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Mutual Gaze and Intersubjectivity

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Handbook of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science

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In this paper I will address the role of mutual gaze in social cognition. The exposition will run in two steps. First, I propose to examine some recent studies of joint visual attention in order to substantiate the view that social cognition is operative in infancy prior to the emergence of theoretical skills required to make judgements about other people’s states of mind. Such social cognition does not depend on intellectual procedures but rather on the communicative potential inherent in human bodies, for example, the ability to directly engage with others via mutual gaze. This view of sociality as dependent on bodily practices is broadly consistent with the phenomenological philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, which I propose to address second. Specifically, I will examine vision in the context of reversible dynamics which Merleau-Ponty believes regulate intercorporeal relations. This will allow me to expose some inner difficulties within Merleau-Ponty’s position as well as to point out the ways of resolving them by means of combined insights from developmental psychology and the analyses of interpersonal connectedness drawn from the dialogic tradition in philosophy.

This chapter is a revised version of my earlier piece “Mutual Gaze and Social Cognition.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, vol 5.1, pp. 17-30, 2006.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    False belief tasks were originally designed by Wimmer and Perner (1983).

  2. 2.

    See Stawarska 2004 for further discussion of the mirror stage and the difficulties inherent in the theory of social cognition based upon it.

  3. 3.

     The category of mindsight I have referred to may be substantiated philosophically by Wittgenstein’s comments regarding the human ability to directly see (rather than infer) other minds (see Overgaard 2006) for further discussion. The author makes an observation similar to my own that autism may consist in a perceptual rather than theoretical inability (so-called aspect blindness, i. e., inability to perceive emotional significance of things and people).

  4. 4.

     See Merleau-Ponty (1968, especially p. 142), (1964a, p. 168), (2003, p. 109). See also Barbaras (2001, esp. pp. 277-305). For a critical discussion of this view, see Stawarska 2002.

  5. 5.

    See John M. Hull’s (2001, pp. 51/2) penetrating comments about how certain organs are prewired for communication.

  6. 6.

     See, e.g. Merleau-Ponty (1968, 146) on the body seeing itself as an example of reversibility.

  7. 7.

     For this distinction, see chapter 4 of Schutz (1967).

  8. 8.

     Compare again Hull (2001, 51).

  9. 9.

    For a discussion of the other being engaged as an agent but not as a person or a subject by autistic individuals and gorillas, see Gomez (1991) and Gomez et al. (1993).

  10. 10.

    As I am reminded by S. Overgaard.

  11. 11.

    See, e.g. Rochat (2001) on the necessary interrelation between mutuality and sociality.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Oregon, Eugene, 97403-1295, OR, USA

    Beata Stawarska

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  1. Beata Stawarska
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  1. FB Philosophie und Philologie, Universität Mainz, Jakob Welder-Weg 18, Mainz, 55128, Germany

    Daniel Schmicking

  2. Dept of Philosophy & Cognitive Sciences, University of Central Florida, Colbourn Hall 411, Orlando, 32816-1352, U.S.A.

    Shaun Gallagher

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Stawarska, B. (2010). Mutual Gaze and Intersubjectivity. In: Schmicking, D., Gallagher, S. (eds) Handbook of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2646-0_15

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