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Understanding others in social interactions

Monika Dullstein, Clinic for General Psychiatry, University Hospital Heidelberg, Germany

Abstract

The Theory of Mind Debate has seen a recent shift of focus from social observation towards social

interaction. Defenders of so-called second-person accounts claim that social interactions reveal an

understanding of another person which is different in kind to merely knowing that the other has a

particular mental state. The aim of this paper is to specify this (allegedly) new form of understanding.

In the first part, I criticize attempts to describe it as the knowledge of how to react to the other’s

mental state, i.e. as the exhibition of a social skill. In the second part, I develop an alternative

proposal which is based upon the work of Cavell and Thompson. I suggest that understanding

another person in a social interaction is to be conceptualized as the propositional nexus of

acknowledging his mental state to him.

Keywords

Theory of mind; understanding; second person; interaction; social skill; acknowledgement

1 Introduction

The Theory of Mind (ToM) Debate has evolved around Premack and Woodruff’s paradigmatic

definition: “In saying that an individual has a theory of mind, we mean that the individual imputes

mental states to himself and others […].” (1978, p. 515). Since its beginnings, the debate has been

dominated by an observational paradigm: Both theoretical and experimental approaches focused on

situations in which one person is observing another person and trying to make sense of his behavior.

Understanding this other person was taken to be equivalent to forming justified true beliefs about

his mental states in order to be able to explain his past and to predict his future behavior. The

discussion mainly focused on the methods of how to form these beliefs. Whereas theoretical

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inference and simulation were initially portrayed as the main alternatives,1 the increasing influence

of phenomenological research into the debate added perception as another potential way of

understanding others (Zahavi and Gallagher 2008; Smith 2010; Krueger and Overgaard, 2012).

For the last 10 years, however, a growing number of researchers has been criticizing the

observational paradigm and trying to shift the focus towards social interactions (e.g. Gallagher 2001;

Hobson 2002; Ratcliffe 2007; Reddy 2008; Fuchs and de Jaegher 2009; Schilbach et al. 2013). The

notion of a “second-person approach” has become an umbrella term for variegated research on

social interactions and interpersonal relatedness, especially in phenomenology, the social

neurosciences and developmental psychology. Yet, the potential contribution of this line of research

to the ToM Debate remains unclear. Besides the divergent definitions of the very terms “second

person”, “social interaction” and combinations thereof (de Bruin, van Elk, and Newen, 2012), it is to

be clarified in what sense the shift towards social interactions is meant to enrich the original debate.

It is helpful to thereby distinguish three different theoretical options: First, one might consider the

trend towards studying social interactions as a plea for more external validity. Forming beliefs about

another person’s mental states, one might argue, not only serves for explaining and predicting his

behavior, but also for interacting. We have to know what the other person is thinking, feeling or

intending in order to be able to react appropriately. Social interactions make us thus aware of

another function of understanding others, but do not call for a reconceptualization of either the

methods of understanding or of the very meaning of this notion itself. As in social observations,

understanding other persons means forming justified true beliefs about their mental states. Second,

one might claim that the focus on social interactions bears new insights because interactions provide

a different kind of evidence and thus point to yet unexplored routes to knowledge of the other

person. Butterfill (2013), for example, proposed the so-called your-goal-is-my-goal strategy: If the

epistemic subject pursues a certain goal and, in addition to that, has reason to assume that another

person attempts to engage in a joint action with him, he can infer that the other person’s goal is the

1 For an overview on these positions see the edited volumes by Carruthers and Smith (1996) as well as Davies

and Stone (1995). For a simplified version of theory of mind cognition see Butterfill and Apperly (2013).

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same as his own, i.e. that his goal is also the other’s goal. The second answer thus acknowledges that

social interactions provide a new kind of evidence and, eventually, new methods for understanding

others, but does again not question the standard conception of understanding itself. A third and final

option is to do precisely that and to argue that social interactions point to a kind of understanding

others which is structurally different to judging that the other person has a particular mental state.

This paper should be seen as an attempt to explore this last option. I start off from the assumption

that defenders of second-person accounts focus on a different notion of understanding others than

defenders of the standard approaches. Although I motivate this assumption, I will not argue for it in

detail as I have done so elsewhere (Dullstein, 2012). The main aim of the paper is to find answers to

the question “What does it mean to understand others in social interactions besides judging that

they have certain mental states?” and to evaluate these answers as potential explananda for second-

person accounts.

The plan of the paper is as follows. After some preliminaries and an introduction to second-person

accounts in the ToM Debate (section 2), I turn in section 3 to a proposal which attracts a growing

number of proponents (McGeer 2001; Michael, Christensen, and Overgaard 2013; Schlicht 2013): It

has been claimed that social interactions and particularly the automatic, effortless and fluid

responses to another person’s expressions reveal an understanding which differs from the standard

conception qua being a form of knowing how, i.e. a social skill. I do not deny the importance of social

skills for interactions, but criticize this proposal for not providing an appropriate explanandum for

second-person accounts in section 4. My critique is based upon an extension of Thompson’s (2012)

distinction between a propositional attitude and a propositional nexus. This distinction is also used as

a springboard for developing my own, alternative proposal to which the remainder of the paper is

devoted. In a nutshell, I suggest that understanding another person in a social interaction shall be

conceptualized as the propositional nexus of acknowledging his mental states to him. I further

develop this suggestion in section 5 by reference to the work of Cavell. Section 6 situates

acknowledgement within the ToM Debate and compares it to both the standard conception of

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understanding others and to the social skills approach. I conclude in section 7 that, against this

background, the recent trend towards studying social interactions can be interpreted as being merely

a symptom of a deeper worry: The worry that the ToM Debate has been based upon a conceptual

framework which actually hinders us to get a hold on the characteristics of understanding persons in

contrast to understanding other material objects.

2 Sharpening the focus

“Understanding another person” is concededly an ambiguous term. In order to make my aims more

precise, it is useful to bear several distinctions in mind. First, there is a distinction between

understanding another person as such (e.g. as a being who is capable of having mental states) and

understanding his concrete situation. The latter can again refer to various things such as his financial

situation, his public role, his motivations, his beliefs, his intentions, his feelings, etc. In what follows, I

will focus – as the main part of the ToM Debate does – on the understanding of the other person’s

experiences, most paradigmatically the ones he has at the moment at which he is observed or met.2

Understanding another person thus means in our context always the understanding of his particular

mental states.

The next term which needs clarification is the notion of a social interaction as it is used by defenders

of second-person accounts. While reciprocity, i.e. a mutual influence of each other upon each other,

is usually taken to be a necessary feature of social interactions tout court (de Bruin, van Elk and

Newen, 2012), defenders of second-person accounts typically have a very special kind of social

interaction in mind. Reddy (2008) and Schilbach et al. (2013), for example, claim that the interacting

partners must also be emotionally engaged. I follow their lead and focus, as they do, on only one

group of social interactions which I mark as “second-person interactions”. In contrast to the just-

mentioned authors I do not think, however, that it is the emotional engagement in particular which is

crucial, but rather a broader attitude of participation and involvement (Strawson 2008) which can,

2 I use, again following standard usage of the ToM Debate, the expression “mental state” to refer to all the

various kinds of experiences there might be.

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but need not be emotionally toned. In other words: I focus on social interactions in which the

involved persons respect each other as co-agents.

Bringing these two features together, my leading question can be specified as follows: What does it

mean to understand another person’s mental state in the course of an interaction in which he is

respected and treated as a co-agent? As already indicated, the standard answer in the ToM Debate

would be: Understanding another person’s mental states is independent of the specific social

constellation in which the two persons are. It means forming justified true beliefs about the other’s

mental states by ascribing them to him in a process which can be called “mentalizing” or

“mindreading”.3 Consequently, the kind of knowledge at play is propositional knowledge which,

following contemporary epistemology (Klein, 1998), can be analyzed as the epistemic subject’s

attitude towards a true proposition about the epistemic object’s mental state (plus further

conditions which are not relevant in our context).

There is, however, reason to believe that defenders of second-person accounts do not accept this

description as their explanandum, i.e. as the kind of understanding they focus upon. Instead of

launching into an interpretation of their work (see Dullstein, 2012), let me motivate this conjecture

with the help of two examples: Gallagher (2001) was one of the first to emphasize the differences

between social observations and social interactions. He formulated an influential critique of

mindreading in which he criticizes the assumption that mindreading constitutes “our primary and

pervasive means for understanding other persons“ (83).4 Referring to Trevarthen’s (1979)

characterization of infants’ earliest interactive abilities (“primary intersubjectivity”), Gallagher

proposes instead that our primary way of understanding others in second-person interactions

consists in “certain embodied practices – practices that are emotional, sensory-motor, perceptual, 3 For an exception see Gordon (1995, 2008) and his controversy with Goldman (2006) on the question as to

whether the simulationist account involves the ascription of mental states. 4 Gallagher’s critique of mindreading is in fact ambiguous because he works with an unwarrantedly restricted

notion of mindreading: As Gallagher understands the term, mindreading is necessarily an inferential process (see Overgaard and Michael 2013, footnote 2). Therefore, it is not clear as to whether his critique aims at mindreading a) as an inferential process (vs. a perception-based attribution of mental states) or b) more generally as being a way of understanding others by ascribing them mental states. In what follows, I adopt the latter interpretation.

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and nonconceptual” (2001, 85). These practices, Gallagher claims, constitute our default way of

understanding others throughout the whole life-span. Instead of attributing mental states to others,

we thus respond to them in one way or another, and these responses reveal, according to Gallagher,

an alternative way of coming to know their mental states – an understanding which is action-based

and action-oriented (pragmatic). Following Gallagher’s lead (but being less explicit in her critique of

the standard conception) Reddy (2008) focuses on the emotional reactions which arise out of

second-person interactions. These affective responses reveal, Reddy claims, something about the

other’s mental states which a disengaged bystander is not able to access. However, taken as a new

method for acquiring justified true beliefs about the other’s mental states, these affective responses

necessarily fail because they depend, at least partly, upon the epistemic subject’s personality, the

situation, the history of the relationship, etc. (Michael, 2011; Dullstein, 2012). Instead, Reddy

concedes in reply that her approach is based upon a different conception of knowledge, i.e. a

conception of knowledge “in and as action” (personal communication, July 18, 2013).

These short statements from two leading figures of the recent trend towards studying social

interactions are meant to illustrate the conjecture that defenders of second-person accounts seem to

find fault with a standard conception of understanding others as described above. Their focus on

social and particularly on second-person interactions has shifted their interest towards a different,

action-based understanding of others. Its details, however, as well as its relationship to the standard

conception of understanding are difficult to grasp and understand from their work only.

3 The social skills approach

In an attempt to better understand Gallagher’s and Reddy’s hints which link our understanding of

another person to responses to him, various researchers have pointed to similarities between the

responses we find in ongoing social interactions and the exertion of a skilled activity such as football

or tennis playing (McGeer 2001; Ratcliffe 2007; Fuchs and de Jaegher 2009; Schlicht 2013; Michael,

Christensen and Overgaard 2013): With the same ease and fluidity with which e.g. a football player

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knows how to approach the moving ball, we often react to our interacting partner’s expressions in an

way which, on the phenomenological level, bears no effort or deliberation. We intuitively seem to

know what he is up to or what he feels by acting accordingly. Furthermore, these reactions are, like a

skill, guided by certain norms and / or routines which we come to know by being trained in them –

often not explicitly through instruction, but implicitly through involvement. At least part of this

knowledge is therefore hard to make explicit: In the same way in which a football player has

problems to reconstruct this precise course of action, we can have trouble in explaining what made

us react in the way we did to another person. On the basis of this analogy, is has been suggested that

social interactions reveal a peculiar form of practical knowledge which is called “psycho-practical

know how” (McGeer 2001), “social expertise” (Michael, Christensen and Overgaard 2013) or “social

know how” (Schlicht 2013). Yet, the characterizations of this knowledge and particularly its

delineation from propositional knowledge about someone else’s mental state differ in detail. While it

is commonly accepted that higher-order cognitive processes, including mindreading, can influence

the way in which we behave towards other people, some authors (such as Schlicht [2013] who

follows McGeer [2001]) assume that social know how is a different kind of knowledge because it is

based upon a different representational format (which they call enactive representations) and

therefore nonpropositional. Others, by contrast, stay uncommitted in this respect (Michael,

Christensen, and Overgaard 2013) and thus leave it open as to whether the responses are simply the

result of an automation process which, initially, has been based upon propositional knowledge.

Do these accounts, irrespective of their differences, provide a fruitful description for an alternative

conception of understanding others in social interactions? Well, there is certainly no denying that

social know how is an important descriptive element of many, if not all social interactions. Not every

skillful way of dealing with others incorporates, however, knowledge of their mental states.5 It may

also be based upon contextual cues, the other’s social role, general norms, etc. My way of interacting

with the waiter in a restaurant is, for example, based upon my knowledge of how to behave in a

5 This point is explicitly granted by Michael, Christensen, and Overgaard (2013, section 2).

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restaurant in which the waiter’s mental states, at least in usual cases, do not play any role. But, of

course, there also are cases in which a skillful way of dealing with others is precisely dependent upon

their mental states. Children, for example, learn from very early on what to do with a child whom

they have hurt – they learn to apologize and to console. And if they do so, they can be rightly said to

having understood the other child’s experiences. Knowing how to react to the other’s mental state

thus certainly is a form of understanding the other person besides knowing that he has a certain

mental state, no matter how the delineation between them is spelled out in detail. But whereas the

existing literature suggests that these two forms of understanding others are the only games in town

– and the (alleged) dichotomy between knowing that and knowing how certainly fosters this

impression – I want to propose in what follows that defenders of second person accounts need not

be satisfied with this situation. They have reasons to look out for still another view.

4 Propositional attitudes, social skills and propositional nexus

In order to explain the objection which can be raised against the social skills approach as well as

against the standard conception of understanding, let me begin with an intuitive illustration before

turning to a more technical discussion of it. Imagine being in a psychotherapeutic session. Thanks to

the therapist’s training he knows how to form justified true beliefs about your mental states, and he

has also learnt to react to them in a skillful way. He is a real social expert; he has had a hundred of

cases like yours before, and he knows how to deal with them. Of course, you are glad to having

found such a therapist, but … if his only aim was to acquire knowledge about your experiences and to

“handle” them (and you) in the right way, you would, I suppose, not have the impression that he was

actually trying to understanding you. An important personal element would be missing as long as he

treats you like one of his cases, like an exemplar, and not like an individual and unique other person

who stands in a unique relationship with him.

Abstracting from this situation, it seems to me that both the standard conception of understanding

others as well as the social skills approach have been developed out of an analogy between persons

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and other material objects and our different ways of knowing them (i.e. knowing something about

them via inference or perception and knowing how to deal with them). In both cases, the epistemic

subject, i.e. the person who tries to understand or to know, is taken to be autonomous in his way of

exploring and / or dealing with the epistemic object. The epistemic object, by contrast, has no other

role to play than being a source of information and / or being handled in the right way. It is not

considered as being capable of getting involved in the epistemic process as well. But this is precisely

what makes another person a very peculiar kind of epistemic object: Another person is an intentional

being as well as the epistemic subject himself, and might, for example, want to be known, try to

avoid to be known, or want to have a word to say on what is known. In short: The other person might

not want to be treated like any other epistemic object, but as a unique other person, as a co-agent.

In order to proceed to a conception of understanding others which respects this decisive difference,

let me make a detour into a discussion in the philosophy of language. One marker of being a co-agent

is the fact that persons cannot only be talked about in the third person mode as “he” or “she”, but

can also be addressed in the second-person mode as “you”. This marker has not only inspired the

notion of second-person accounts in the ToM Debate, but has also lead to discussions concerning the

possibility of a peculiar second-personal form of thought (Thompson 2012, Rödl ms.). In particular,

the question arose as to whether there is a form of thought which would be analogous to the special

way in which we can refer to ourselves in propositional attitudes. Let me illustrate the question with

the help of examples: There are various ways in which a person, let us call him Max, can refer to

himself in direct speech. He can e.g. talk of himself demonstratively (e.g. “this man”), by using his

name, or simply by using the pronoun “I”. If we try to describe what Max knows of himself, we can

make these differences explicit by formulating:

(1) Max knows that this man is happy.

(2) Max knows that Max is happy.

(3) Max knows that he himself is happy.

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It is commonly accepted that the third expression has some unique logical characteristics (although

the precise explication is still a matter of debate, see e.g. Anscombe 1975 vs. Evans 1982). Given that

we can similarly refer to another person in direct speech in these different ways (demonstratively, by

name and by using the pronoun “you”), the question which arises at this point is the following: Is

there an expression (3’) which would be analogous to (3) in the sense that it allows us to denote a

peculiar form of knowledge of another person as being the person who has been addressed as

“you”? In a recent talk, Thompson (2012) argued that “states of individual souls – beliefs, knowledge,

etc. – cannot take a ‘second-personal’ form of thinking-about-another, as there is a ‘first-personal’

form of thinking-about-oneself”, but he added that “[i]n addition to propositional attitudes in

Russell’s sense, we must recognize propositional relations or propositional nexuses of agents” (slide

6). In other words: Instead of presenting a direct counterpart to the first-personal form of thought –

which, already on the linguistic level, seems hardly conceivable – he proposes a new way of linking

persons to each other, the so-called propositional relation or nexus. A propositional nexus,

Thompson explains, is a special kind of a two-place relation which

a) relates two persons who

b) are directed towards each other in such a way that they both think of the relation as one which

relates “me” to “you”, and thus

c) recognize each other as co-agents (see also Thompson 2004, 354).

One of Thompson’s leading examples of a propositional nexus is marrying. A marriage is lawful only if

bride and groom are related to each other in the right way: Both of them must realize that they

themselves are about to marry each other. This directedness towards each other, Thompson argues,

cannot be represented by what the two persons think of each other individually. Rather, what is

needed is the concept of a relation through which the two persons relate themselves to each other

by falling under it.

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Applying Thompson’s advance to our topic of inquiry, I want to suggest that a similar move shall be

made in order to explicate the peculiar form of understanding others in social interactions in the

course of which the other person is treated as a co-agent. The two forms of understanding others on

which the existing literature focusses – propositional knowledge and social know how – are

ultimately individual achievements of one person only: Understanding is a propositional attitude or a

capacity of the epistemic subject. The epistemic object does not figure in the very conception of

these forms of understanding besides being the object to be thought about or dealt with. I follow

Thompson’s lead in claiming that, qua being the states of individuals, neither a propositional attitude

nor a social skill can take a peculiar second-personal form which would allow us to respect the other

person as a real co-agent. In order to do so, the focus must be shifted from individual states of

minds to relations between persons.

We shall thus look for a propositional nexus which allows us to describe an epistemic enterprise in

the course of which an epistemic subject and his object are directed towards each other as an “I” to a

“you”. Is there such a concept? Yes, there is, and it has been suggested long before Thompson’s

theoretical advance: Cavell’s (1976, 1979) concept of acknowledging something to someone. In a

nutshell, I thus want to suggest: Knowing another person’s mental state in a second-person

interaction should not be conceived as the propositional attitude of knowing something about the

other person and his mental states, not as the social skill of dealing with the other and his mental

states, but rather as the propositional nexus of acknowledging the mental state to the other.

5 Acknowledgement

Cavell’s usage of the expression “to acknowledge something to someone” is idiosyncratic.6 Let me

therefore add some context to it. Cavell (1976) introduced this expression in an early paper in which

he, by way of discussing analytic arguments for and against skepticism of other minds, tries to give a

6 Although the very notion of acknowledgement reminds of the long-lasting debate on recognition from Hegel

to Honneth, Cavell does not refer to the latter, but rather intended to “discover [the problem of the other, MD] within the means of a tradition of philosophy [i.e. the analytic discussion on the problem of other minds, MD] that has thought to sidestep Fichte and Hegel” (2005, 148f.).

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first statement of what he later calls the “problem of the other” (2005, 148). Whereas skeptics (as

well as those who try to refute skepticism) assume that the philosophical task consists in finding

reasons to justify our beliefs about other persons and their mental states, Cavell argues that this

problem “invoke[s] a special concept of knowledge, or region of the concept of knowledge, one

which is not a function of certainty” (1976, 258). To exemplify this claim, he considers a situation – in

our terminology: a second-person interaction – in which one person expresses his pain and a second

person responds by stating “I know (that) you are in pain”. Whereas a standard reading would

interpret this utterance as an expression of the second person’s propositional knowledge, Cavell

suggests otherwise:

“I might say here that the reason “I know you are in pain” is not an expression of certainty is that it is a response to this exhibiting [of pain, MD]; it is an expression of sympathy. (“I know what you’re going through”; “I’ve done all I can”; “The serum is being flown in by special plane.”)

But why is sympathy expressed in this way? Because your suffering makes a claim upon me. It is not enough that I know (am certain) that you suffer ─ I must do or reveal something (whatever can be done). In a word, I must acknowledge it, otherwise I do not know what „(your or his) being in pain“ means. Is. (This is „acknowledging it to you.“ […]) (Cavell, 1976, 263, emphasis in the original)

By stating “I know (that) you are in pain”, the second person expresses according to Cavell his

sympathy, and he thereby acknowledges the pain to the first person. This example leads Cavell to

claim more generally that interpersonal contexts make demands on the epistemic subject which go

beyond acquiring justified true beliefs about the other. The other person’s expression – be it

addressed or not – makes, as Cavell states, a claim upon the epistemic subject, a claim to respond.

Given that this claim cannot be annihilated, the epistemic subject has, in effect, two options: He can

either take up the claim and respond to the other person – the option by which the experience is, in

Cavell’s terms, acknowledged – or he can deny the claim and keep silent – the option which Cavell

would call a failure of acknowledgement or an “indifference, […] a coldness” (264) with regard to the

other person. What is important to note, however, is that acknowledgement thus understood need

not be a sympathetic response. It need not take one of the forms which Cavell mentions in the

quotation, it need not be a verbal and not even a benevolent response. Fundamental to

acknowledgement is rather the fact that the epistemic subject responds. Instead of remaining in the

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position of an autonomous observer who merely gathers information about the other, he does

something on the basis of that knowledge. He steps out, acts publicly and thereby reveals something

about himself: He reveals that he takes himself to having been addressed by the claim, and he opens

up about what he has come to know about the other person.7 By doing so, he exposes himself to the

other and makes himself vulnerable for being criticized or even rejected.

Referring to this requirement to act, Cavell claimed that acknowledgement “goes beyond” (1976,

257) a standard conception of knowledge as justified true beliefs. This formulation is, however,

misleading, because it might suggest that he is after a two-step-model according to which the

epistemic subject should first acquire knowledge in the standard sense of the word before he

(eventually) acts on the basis of that knowledge in a second step. It is misleading because it is crucial

to note that these two concepts invoke two different and mutually incompatible attitudes towards

the other person, the epistemic “object”: Whereas a standard conception treats the epistemic object

in line with any other material object, the point of acknowledgement lies precisely in the fact that the

epistemic subject enters a personal relationship with his “object”. The other person is no longer a

“he” or “she” about whom the epistemic subject reasons, but a “you” to whom something is

revealed. By opening up about his way of understanding the other’s experience, the epistemic

subject involves the other into the epistemic process. He places himself on the same level and grants

the other the right to take over and do the next move. By doing so, he exposes himself to be

criticized in his way of seeing things, but he also demonstrates his openness to what the other person

wants to reveal himself. In short, one might thus say: A person who acknowledges does thus not aim

at seizing hold of the other person.8 He is not driven by a search for ultimate reasons which would

allow him to justify his beliefs and to, eventually, “possess” knowledge about the other. Rather, he

allows the other an autonomy – or: an otherness – which is peculiar and unique for the kind of

7 It is therefore no coincidence that Cavell uses the terms “admission” and “confession” as synonyms for

“acknowledgement” (e.g. 1976, 255).

8 This formulation is originally due to Levinas (1990, 8). Cavell (2005, 151) cites the corresponding passage,

adding his surprise “how philosophical and religious ambitions so apparently different as mine and Levinas can have led to certain phenomenological coincidence so precise” (151f.).

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epistemic object persons are. He accepts that approaching another person and understanding his

experiences is a potentially infinite process which depends upon the other person as well as upon

himself.9

Having these different attitudes in mind, one might thus assume that Cavell proposes

acknowledgement as an alternative to knowledge. But this is, as he (1988, 8) corrects, again a

misunderstanding. Rather, he takes acknowledgement to be an interpretation of knowledge, and he

adds: “For the point of forgoing knowledge is, of course, to know.” (ibid., see also Cavell [1976, 325]).

What does this mean? I think that the following conceptual “map” is useful to better understand

these remarks: The concept of knowledge, very broadly conceived, invokes a situation in which an

epistemic subject is interested in something. Depending upon the nature of the epistemic object, two

different kinds (or “regions”, 1976, 258) of the concept have to be distinguished: If the epistemic

object is a material object, the standard conception of knowledge as a propositional attitude applies.

If, however, the epistemic object is another person, the concept of acknowledgement is called for.

Acknowledgement is, as well as the standard conception, motivated by an interest in the other and

his experiences, and it also involves beliefs about the other. But – and this is the crucial point – it is

not exhausted by them. In its core, it is not an individual’s reasoning about the other – a

propositional attitude –, but a relation to him – a propositional nexus. Furthermore, it is not up to

the epistemic subject to choose which of the two concepts of knowledge is to be applied in a

concrete situation. If the epistemic object is another person, there is, metaphorically speaking, no

escape from the claim which his expressions make, no escape from a relationship to him. Of course,

the epistemic subject can decide to treat him like any other material object and to therefore not

respond to him, but this would, in Cavell’s terms, be a denial of the other. There is thus no neutral or

third-personal way of merely thinking about the other which would not in itself be already a failure

of acknowledgement. Or, as Cavell states: “Either way, I implicate myself in his existence. There is the

problem of the other.” (1979, 430)

9 One marker of this difference is that “to acknowledge something to someone” is an episodic verb whereas “to

know something about someone” is an attributive one. Acknowledgement is, in other words, something one has to do over and over again, knowledge, by contrast, is something one, once acquired, simply has.

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6 Acknowledgement in the ToM Debate

Cavell’s attempts to delineate acknowledgement from knowledge already give us some material to

situate acknowledgement within the ToM Debate. Of course, Cavell’s focus is much broader than

mine. He aims at a very general critique of the standard conception of knowing other persons

whereas I have restricted my discussion to social and, in particular, to second-person interactions. In

this section, I want to stick to my leading question and explain in what sense I take Cavell’s

conception of acknowledgement to be a far more fruitful conception of understanding others in

second-person interactions than the standard conception and the social skills approach. The more

general conclusions will be left to the next section.

It might surprise that acknowledgement qua being a propositional nexus involves beliefs about the

other’s mental states. Terms like “ascribing mental states” or “mindreading” which have been

vehemently criticized by e.g. Gallagher (2001) can thus be used to explicate the concept if – and this

is the crucial point – they are understood in the right way. In contrast to the standard conception of

understanding in which mental states are attributed to an observed third person (i.e. a “he” or

“she”), they are here attributed by a “me” to a “you”. If we wanted to spell out the involved beliefs

they would thus have the form of e.g. “(I think that) you are in pain.” I have followed Thompson in

claiming that the special character of these you-directed beliefs cannot be understood if they are

conceptualized as propositional attitudes of the epistemic subject. They must be situated, so to say,

in a relation between two persons, the propositional nexus. Thinking of understanding others as a

relation rather than an individual cognitive achievement is the essential difference between

acknowledgement and the standard conception of understanding others. The other person, the

epistemic “object”, is no longer treated as a mere source of information, but as a real counterpart, as

a second person in a substantive sense of the word. He is, as Thompson defines, respected as a co-

agent. He is involved in the epistemic process because the epistemic subject reveals to him in

acknowledgement what he has come to know. The very same idea is expressed by Cavell when he

states that acknowledgement involves a different attitude towards the person who is in the focus of

16

interest. It is on the grounds of this insight that an obvious objection can be blocked: Why, one might

ask, is acknowledgement not simply an extension to the standard conception of understanding which

adds to the cognitive part (i.e. the mindreading part) the requirement to act accordingly? We can

now easily reply: Because acknowledgement is conceptually different. It does not add another

function to an individual’s epistemic enterprise, but changes its description. Understanding becomes

a social action in which two co-agents are involved – a conception which seems to be tailor-made for

second-person interactions.

But what about the other candidate, the social skills approach, which has been proposed as a way of

making sense of an alleged action-based way of understanding others in social interactions? I think

that there are three crucial points which make acknowledgement a more promising candidate in this

respect. Even at the cost of repeating myself: The fundamental difference is that a social skill is a

capacity which is attributed to one person only whereas acknowledgement describes a relation

between two.10 As such, acknowledgement does not provide the conceptual resources to generate

the asymmetry between an epistemic subject and his object which I have criticized. The other is not

any more treated as an exemplar, as one of this kind of things to which the subject has to react, but

as a unique co-agent who stands on the very same level. Second: Even if a person who acknowledges

a certain experience to someone might thereby conform to a social norm or routine (e.g. by offering

his condolences), acknowledgement does in itself not refer to a set of rules in accordance to which

the epistemic subject should act. Acknowledgement does – in contrast to the concept of a social skill

– not concern the precise way of how to react, but tries to capture that fact that an epistemic subject

has to react, i.e. that part of approaching another person in his inner experiences consists in

responding to them. I believe that such a conception comes much closer to what could be meant by

an action-based understanding of others which, after all, seems to be something different to finding

10

Of course, a skill can be also said to be a relational concept in the sense that a skillful way of interacting with the environment must be adjusted to the environment. Acknowledgement qua being a propositional nexus is, however, a very special kind of a relation. It involves, as it has been explained in section 4, a directedness between two persons towards each other which is unique for relations between persons and which is not part of the concept of a skill.

17

the appropriate reaction. Finally, the concept of acknowledgement has an ethical dimension which

the concept of a social skill lacks. A social “expert” can, of course, be made responsible for the way

he reacted to another person, but this responsibility is mediated by the general norms or routines in

accordance with which he acted. Being good at doing something and evaluating the norms or

routines in themselves as being good seem to be here two different and separable tasks. Although

epistemologists might applaud to precisely this allocation of tasks (and concentrate of the first one),

the concept of acknowledgement makes us aware that we also bear another personal and

“unmediated” responsibility with regard to the other person: the responsibility to respond to him

and to thereby treat him as a co-agent.

7 Conclusion

The aim of this paper was to answer the question of what it means to understand someone else’s

mental state in a second-person interaction. I have focused on this question because I suspected that

explicating this concept in a way which goes beyond the standard conception of propositional

knowledge might help us to better understand the recent shift of focus towards social interactions in

the ToM Debate. After having criticized one attempt to answer the question (the social skills

approach), I have proposed that Cavell’s concept of acknowledging something to someone is a

promising concept to take on. Instead of trying to modify standard conceptions of object knowledge

– knowing that and knowing how –, Cavell suggested to start out with the fact that only persons can

be directed towards each other in thought and action. He thus tried to develop a concept of

knowledge which is tailor-made for the peculiar kind of epistemic objects persons are. By doing so he

provided a concrete example of what Thompson called in more general terms a propositional nexus.

Proposing acknowledgement as an explanandum for second-person accounts is, however, not

without problems. Given the extensive and rather permissive usage of the term “second person” in

the ToM Debate it might turn out to be an illusion to assume that all proponents of so-called second-

18

person accounts pursue the very same aim.11 But even the two proponents whose accounts have

been used as examples here might have reason to be dissatisfied with the concept of

acknowledgement as described. Why? Because both Gallagher and Reddy consider early social

interactions between infants and their care-givers as paradigmatic cases of understanding others in

their sense. They might thus question as to whether acknowledgement (qua being a propositional

nexus) is a cognitively too demanding conception of understanding. I think that there are various

ways of replying to this objection which, however, reach beyond the scope of this paper. For the time

being, I concede that acknowledgement as described might not fit the letter of their accounts, but I

nevertheless want to emphasize that the essential move which has been proposed in this paper (i.e.

the move towards thinking of understanding another person as a relation) is very much in their spirit.

As a telling example, I invite you to compare Cavell’s idea of the other’s expression making a claim

upon the epistemic subject with the following statement from Reddy’s second-person account:

„Not only is the experience of the other person more immediate and more powerful in direct engagement, but it calls out from you a different way of being, an immediate responsiveness, a feeling in response, and an obligation to „answer“ the person‘s act.“ (Reddy, 2008, p. 27)

Finally, if acknowledgement was accepted as an explanandum for second-person accounts,

defenders of the standard approaches might still question as to whether such an explanandum is

rightly considered to be part of the ToM Debate. Of course, my suggestion does not directly object to

the standard conception of understanding others (nor to the social skills approach), and it does not

question the established methods. But I think that it helps to bring the broader picture into view out

of which theory of mind, i.e. the ascription of mental state, is just one element. It helps to see that

understanding others can be more than forming justified true beliefs. And it helps to see that such an

enlarged point of view is necessary in order to understand the essential differences between

understanding persons and understanding other material objects. By doing so, it helps to finally

11

Gallagher (2009), for example, distinguishes between two problems in studying social interactions: The problem of understanding others and the problem of an (partly autonomous) interaction process. Both problems are, however, sometimes (e.g. Schilbach et al. 2013) discussed under the label “second-person account”.

19

better understand the recent trend towards studying social interactions. Against the background of

my suggestion, it would not be the social constellation per se – i.e. the social interaction in contrast

to a social observation – which has attracted this enormous interest. What the work of Thompson

and Cavell brings into view is the following conjecture: In the same way in which the linguistic

possibility to address other persons by “you” is just a marker of the fact that they can be treated as

co-agents, the trend towards studying social interaction might be merely a symptom of a much

deeper concern: The concern that the ToM framework has been unwarrantedly restrictive in a way

that it over-emphasizes the analogy between persons and other material objects, but actually

hinders us to get a hold on what is peculiar about understanding other persons.

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Conference “The Second Person Perspective in

Science and the Humanities” (Oxford, July 17-20, 2013) as well as at departmental colloquia at the

Clinic for Psychosocial Medicine at the University Hospital Heidelberg and the CIN Tübingen. I thank

the participants of these events for valuable feed-back, and the SIAS Summer Institute “The Second

Person: Interdisciplinary Perspectives” for having been a great inspiration. The study was funded by

the post-doc program of the Medical Faculty Heidelberg.

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