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Implications of the Second-Person Standpoint: Comments on Darwall (2006)

My review of The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability (Darwall,


2006)
Call the second-person standpoint the perspective you and I take up when we make and
acknowledge claims on one anothers conduct and will whether explicit and voiced or only
implicit and felt the I-you-me structure of reciprocal address runs throughout thought and
speech from the second-person point of view. (Darwall, 2006, p. 3)
This thought-provoking philosophical project nicely complements the scientific foundations to
teaching that unify training, education, and leader development. While the precise technical
terminology will make this work somewhat inaccessible to non-philosophers, it is well worth
your patience.
I would merely add that the nuanced differences between this project and other philosophical
arguments that are highlighted throughout this book can be viewed in quite a different light by
considering shared experience of persons that is grounded in an intersubjectively verifiable
reality. This is shared reality in which persons are meaningfully engaged together over time. It is
a common ground in which their respective conduct and will is constrained, and reciprocally
interdependent, in ways that are observable. It is a source of inescapable accountability that is not
speculative and not authentically negotiable.
In other words, the second-person standpoint is not limited to thought and speech. Reciprocal
address is at least as powerful in perception and action with other individuals who are addressed
as such (from the second-person standpoint) in the shared context of a group and within the
situation in which the group, as such, has meaning. The second-person perspective takes on
deeper meaning through verbal and nonverbal communication about the shared context, that is,
collaborative reflection on the shared experience. It implies that written and spoken
communication during such reflection should be conducted preferentially in the I-you-me
structure of reciprocal address.
Whether or not there is explicit reciprocity in communication about a shared experience,
collaborative reflection should be approached with the assumption of reciprocity. The authority
or momentary standing that is assumed and acknowledged in the second-person perspective is
the privilege of a different perspective that is inaccessible to the addressee, even if only
momentarily. More broadly, given the assumptions of crystallization, all parties in collaborative
reflection can have authority albeit different kinds of authority deriving from complementary
perspectives (i.e., propositions that are not logically inconsistent). From a realist perspective, such
complementarity is verifiable over time in a shared experience.
These ideas have direct relevant to topics of intense contemporary interest such as collaborative
innovation and collective intelligence in social networks mediated by the internet.
Gary E. Riccio, Ph.D. (revised May, 2014)

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