Other I’s, communication, and the second person

ABSTRACT

Why do we think there are other self-conscious about, other thinkers of ‘I’ thoughts, other possessors of a first-person perspective? What is the most basic manifestation of our grip on their existence? This paper develops an answer to these questions summarised under the heading: Second Person Communication Claim (SPCC), which says: Our grip on the idea that other self-conscious subjects exist is rooted in our capacity to enter into particular kinds of communicative relations with others, in which we adopt attitudes of mutual address and think of each other as ‘you’. If the SPCC is right, our grip on the existence and nature of other I’s, and on their relation to ourselves, rests essentially on a practical capacity to treat others as partners in conversation, addressors and addressees, with all that this entails. This contrasts with the traditional approach to other minds, on which our knowledge and thought of others rests on observation and is essentially third personal and theoretical.

KEYWORDS:

• Second person
• other I's
• communication
• self consciousness
• knowing other persons

Acknowledgements

For conversations about issues raised in ancestors of this paper I am much indebted to Quassim Cassam, Guy Longworth, Christopher Peacocke, Sebastian Rödl and Johannes Roessler.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For an account of scepticism-related objections to appealing to communication, and for suggestions as to how to overcome them, see Anil Gomes (2015).

2 The most extended recent account of Reid’s social acts of mind, to which I am greatly indebted, is to be found throughout the course of Richard Moran’s 2018 The Exchange of Words.

3 For an extended critical examination of Heck, see Longworth (2014). See also Rödl (2014), Heal (2014/16), and Hasse (2014/16).

4 For two fairly recent collections see Conant and Rödl (2014), and Eilan (2014/16b).

5 On the general difficulty of distinguishing stipulation and discovery in debates about whether there is such a thing as second person thinking, and on different ways of motivating stipulations about what it is and what should count as paradigmatic cases see Eilan (2014/16a).

6 Buber’s distinction is close to a distinction made by the sociologist Georg Simmel between two ways of acquiring knowledge of others. The first employs ‘simple sight and observation’. In the second, ‘[b]y the same act in which the observer seeks to know the observed, he surrenders himself to be understood by the observer. … .What occurs in this direct mutual glance represents the most perfect reciprocity in the entire field of 'human relationships”. (‘Sociology of the Senses: visual interaction’, 1969), 256).

7 I am indebted to Moran 2018 for attention to Benveniste, and for his discussion of him and related issues in Chapter 6 ‘The Social Act and its Self-Consciousness’.

8 For an extended examination of Husserl on empathy, helpful for filling in this dialectic, see Zahavi (2014b). For an examination of Husserl’s unpublished work on intersubjectivity which seems to give communication and I-you relations a constitutive role, for reasons not unrelated to those mooted here, see Zahavi (2016).

9 For the suggested translation of ‘summons’ see Wood (2006).

10 On the significance, and importance, of Fichte’s location of his account of ‘I’ in an ethical, and legal context, see e.g. Altman (2018). For a helpful critical discussion of the role of the summons and mutual recognition in constituting self-consciousness, and complications therein, see Williams (1992, ch 3) ‘Fichte on Recognition’, 49–70.

11 For a rich source of recent reflections on links between second person thinking and recognition, and more generally on the ‘ethical ladenness’ of second person thinking, see papers collected in Conant and Rödl (2014). For the contrast between the theoretical perspective normally assumed in other minds debates, and such practical questions, see Lavin (2014/16).

12 In Mischel (1974), reprinted in Hamlyn (1974/83). For independently formulated account of knowledge of persons, close in spirit and some detail (see Lauer 2014; Talbot 2015).