use Sperber and Wilson’s (1986) phrase, ‘mutually manifest’. Psychologists sometimes speak of such jointness as a case of attention being ‘shared’ by infant and adult, or of a ‘meeting of minds’ between infant and adult, all phrases intended to capture the idea that when joint attention occurs everything about the fact that both subjects are attending to the same object is out in the open, manifest to both participants.

Suppose you are a blindsighted subject and an experimenter sitting opposite you says of an object in your functionally blind field ‘that peach looks delicious’. Unless you move your head to encompass the object within your normal field of vision you will not know which object she is talking about. Suppose now she reverts to the strategy used by neurophsychologists who work with blindsighted subjects and simply tells you that there is an object there and asks you either to reach for it or guess its shape, colour and so forth. If you are one of the well-trained blindsighted subjects who have been worked over for many years by psychologists you may well be able to do so, while denying you have any visual experience of the object and insisting you are only guessing. And, in concurrence with the existential formulation the experimenter now uses, instead of the demonstrative, it is natural to think that your singular reference, based on your perceptual input, is descriptive, as in ‘the object she maintains is there’ or ‘the object I am guessing about’ or ‘the object in my blind field’, etc.

Wittgenstein formulates the paradox of gestalt switches thus: ‘What is incomprehensible is that nothing, and yet everything has changed, after all. That is the only way to put it’. In the course of isolating what I take to be the best of the various solutions to the paradox explored by Wittgenstein, the following claims are defended: (a) A significant strand in Wittgenstein’s own formulation of, and solution to, the paradox can best be understood as a response to three specific claims made by the Gestalt psychologist Kohler. (b) The most promising avenue Wittgenstein explored in his many attempts to resolve the paradox gives perceptual attention a constitutive role in the solution (c) This role is best elaborated, partially, by appeal to information processing theories of attention. (d) There are good reasons to think that the kind of solution to the paradox this yields would have been welcomed by Wittgenstein.

Table of Contents Acknowledgments 1 Self-Consciousness and the Body: An Interdisciplinary Introduction by Naomi Eiland, Anthony Marcel and José Luis Bermúdez 2 The Body Image and Self-Consciousness by John Campbell 3 Infants’ Understanding of People and Things: From Body Imitation to Folk Psychology by Andrew N. Meltzoff and M. Keith Moore 4 Persons, Animals, and Bodies by Paul F. Snowdon 5 An Ecological Perspective on the Origins of Self by George Butterworth 6 Objectivity, Causality, and Agency by Thomas Baldwin 7 At Two with Nature: Agency and the Development of Self-World Dualism by James Russell 8 Ecological Perception and the Notion of a Nonconceptual Point of View by José Luis Bermúdez 9 Proprioception and the Body Image by Brian O’Shaughnessy 10 Awareness of One’s Own Body: An Attentional Theory of Its Nature, Development, and Brain Basis by Marcel Kinsbourne 11 Body Schema and Intentionality by Shaun Gallagher 12 Living without Touch and Peripheral Information about Body Position and Movement: Studies with Deafferented Subjects by Jonathan Cole and Jacques Paillard 13 Bodily Awareness: A Sense of Ownership by M. G. F. Martin 14 Bodily Awareness and the Self by Bill Brewer 15 Introspection and Bodily Self-Ascription by Quassim Cassam 16 Consciousness and the Self by Naomi Eilan Contributors Index.

Spatial Representation presents original, specially written essays by leading psychologists and philosophers on a fascinating set of topics at the intersection of these two disciplines. They address such questions as these: Do the extraordinary navigational abilities of birds mean that these birds have the same kind of grip on the idea of a spatial world as we do? Is there a difference between the way sighted and blind subjects represent the world 'out there'? Does the study of brain-injured subjects, such as 'blind seers', tell us anything about the working of normal spatial consciousness? The essays are arranged into five sections, each of which reflects a central area of research into spatial cognition, and opens with a short introduction by the editors, designed to facilitate cross-disciplinary reading. The volume as a whole offers a rich and compelling expression of the view that to advance our understanding of the way we represent the external world it is necessary to draw on both philosophical and psychological approaches.

A representative expression of current thinking on the ‘problem of consciousness’ runs as follows. There is one, impenetrably hard problem; and a host of soluble, and in this sense easy problems. The hard problem is: how could a physical system yield subjective states? How could there be something it is like to be a physical system? This problem corresponds to a concept of consciousness invariably labelled ‘phenomenal consciousness’. It is here, with respect to phenomenal consciousness, that we encounter an ‘explanatory gap’, where it is this gap that makes the problem so hard. Nothing we can say about the workings of a physical system could begin to explain the existence and nature of subjective, phenomenal feel.