Joint Attention: Communication and Other Minds

Although the methodological approaches that the volume brings together are widely various, its contributors have evidently learned a good deal from one another, and the result displays much more coherence than one might have expected from a book in which philosophy of various sorts shares space with primatology and with discussions of autism. This impressive coherence is heartening to the reader who has entertained fears about philosophy's ability to stay relevant when faced with psychology's unabating torrent of freshly gathered data. The volume provides every reason to suppose that joint attention is a topic on which philosophy and other disciplines can collaborate fruitfully.

• 1. Joint attention, communication, and mind ; 2. Joint attention and understanding the mind ; 3. What chimpanzees know about seeing revisited: an explanation of the third kind ; 4. Joint attention and the notion of subject: insights from apes, normal children, and children with autism ; 5. Before the 'Third Element': understanding attention to self ; 6. Infants' understanding of the actions involved in joint attention ; 7. Infant pointing: Harlequin, servant of two masters ; 8. Understanding the role of communicative intentions in word learning ; 9. What puts the jointness into joint attention? ; 10. Why do children with autism have a joint attention impairment? ; 11. Joint attention and the problem of other minds ; 12. Joint reminiscing as joint attention to the past ; 13. Joint attention and common knowledge ; 14. Joint attention: its nature, reflexivity, and relation to common knowledge?