Thinking About You

Abstract

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The Second Person Perspective

“…In consequence, the distinctivist has either to tighten up the conditions for genuine second person thought to rule out cases of unproblematic 'I'/'you'-substitution, or else grant, concessively, that distinctive 'you'-thought is expressible by means of 'I' in those cases. The former option is the more preferable and arguably the only one available if, as seems likely, the Addressing Constraint takes on the role of a constitutive condition on 'you'-thought (see Salje 2017), but it leaves mysterious how anything close to the Merging Constraint can be accommodated. Whereas the latter alternative is not automatically self-defeating (as noted in Sect.…”

“…Voices have been raised, in particular, to challenge the dominant approach just highlighted and to substantiate the distinguishing character of a type of thought available via utterances of sentences such as (2). For instance, Haase (2014), Heal (2014) or Salje (2017), each in their own way, draw attention to specific awareness or social interaction conditions plausibly attached to the second person in order to demarcate a type of thought set against the types expressible via (1) and (3).…”

“… See Peacocke (2014a, b, Chap. 10),Martin (2014) andSalje (2017) for insightful discussions of the form of awareness at issue and which goes in these writings under the label 'interpersonal self-consciousness'. Note that, although similar forms of awareness are arguably involved in communication generally, the kind of awareness targeted in the analysis concerns specifically successful practice with 'you' (cf.Peacocke 2014b, 244-245).…”