BOOKS

  • The Shared World: Perceptual Common Knowledge, Demonstrative Communication, and Social Space
           (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2019)
The book offers a new treatment of the capacity to perceive, act on, and know about the world together with others. I argue that creatures capable of joint attention stand in a unique perceptual and epistemic relation to their surroundings: they operate in an environment that they, through their communication with their fellow perceivers, help constitute. I show that this relation can be marshaled to address a range of questions about the social aspect of the mind and its perceptual and cognitive capacities. I begin with a conceptual question about a complex kind of sociocognitive phenomenon—perceptual common knowledge—and develop an empirically informed account of the spatial structure of the environment in and about which such knowledge is possible. In the course of this argument, I address such topics as demonstrative reference in communication, common knowledge about jointly perceived objects, and spatial awareness in joint perception and action.
 
Click here for a series of posts about the book in The Brains Blog.
Click here for an interview with me about the book in the podcast New Books Network.
Click here and here for reviews of the book.

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  • Axel Seemann (ed.), Joint Attention: New Developments in Psychology, Philosophy of Mind, and Social Neuroscience (Cambridge MA: MIT Press 2012)
​Academic interest in the phenomenon of joint attention—the capacity to attend to an object together with another creature—has increased rapidly over the past two decades. Yet it isn't easy to spell out in detail what joint attention is, how it ought to be characterized, and what exactly its significance consists in. The writers for this volume address these and related questions by drawing on a variety of disciplines, including developmental and comparative psychology, philosophy of mind, and social neuroscience. The volume organizes their contributions along three main themes: definitional concerns, such as the question of whether or not joint attention should be understood as an irreducibly basic state of mind; processes and mechanisms obtaining on both the neural and behavioral levels; and the functional significance of joint attention, in particular the role it plays in comprehending spatial perspectives and understanding other minds. The collected papers present new work by leading researchers on one of the key issues in social cognition. They demonstrate that an adequate theory of joint attention is indispensable for a comprehensive account of mind.
 
Click here and here for reviews of the collection.

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