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Abstract
The rise of social neuroscience has brought the second-person perspective back into the focus of philosophy. Although this is not a new topic, it is certainly less well understood than the first-person and third-person perspectives, and it is even unclear whether it can be reduced to one of these perspectives. The present paper argues that no such reduction is possible because the second-person perspective provides a unique kind of access to certain facts, namely other persons' mental states, particularly, but not only, in social contexts. The paper starts with the idea that perspectives are ways of epistemic access that determine an epistemic subject's recognition of a certain object. While the first-person perspective is subjective because it is based on, and directed at, the epistemic subject's experiences, the third-person perspective, which is based on objective evidence and gives access to all kinds of entities, is objective. The second-person perspective, by contrast, is intersubjective because it is a relation between an epistemic subject and another sentient being's mental states. It involves the epistemic subject's replication of those states, a basic self/other distinction and a basic awareness of the relevant situational differences between the epistemic subject and the other being. This is why the second-person perspective is a perspective on a perspective, which involves a basic awareness of perspectivalness, even if second-person perspective taking may be subpersonal to a large extent.
Notes
1. Obviously, second-person perspective taking is closely related to what proponents of the simulation account (Goldman, 1993) have in mind. So, simulation is a kind of second-person perspective taking. Still, the present account does not imply an endorsement of the simulation account because it makes no assumptions on whether or not solving theory of mind problems requires simulation rather than the use of a folk theory. It holds only that, if based on simulation, then solving theory of mind problems is a kind of second-person perspective taking. Moreover, simulation as it is understood by the proponents of the related account is not a necessary condition for second-person perspective taking, as there may be other forms of replicating another person's mental states. So, according to the “shared network hypothesis”, replicating another person's pain feeling may be based on an automatic activation of the pain areas in one's own brain, which does not require any simulation (Vignemont & Singer, 2006).
2. Of course, it is or may be a fact that a certain subject has these beliefs, desires, and norms. But even then, it's something like a second-order fact, a (mental) fact referring to a fact about the external world. Uljana Feest has drawn my attention to this point.
3. I am happy to concede that these cases are difficult to interpret. However, the most straightforward way to deal with them is as follows: Rather than giving up on the second-order criterion in order to accept these cases as typical examples of second-person perspective taking, I suggest we keep the second-order criterion and regard these cases as non-standard or weak cases of second-person perspective taking, just because one decisive criterion, namely being aware of someone else's perspective as a perspective, is not met.
4. I owe this point to a discussion with Romy Jaster.