Abstract
Joint attention is mainly investigated in empirical psychology, especially in the contexts of research into autism, social cognition, and the development of moral behavior. Philosophically, joint attention is supposed to clarify human cognitive abilities, the structure of the mind, and the origins of communication, cooperation, and moral evaluation. This chapter discusses the philosophical side of joint attention, focusing on the aspect of “jointness” in collective intentionality.
Throughout the debate concerning the role of joint attention in collective intentionality, jointness has been located in a relational structure holding among the participants of a collective action. But although there is considerable agreement that collective intentions are not entirely reducible to individual intentional states, the basis for this irreducibility remains a contentious issue. In this chapter, I treat joint attention as a core element of collective intentionality in general, arguing for a variety of the relational view. I argue that joint attention is omnipresent in everyday social interaction: subjects focus together on an object that attracts their common interest. When we jointly attend to an object, we share in what we focus on, but also in the evaluative mode in which we approach the object.
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Notes
- 1.
Prominent examples that evolved from mutual inspiration among psychologists, philosophers and cognitive scientists are Theory Theory (Meltzoff, Gopnik) and Simulation Theory (Goldman, Heal). To some extent, this moreover concerns functionalist and modular models of mind and cognition and the cited protagonists in the collective intentionality debate.
- 2.
There are different estimations of when joint attention first occurs; it depends on what capacities one takes to be necessary for engaging in complex forms of interaction. The earliest instances are generally recorded as occurring at around 3 months. Reddy assumes that interaction primarily just requires the ability of relating to others affectively, not cognitively. See Reddy (2003) pp. 397–402.
- 3.
Cf. Eilan ‘Introduction’, in: Eilan and Roessler (2005), p. 16. For reasons of simplicity, I will focus on cases involving two attendants.
- 4.
That this does not require more sophisticated abilities speaks against rational models of influencing one another, such as Rovane’s model, which presupposes that the agents employ a theory of mind and can also form the intention to use the other’s reasoning for their own purposes. Cf. Rovane (1998)
- 5.
This is not to say that one cannot mistakenly be certain that one is attending with someone else. The certainty comes along with a sense of agency that captures the jointness of the shared activity. See below (Sect. 4).
- 6.
This is because both TT and ST must, in their respective versions of person perception, presuppose a theory of mind that is always already at an individual’s disposal. This does not only presuppose certain functional mechanisms that might be laid down in the neuronal structure of the frontal cortex but also the mastery of meta-intentional concepts that is required for the sensible ascription of beliefs and desires. However, how should these concepts be innate and still meaningful in a linguistic sense? How can the TT theorist or the ST theorist presume to have knowledge of the other’s intentional states? All they can work with are assumptions – and they can work with this only if they have already been able to develop intentional language in private. See Hutto (2008) for a more elaborate version of this argument, footnoting Wittgenstein’s (1950) discussion of the possibility of a private language, directed against TT/ST theorists as well as the related group of language of thought theories.
- 7.
I will not here go into the details about the origin and development of normative systems or how the rules of validity are grounded in a community’s agreement. Here, I will just sketch the relatedness between a structured sense of sociality and socially established ways of interaction and highlight the common features of interaction on different cognitive levels. For the process of creating an objective world in intersubjective engagement, see Davidson (2001) and Peacocke (2005).
- 8.
Schilbach et al. (2010) suggest a correlation of initiating gaze following with activity in the brain’s reward centre. This would support the idea that initiating situations of joint attention has an intrinsic motivational factor (assuming that something that feels good is a good reason to pursue it).
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Schmid, U. (2013). From Sharing a Background to Sharing One’s Presence. In: Schmitz, M., Kobow, B., Schmid, H. (eds) The Background of Social Reality. Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5600-7_9
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