The onset of joint attention behaviour seems to indicate a key point in human development in relation to social cognition and our grasp of psychological concepts. It is tempting to suppose that the ability to engage in such behaviour acts a precursor to a more sophisticated understanding of the mentality of self and others. The philosophers John Campbell and Christopher Peacocke have both argued that properly joint attention is a kind of co-operative activity which would seem to require the presence of either common knowledge or something which can play a similar coordinative role. In response, both argue for an account of joint attention in terms of a particular kind of experience that joint attenders can enjoy.

In this paper, I argue that Campbell’s and Peacocke’s accounts of (mature) joint attention comes into conflict with Tomasello’s recent discussions of what the key difference in between human infant engagement in joint attention and primates failure to do so – an account which stresses the idea that infants have an understanding of intention and a desire to engage in a certain kind of shared activity.

This raises the question whether there is a way of conceiving of genuinely joint attention consistent with Tomasello’s picture of development, but which does not require that we suppose human infants already to have a highly sophisticated grasp of others’ psychology. That is, we need to ask whether there is a way of understanding joint attention as an activity on which it is a shared activity but which doesn’t require that the participants have common knowledge or necessarily mutual awareness of their co-ordinated behaviour. Such a conception would require less conceptual sophistication of an agent than our common understanding of co-operative behaviour. In the second part of the paper I attempt to sketch such a model.

Note: As for the works I discuss, the Call and Tomasello is in manuscript forthcoming in a volume together with the Peacocke. Those who wish to read the Campbell can find it as chapter 8, 'Joint Attention', of Reference and Consciousness (Oxford Cognitive Science Series) OUP 2002.