ABSTRACT
Taking seriously the second person context, on Roessler’s account, requires thinking of action explanation as often involving a sharing of a deliberative perspective, coupled with a capacity to recognize that others’ perspectives on the right way to do things might differ – that is what arguing consists in. What, in particular, introduces the distinction between one’s own perspective and that of the other is that one is engaging in such arguments, not in order to decide what to do, but in order to understand what others are up to. This way of presenting the importance of taking the second person seriously arguably bears directly on questions Lavin raises. For we have here, potentially, one way of beginning to address the other minds problem which does engage with the question of how awareness of others can be connected directly to what I do. If such sharing of normative perspectives is implicated in my understanding of others’ actions, one kind of gap between others’ wills and one’s own actions may not be as wide as is sometimes supposed.
