1. Knowing and understanding other minds: on the role of communication
Naomi Eilan, Warwick University
Over the past decade or so there has been increasing interest, in both philosophy and psychology, in the claim that we should appeal to various forms of social interaction in explaining our knowledge of other minds -- where this is contrasted with the so-called ‘dominant approach’ which says that our knowledge of others is based on observation plus theory. In my talk I explore what I take to be the most promising of such appeals to social interaction-- the ‘Communication Claim’, which says that our knowledge of each other is based on forms of face-to-face communication which essentially involve ‘I-You’ thinking, and which can deliver shared, mutual knowledge. The talk will be devoted to sketching an account of second person thought required if this claim is to be made good, focusing in particular on (a) its essentially reciprocal structure; (b) its role in yielding a distinctive kind of knowledge of others; and (c) the notion of communication we need to have in play if this proposal is to provide a serious alternative to the ‘observation-plus-theory’ account.
2. Phenomenal understanding and phenomenal community
Lilian O’Brien, University College Cork
Although phenomenal states are more usually associated with colour perception, emotions, and sensations, they play a central and under-theorized role in practical deliberation and action. Given this, phenomenal states also have an important impact on whether and how we come to understand the actions of others. First I will argue that the role of the phenomenal in understanding the actions of others has implications for our best theories of rationalizing action explanation. Second, I will argue that the role of the phenomenal means that the social world of mutual understanding among rational practical agents is often a balkanized one: there can be communities of mutual understanding from which many agents – agents who are intelligent and fully informed - are excluded. I conclude by considering the kind of testimonial exchange that would be required to broaden such phenomenal community.
3. Social factors in delusion formation
Kengo Miyazono, Hiroshima University and Alessandro Salice, University College Cork
A delusion is a belief that is held despite obvious counterevidence and that is not explained by the person's social, cultural or religious background. A striking feature of the previous theories of delusion formation is that most, if not all, of them explain delusions in terms of individualistic (i.e., non-social) factors, such as abnormal (perceptual) experience (e.g., Maher 1974), abnormal reasoning (e.g., Von Domarus 1944), or both abnormal experience and abnormal reasoning (e.g., Stone & Young 1997). We see a potential problem here. Recent developments in social epistemology suggest the importance of social factors (e.g., testimony, disagreement, etc.) in belief formation process. Adapting some ideas from social epistemology, we propose a model of delusion formation process in which social factors play a crucial role. We rely on a model of social impairment in schizophrenia, which one of us defended elsewhere (Salice & Henriksen 2015), and explain how the social impairment can lead to delusional beliefs.
4. Self-esteem, interpersonal experience, and social agency
Anna Bortolan, University College Dublin
The paper develops a phenomenological exploration of some aspects of the relationship between self-esteem and interpersonal and social experience. More specifically, drawing upon philosophical research on affective attitudes like self-trust and the sense of ability (e.g. Govier 1998; Slaby 2012), and their role in joint action (Schmid 2011), it investigates the dynamics through which the capacity to engage in specific forms of social interaction and activity may be influenced by self-esteem. I will start by suggesting that self-esteem involves both pre-reflective and reflective forms of self-evaluation, and draw attention to the central role played in the latter by other people’s judgments and behaviours towards the self. By taking as a case study the alterations of interpersonal and self-experience which mark social anxiety disorder (American Psychiatric Association 2013), I will then argue that low self- esteem may lead to specific disturbances of self-consciousness, and I will illustrate how these
can negatively impact on the person’s agency in social contexts.
5. Implicit coordination: acting quasi-jointly on implicit shared intentions
Judith Martens, Ruhr-Universität Bochum and Luke Roelofs, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
We identify a social phenomenon in which large numbers of people seem to work towards a shared goal without explicitly organizing to do so. We argue that this phenomenon - implicit coordination - is best understood as a form of joint agency differing from the forms most commonly discussed in the literature. Those standard forms, involving strong forms of common knowledge of other participants’ participation, should be differentiated from implicit coordination in the same way that individual actions driven by ‘explicit’ intentions (those available for reflection and report) differ from individual actions driven by ‘implicit’ intentions (those not thus available). More precisely, implicit coordination is both analogous to wholly implicit individual intentions, and is constituted by the partly implicit intentions of participants. We discuss the significance of this category for action theory, social ontology, and social criticism.
6. Vicarious agency and minimal sociality
Philippe Lusson, New York University in Paris
When someone answers a demand, order, or cue, their individual action may get some of its meaning, purposeful descriptions and reason explanations from the social surroundings, sometimes in ways they could not articulate or accept. When this happens, another’s purpose animates what they do, whether they know of it or not. Their response to the demand, order, or cue has turned them into the vicarious agent of a principal agent, and their action into a vicarious action of the principal. I explore the conditions under which the phenomenon occurs, and I support its existence with three arguments: the adverbs we use to describe the action, the way we explain it, and an analogy with the execution of individual plans. The resulting concept of vicarious agency is, despite its broad extension, a useful tool to investigate the social world, and an important building block towards a theory of collective action.
7. A disjunctivist account of shared experiences
Alessandro Salice, University College Cork
When an experience is shared or collective, it typically feels like ours. Can an experience feel like ours even when the other does not reciprocate, that is, even when the experience is not ours? In this talk I contrast two answers to this question, which I claim underlie two general approaches towards the (phenomenology of) shared experiences. According to conjunctivism about shared experiences, the answer to that question is positive: the phenomenal property of feeling like ours is non-committal to the property of being ours. According to the disjunctivist approach, the answer to that question is negative: if an experience genuinely instantiates the phenomenal property of feeling like ours (and does not simply mystify it), then the experience is ours. After highlighting the shortcomings of the first approach, I develop the disjunctivist view and argue that it is superior.