This paper explores how the phenomenon of Joint Attention (JA) drives certain core features of team sport and how sport illuminates the nature of JA. In JA, two or more agents focus on the same object in mutual awareness that the content of their experience is thus shared. JA is essential to joint sporting actions. The sporting context is particularly useful for illustrating the phenomenon of JA and provides a valuable lens through which to examine rival theoretical accounts of its (...) workings. This paper draws novel connections between the respective philosophical literatures on JA and sport, suggesting prospects for mutually advantageous cross-pollination. I contend that the workings of JA within joint sporting action are misconstrued on intellectualistic and individualistic theories which posit reductive explanations in terms of the contents of individual minds. The best evidence and strongest philosophical arguments support ‘relational’ accounts whereby joint sporting actions exceed the sum of their parts. I reject the ‘extensionalist’ contention, associated with ‘lean’ versions of the relationalist approach, that objects of JA are individuated in terms of causal properties not sensitive to how they are perceived. Siding instead with ‘rich’ versions of the view, I argue that team collaboration depends on convergence in terms of the ‘aspectual shape’ of the objects of JA. Finally, a further possible application for these ideas is suggested: that JA plays a central role in the constitution of sport-specific kinds. On this proposal, JA facilitates collective perceptual recognition of particular objects and situations as embodying the general types described in the rulebook, playing an important role in creating and sustaining the public ‘social space’ of sporting competition. (shrink)

Joint attention is recognised by many philosophers and psychologists as a fundamental cornerstone of our engagement with one another and the world around us. The most familiar paradigm of joint attention is joint perceptual—specifically visual—attention to an object in the present environment. However, some recent discussions have focused on a potentially different form of joint attention: namely, ‘joint reminiscing’ conversations in which two or more people discuss something in the past which they both remember. These exchanges are in some ways (...) comparable to joint perceptual attention to something present, and have been characterised by some as a form of joint attention to the past. In this paper, I will assess the prospects for characterising joint reminiscing as a genuine form of joint attention to the past, as understood on the model of joint perceptual attention to something present. My conclusions will be tentative, and my primary aim will be to explore how different commitments regarding the nature of both joint attention and episodic memory give rise to different possibilities for characterising joint reminiscing as a distinctive form of collective engagement with the past. I will suggest that joint reminiscing is unlike ordinary joint attention at least insofar as joint reminiscing trades on the participants’ mutual recognition of one another as having been present at an earlier experience. This is connected with joint reminiscing’s social function, and its role in facilitating the special kind of relationship conveyed by the idea of knowing a person. (shrink)

In this paper I outline the PAIR account of joint attention as a perceptual-practical, affectively charged intentional relation. I argue that to explain joint attention we need to leave the received understanding of propositions and propositional attitudes and the picture of content connected to it behind and embrace the notions of subject mode and position mode content. I also explore the relation between joint attention and communication.

Many accounts of collective intentionality target rather sophisticated types of cooperative activities, i.e., activities with complex goals that require prior planning and various coordinating and organizing roles. But although joint action is of obvious importance, an investigation of collective intentionality should not merely focus on the question of how we can share agentive intentions. We can act and do things together, but it is not obvious that the awe felt and shared by a group of Egyptologists when they gain entry (...) to a newly discovered pharaonic tomb can or should be analyzed in the same way as, say, a heist that a group of criminals carefully plan and execute together. The aim of the article is to better understand the kind of emotional sharing that can occur between two individuals who are perceptually co-present. Does the sharing involve a kind of phenomenal fusion? Is it a matter of sharing one and the same token experience? It will be argued that both of these recent suggestions must be rejected as misleading in favor of an account that sees emotional sharing as a form of emotional integration that involves constitutively interdependent processes of empathy, second-personal address, and identification. (shrink)

Recent years have seen an upsurge of interest in the second-person perspective, not only in philosophy of mind, language, law and ethics, but also in various empirical disciplines such as cognitive neuroscience and developmental psychology. A distinctive and perhaps also slightly puzzling feature of this ongoing discussion is that whereas many contributors insist that a proper consideration of the second-person perspective will have an impact on our understanding of social cognition, joint action, communication, self-consciousness, morality, and so on, there remains (...) considerable disagreement about what exactly a second-person perspective amounts to (see Eilan 2014; Conant and Rödl 2014). What is the difference between adopting a second-person and a third-person perspective on another? How does one relate to another as a you and how does that differ from relating to another as a he, she or they? In the following, I will consider three different proposals and argue that a promising but somewhat overlooked account can be found in the work of Husserl. (shrink)

An important thesis discussed in the literature on shared agency is that group identification motivates pre-school children to act together. This paper aims at further illuminating this thesis by clarifying what triggers the process of group identification in young children. It is argued that joint attention, among other functions in supporting joint actions, can reveal to the co-attenders that they share some preferences. Since sharing preferences has been established by the literature to be a reliable motivation of group identification and (...) since joint attention has an early emergence in development, one can consider joint attention to be a putative trigger of group identification in pre-school children. If this is on the right track, group identification, joint attention, and preferences identify a cluster of minimal pre-conditions for joint actions. (shrink)

Joint attention occurs when two (or more) individuals attend together to some object. It has been identified by psychologists as an early form of our joint engagement, and is thought to provide us with an understanding of other minds that is basic in that sophisticated conceptual resources are not involved. Accordingly, it has also attracted the interest of philosophers. Moreover, a very recent trend in the psychological and philosophical literature on joint attention consists of developing the suggestion that it holds (...) partially in virtue of communication: it is because we share our thoughts or feelings about an object that our individual attention becomes joint. This paper unpacks the communicative suggestion in a way that accounts for joint attention's basicness. (shrink)