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Joint Attention and the First Person

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Extract

It is sometimes said that ordinary linguistic exchange, in ordinary conversation, is a matter of securing and sustaining joint attention. The minimal condition for the success of the conversation is that the participants should be attending to the same things. So the psychologist Michael Tomasello writes, ‘I take it as axiomatic that when humans use language to communicate referentially they are attempting to manipulate the attention of another person or persons.’ I think that this is an extremely fertile approach to philosophical problems about meaning and reference, and in this paper I want to apply it to the case of the first person. So I want to look at the case in which you tell me something about yourself, using the first person, and we achieve joint attention to the same object. But I begin with some remarks about how this approach applies to proper names and to perceptual demonstratives.

Type
Papers
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1998

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References

1 Tomasello, Michael, ‘Joint Attention as Social Cognition’, Joint Attention: Its Origins and Role in Development, ed. Moore, Chris and Dunham, Philip J. (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1995).Google Scholar

2 Kinsbourne, Marcel, ‘Awareness of One's Body’, in The Body and the Self, ed. Marcel, Anthony and Eilan, Naomi (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).Google Scholar