This chapter considers a concise account of the second-person experience from the viewpoint of an analytic philosopher and develops a contrasting second-person account on the basis of Alfred Schutz's The Phenomenology of the Social World. After this close analysis, the chapter considers more broadly how a Schutzian perspective might approach some of the further issues arising in the philosophical literature on the second-person experience.

An Initial Account of Second-Person Experience

The distinguished analytic philosopher, Eleonore Stump, on the basis of an extensive and burgeoning literature in analytic philosophy, has brought into clear and concise focus the second-person experience. She contrasts this experience with first-person experience in which one is directly and immediately aware of (only) oneself as a person and third-person experience in which one has knowledge of the states of another but not in virtue of being conscious of that other as a person (Stump 2010, 76). To have a second-person experience, one has to interact consciously and directly with another person who is conscious and present to you as a person (77).

Expanding this account to discuss the distinctive types of knowledge linked to second-person and third-person knowledges, Stump takes as models modes of thinking characteristic of two medieval founders of religious orders. She argues, then, for a distinctive kind of Franciscan knowledge, like the knowledge of qualia or knowledge of persons such as oneself or others (e.g., all that is involved in facial recognition) that is conveyed through second-person experiences of them. In such second-personal experiences, one can say “you” to another person, and Stump insists that such knowledge cannot be adequately expressible in terms of knowing that (2010, 49–53, 56, 62) or grasped in propositional form (54), the kind of knowledge that is typical of the “Dominican” style. Stump (50) makes use of Frank Jackson's thought experiment about the neuroscientist Mary who might know all the neurological facts about having the experience of color but lacks the distinctive rich experience that will flood over her when she comes face to face with an actual color. Stump imagines a “Mary” who knows (via factual, third-person knowledge) all there is to know about other people, but, should she suddenly find herself confronted with a person in the face-to-face mode, she would find pouring in upon her the quite different type of knowledge—that is, Franciscan personal knowledge that would be irreducible to some set of “that” propositions.