Vol. 9 No. 1 (2021): Dossier "The Second Person"

The clash between the first-person and the third-person perspectives is well-known to anyone familiar with the literature in the philosophy of mind. We have a privileged access to our own mental states, acts, or events; there is clearly an asymmetry between the way we know our own mental states and the way we know the mental states of other persons through mindreading or empathy. Thus, the first-person perspective is subjective.[1] From that perspective we think of ourselves as conscious and rational beings, with responsibilities, commitments, and values. This is the obliged starting point of everybody. The knowledge we have about ourselves from that perspective is not scientific and does not require any special training.

The third-person perspective is the one of natural sciences. It is objective. From that perspective, we are organisms caught in the causal network of the world, like any other object around us. When natural sciences look at the human body, what is seen is shown by anatomical boards. We have a third-person perspective when different people can look at the same objects, consider and weight the same evidence, share the same methods, reach the same conclusions. The third-person perspective presupposes the possibility to engage in the same sort of activity (investigating, theorizing) and to agree with other people, thus, to access, somehow, and assess, other people’s beliefs. Without that (imperfect) access to other’s beliefs, there wouldn’t be objectivity. But this is what we call intersubjectivity. So, objectivity is grounded in intersubjectivity. But intersubjectivity is based on the capacity to put oneself in someone else’s skin. This is a first-person ability, that of representing other people’s mental states, a metarepresentational capacity grounded in the first-person perspective.   

It is now easy to see why the idea of introducing a second-person perspective became conceptually so urgent. The second-person perspective is intersubjective, rooted in the first-person perspective, and grounding the third-person perspective of science. The second-person perspective is necessary to complete the picture, to close the gap and to explain genetically how we can get outside the close circle of subjectivity by sharing beliefs and methods. This is how we reach collectively “a view from nowhere.” [2]  

[1] For a similar characterization of the three perspectives, see Michael Pauen (2012): “The Second-Person Perspective”, Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, 55:1, 33-49.

[2] Thomas Nagel, in A View from Nowhere (1986) saw the problem acutely: “This book is about a single problem: how to combine the perspective of a particular person inside the world with an objective view of the same world, the person and his viewpoint included. It is a problem that faces every creature with the impulse and the capacity to transcend its particular point of view and to conceive of the world as a whole.” p. 3.