Axel Seemann, "The Shared World: Perceptual Knowledge, Demonstrative Communication, and Social Space" (MIT Press, 2019)
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What is the episode’s opening premise about perceptual common knowledge?
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Hello, thanks for joining us for this episode of New Books and Philosophy, which is part of the New Books Network. I'm Robert Talese, and I'm Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. My guest today is Axel Simon. Axel is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Bentley University. He works primarily in philosophy of mind, with special interest in social cognition and joint attention. Axel's new book is titled The Shared World, Perceptual Knowledge, Demonstrative Communication, and Social Space. It is newly published with MIT Press. When you think about it, a lot of what we're able to accomplish in our day-to-day lives depends on the ability to act and think in concert with others. And often, this involves not only the capacity to perceive together the world around us, we must also know that we perceive together.
In other words, there must be perceptual common knowledge. Now questions mount quickly. How is this kind of knowledge possible? How does it arise? What does its possibility show us about our sociality? What does it suggest about the world around us? In the shared world, Axel Simon develops an account of perceptual common knowledge that's both philosophically subtle and empirically informed. And so there's a lot to talk about. But let's begin, as we usually do, with our guest. Hello, Axel. Hello, Bob. Pleasure to be here. How are you today?
Yes, thanks. I'm very well. I get to talk about, you know, a project that I have been thinking about for a long time. So what could be better?
Well, fabulous. Why don't you then start us off by telling us a little bit about yourself and all the work that you've been doing?
Yes. Well, of course, you know, there's many things one can say about oneself. But here's one way to say something of interest, perhaps. I have always been fascinated by stories. I've always devoured novels, fictions about persons, about people. And one of the most important books of my teenage years, perhaps the most important book, was The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. So, you know, the story where a young man at the beginning of the war goes off into a Swiss sanatorium and stays there and has intimate encounters with, at the end of the day, death, but also philosophy and philosophy about life and death. And I read this book over and over again, and it's a deeply philosophical book, you know, riffs on Schopenhauer, and so I began to read Schopenhauer, and then, you know, via Schopenhauer got into Kant.
And when the time came to choose a course of study, I opted for philosophy, German literature, and art history. I did all of this first in Hamburg and then in Munich. And both of the latter two subjects sort of dropped out fairly quickly as subjects of academic interest because I discovered that in order to enjoy and love stories, novels, you don't have to study them.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the episode’s opening premise about perceptual common knowledge?
0:00–5:52
2
How does Axel Seemann introduce his background and the main arguments of *The Shared World*?
5:52–13:12
3
Why does the possibility of perceptual common knowledge raise philosophical questions about sociality?
13:12–21:47
4
How does the painting *The Raft of the Medusa* illustrate the problem of shared perception?
21:47–30:36
5
What are “joint constellations” and why are demonstrative gestures crucial for them?
30:36–37:51
6
What is the regress problem for perceptual common knowledge and how does the externalist approach resolve it?
37:51–47:27
7
Which empirical findings support the idea of a social spatial framework for joint perception?
47:27–55:43
8
What future projects does Seemann envision, including applications to loneliness and social timing?
55:43–1:02:55
Speakers
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