My friend Nick asked me to explain a drawing I did.
It made me look up cool papers on second person perspectives and I ran into this gem, written by Michael Pauen!
In it he writes:
The rise of social neuroscience has brought the second person perspective back into the focus of philosophy. Although this is not a new topic, it is certainly less well understood than the first and the third person perspective, and it is even unclear whether it can be reduced to one the third person perspective.
The present paper argues that no such reduction it possible because the second person perspective provides a unique kind of access to certain facts, namely other persons’ mental states, particularly, but not only, in social contexts.
The paper starts with the idea that perspectives are ways of epistemic access that determine an epistemic subject’s recognition of a certain object. While the first person perspective is subjective because it’s based on, and directed at the epistemic subject’s experiences and the third person which is based on objective evidence and gives access to all kinds of entities is objective, the second person perspective is intersubjective because it is an epistemic relation between an epistemic subject and another sentient being’s mental states. It involves the epistemic subject’s replication of those states, a basic self/other distinction and a basic awareness of the relevant perspectival differences between the epistemic subject and the other being. This is why the second person perspective is a perspective on a perspective, even if second person perspective taking may be subpersonal to a large extent.
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