Understanding Others in Social Interactions

The Theory of Mind Debate has seen a recent shift of focus from social observation toward social interaction. Defenders of so-called second-person accounts claim that social interactions reveal an understanding of another person which is different in kind to merely knowing that the other has a particular mental state. The aim of this paper is to specify this (allegedly) new form of understanding. In the first part, I criticize attempts to describe it as the knowledge of how to react to the other’s mental state, i.e. as the exhibition of a social skill. In the second part, I develop an alternative proposal which is based upon the work of Cavell and Thompson. I suggest that understanding another person in a social interaction is to be conceptualized as the propositional nexus of acknowledging his mental state to him.