Mental Perspectives in Interaction: About Social Cognition and the Second Person in Human Interaction by Diana Pérez and Antoni Gomila

Abstract

In 1996 a small revolution started in the psychology and philosophy of social cognition. As a critical reaction to the attempt by Barresi and Moore to explain social cognitive development in children as the progressive integration of first-person and third-person perspectives on the world, some psychologists proposed the idea that the neglected second person perspective could be a better approach to understand social cognition and solve some of its traditional problems. Here I review the book by Pérez and Gomila, one of the most detailed and better developed proposals about the interdisciplinary implications of this approach, and I critically discuss some unresolved issues, such as the apparently inextricable interaction between the different person perspectives from the beginning of development, or the difficulty to separate clearly the different properties of each perspective with current analyses.