Second-person Perspective in Interdisciplinary Research: A Cognitive Approach for Understanding and Improving the Dynamics of Collaborative Research Teams

In this paper, we argue that to reverse the excess of specialization and to create room for interdisciplinary cross-fertilization, it seems necessary to move the existing epistemic plurality towards a collaborative process of social cognition. In order to achieve this, we propose to extend the psychological notion of joint attention towards what we call joint intellectual attention. This special kind of joint attention involves a shared awareness of sharing the cognitive process of knowledge. We claim that if an interdisciplinary research team aspires to work collaboratively, it is essential for the researchers to jointly focus their attention towards a common object and establish a second-person relatedness among them. We consider some of the intellectual dispositions or virtues fostered by joint intellectual attention that facilitate interdisciplinary exchange, and explore some of the practical consequences of this cognitive approach to interdisciplinarity for education and research.

Integrating qualitative research methodologies and phenomenology—using dancers’ and athletes’ experiences for phenomenological analysis

This paper sets out from the hypothesis that the embodied competences and expertise which characterise dance and sports activities have the potential to constructively challenge and inform phenomenological thinking. While pathological cases present experiences connected to tangible bodily deviations, the specialised movement practices of dancers and athletes present experiences which put our everyday experiences of being a moving body into perspective in a slightly different sense. These specialised experiences present factual variations of how moving, sensing and interacting can be like for us as body-subjects. To use of these sources inevitably demands that qualitative research methodologies – especially short-term ethnographical fieldwork – form part of the research strategy and qualify the way the researcher involves a second-person perspective when interviewing dancers and athletes about their experiences. In the subsequent phases analysing the data generated, I argue that researchers first strive to achieve internal consistency of empirical themes identified in the case of movement practices in question thus keeping to a contextualised and lived perspective, also denoted as an emic perspective. In subsequent phases phenomenological insights are then actively engaged in the exploration and discussion of the possible transcendental structures making the described subjective experiences possible. The specialised and context-defined experiences of ‘what a moving body can be like’ are accordingly involved as factual variations to constructively add to and potentially challenge phenomenological descriptions. Lastly, I exemplify how actual research strategies have been enacted in a variety of projects involving professional dancers’, golfers’ and sports dancers’ practices and experiences, respectively.

Fenomenología de la cognición social y neurociencia de segunda persona

Gran parte de los estudios sobre la naturaleza de la cognición social, que también se ha entendido como una perspectiva de se-gunda persona, ha tenido lugar en el marco de la llamada “teoría de la mente”, entendida básicamente como capacidad inferencial de atribución de estados mentales. La fenomenología, por el contrario, advierte la naturaleza corporizada e integrada de la experiencia de sí, lo que permite, consecuentemente, el acceso inmediato a la experiencia vivida del otro. La incorporación de esta comprensión de la cognición social en el ámbito experimental ha planteado un giro interactivo: de perspectivas observacionales y mecanismos individuales a escenarios interactivos y procesos participativos. Este trabajo se propone mostrar tanto el sentido fenomenológico de la cognición social como así también las diversas interpretaciones que han encontrado aplicación en la experimentación neurocientífica en cuanto perspectivas de segunda persona, a fin de evaluar sus aportes y ofrecer posibles tareas aún pendientes.Most of the studies on the nature of social cognition, which has also been understood as second-person perspective, have taken place within the framework of the so-called "theory of mind", basically understood as inferential capacity for attribution of mental states. Phenomenology, on the contrary, shows the embodied and integrated nature of self-experience, which consequently allows immediate access to the lived experience of the other. The incorporation of this understanding of social cognition in the experimental field has proposed an interactive turn: from observational perspectives and individual mechanisms to interactive scenarios and participatory processes. This work aims to show both the phenomenological meaning of social cognition as well as the various interpretations that have found application in neuroscientific experimentation as second-person perspectives, in order to evaluate their contributions and offer possible open tasks.

empirically testable causal mechanism for divine action

A form of special divine action often considered central to the everyday experience of Christianity is that of a personal interaction with God. For example, in The Second Person Perspective in Aquinas’s Ethics, Andrew Pinsent characterises this interaction in terms of mutually empathic relations that serve to “infuse” virtues and other attributes into a person. Such interaction requires that causal relations exist between a necessary being and the contingent universe. This paper addresses a central problem of special divine action: that the empirically identifiable causes of physical events are modally ill-suited for (and epistemically distinct from) the action of an eternal, non-composite, necessary being. Accounts of what brings about physical events are standardly empirical accounts, grounded upon experience of the world.

Temperance and the Second-Person Perspective

The virtue of temperance with respect to food and drink is often assumed to be relatively straightforward, a matter of steering a mean between excess and deficiency. Given also that humans share the need to eat and drink with non-human animals, this topic might therefore seem promising to explore for possible connections between evolutionary research on morality and theological ethics. In this paper, however, I argue that many aspects of temperance go far beyond the Aristotelian account and can be understood principally as reflecting the fact that human beings are embodied relational persons. This second-person account can indeed be connected to theological ethics, but it is also one that draws principally from the discontinuities of human and non-human behaviour.

A cognitive window into Year 3 students’ social thinking processes

This work focused on increasing Year 3 students’ use of critical thinking and taking the second-person perspective (2ndPP) when interpreting and resolving life issues. Previous research indicated the Personal Viewpoints Pedagogy (PVP) elicited social thinking that exhibited strong perspective-taking and precursors to critical thinking – incipient critical thinking (ICrT). A 10-lesson curriculum with PVP applied to narratives from the Book of Acts, and a ‘do unto others’ focus (ActsPVP Curriculum) was taught. Pre- and post-test comparisons using a ‘Stealing Scenario’ to judge heart-based thoughts and attitudes (Heb 4:12) indicated that 2ndPP and ICrT increased support of the PVP’s impact on social thinking processes.