Joint Attention: Communication and Other Minds -- Issues in Philosophy and Psychology
NAOMI EILAN, CHRISTOP HOERLH, TERESA MCCORMACK, JOHANNES ROESSLER (EDS)
(Reviewed by Christopher Mole, Washington University in St. Louis)
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John Campbell's essay reproduces the work on joint attention from Chapter Eight of his 2002 book.
At the other end of the book's methodological range is a pair of essays focusing on primates. The first, by Josep Call and Michael Tomasello, presents a nice puzzle that arises from a series of experiments in which chimpanzees show a pattern of competence and incompetence that it is hard to resolve into a coherent picture of their abilities. Call and Tomasello suggest that the apparent conflict can be resolved by crediting chimps with a high degree of know-how that they can deploy in social interaction, while denying that they have an understanding of others as representing the world. The details of this suggestion are rather difficult to understand, which Call and Tomasello admit, suggesting that non-chimps should not expect chimpanzee folk psychology to be any easier to understand than human.
A second paper on the abilities of apes, this one by Juan Carlos Gomez, adds some interesting results with gorillas to the discussion and makes some connections between the chimp's situation and that of the autistic child. It is never entirely clear, however, how Gomez's theoretical approach differs from that of Call and Tomasello. This is in part because his attempts to explain what is meant by 'practical representations' or by 'sensorimotor notion of a subject' are never entirely successful. If, as sometimes seems to be the case, the intention is to claim that apes have something like understanding-constituting know-how for social interactions, then the suggestion is very similar to that of Call and Tomasello. The difficulties of understanding what is meant here come, in part, from an awkward prose style that afflicts much of Gomez's paper. ('Specially' for 'especially' on p. 67, 'blatant' for 'obvious' on p. 68, 'paramount' for 'paradigm' on p. 77: Surely it should have been somebody's job to correct this sort of thing.) The paper is nonetheless a helpful one, especially when illustrating some of the complexities that one faces in interpreting ape behaviour, and in its careful handling of the easily overlooked differences between apes reared with various degrees of human interaction.
Naomi Eilan contributes a chapter that strives to incorporate introductory material alongside more substantive considerations. The chapter may prove to be a useful introduction to those readers who are not put off by Eilan's organization of her material around Donald Davidson's most radical and least plausible proposals about the impossibility of a solitary thinker having thoughts about the mind-independent world. Unfortunately it is a chapter that is poorly executed throughout, in a way that suggests it must have been written in great haste. Typos remain of the sort that the most cursory proof-reading should have detected: Page three has a sentence that begins "Despite the centrality of the those of attention [. . .]". And there is some quite elementary philosophical bungling. On page five we are presented with four conditions as being necessary conditions on joint attention. ("[T]o say of an event that it is an event of two subjects (or more) jointly attending to the same object is to be committed, at least, to the truth of the following four claims about the event.") But no sooner have these conditions been introduced than they are being treated as sufficient for joint attention ("Let us say that when these conditions are met, we have in play a 'joint attention triangle'."). Eilan and the editors with whom she has collaborated on this volume have achieved a work that advances our understanding of joint attention and of the several important phenomena in which it has a role. It is to be hoped that the unappealing introductory chapter does not keep this stimulating book from reaching the wide audience of philosophers and psychologists that it deserves..
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