Conference | Paper

Joint attention, self-other equivalence, and the roots of the we-perspective On a widely held characterization, triadic joint attention is the capacity to perceptually attend to an object or event together with another subject. In the last four decades, research in developmental psychology has provided mounting evidence of the crucial role that this capacity plays in socio-cognitive development, early language acquisition, and the understanding of others’ perspectives. In my talk, I will explore the contrast between reductive and non-reductive approaches to (triadic) joint attention, and I will argue in favour of a non-reductive view of joint attention that gives pride of place to the idea that co-attenders are related to one another as a ‘you’. I will do so by contrasting and assessing two ways of understanding the putative second-personal character of joint attention. According to one view, such character is consistent with the idea that, at a basic level, co-attenders relate to one another via recursive mindreading (Tomasello 2014). On the second view, which I favour, the second-personal character of joint attention is an alternative to the idea that co-attenders relate to one another via recursive mindreading. Finally, I will discuss how these two views relate to the proposal that joint attention is a “primordial form of perceptual we-intentionality” (Rakoczy 2018).