ABSTRACT
Each of these ways of developing the bipolarity metaphor has generated a large, somewhat technical, self-contained literature, the point of which can be lost when our interest is in why the second person has seemed to many to be so important. It is the burden of Lavin’s paper that progress with what I called ‘existence’ and ‘significance’ questions in these distinct areas rests on recognizing their interdependence, and several of the papers here point to ways of doing so. This is also the rationale for this issue. For the purposes of introduction, though, I will initially adhere to the division. In Section 3, I introduce papers concerned with the problem of second person thought; in Section 4, I introduce issues raised by the claim that testimony and morality are grounded in speech acts that provide for second person reasons for action and belief. Finally, in Section 5, I return to questions raised by several papers of possible connections among these different ways of explicitly or implicitly using the metaphor of bipolarity to give the second person relation substantive import.
