Seeing People and Knowing You: Perception, Shared Knowledge, and Acknowledgment

Authors

  • Stina Bäckström Åbo Akademi University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.24204/ejpr.v5i4.205

Abstract

This article takes up the proposal that action and expression enable perceptual knowledge of other minds, a proposal that runs counter to a tradition of thinking that other minds are special in that they are essentially unobservable. I argue that even if we accept this proposal regarding perceptual knowledge, there is still a difference between knowing another person and knowing other things. I articulate this difference by pointing out that I can know another person by sharing knowledge with her. Such sharing is expressed in the use of the second-person pronoun. Thus, I argue, other minds are indeed special as objects of knowledge, but not in the way the tradition has supposed.

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Published

2013-12-22

How to Cite

Bäckström, Stina. 2013. “Seeing People and Knowing You: Perception, Shared Knowledge, and Acknowledgment”. European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 5 (4):55-73. https://doi.org/10.24204/ejpr.v5i4.205.