“This is a timely and fascinating book on the epistemology of social knowledge. Seemann's approach is both complementary to, but also a challenge for, the current dominant alternative view of social cognition in philosophy and psychology, the 4E (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive) account of mind. We need more work like this that is not a simple attempt to accommodate the psychological evidence, but rather that helps us make sense of it.”
Timothy Racine, Department of Psychology, Simon Fraser University
“Seemann insightfully brings together a wealth of conceptual ingredients from philosophy and psychology in an original—inspired and inspiring—recipe that makes the reader think afresh about one of the most elusive scientific conundrums: the explanation of how human individuals manage to achieve their shared experience of the world.”
Juan-Carlos Gómez, School of Psychology & Neuroscience, University of St. Andrews, UK
“In The Shared World, Axel Seemann grapples with explicating the role of others in our understanding of the world, a problem that is linked to understanding the nature and development of the mind. In contrast to individualistic approaches, Seemann brings out the social dimension of human minds by rooting the development of joint attention and the construction of social space in the infant's joint activity with others.”
Jeremy Carpendale, Department of Psychology, Simon Fraser University
“The Shared World is a rich and energetic book, that deserves a wide readership....[A] very impressive work of critical synthesis, that manages to construct an empirically informed, yet philosophically astute, picture of the basis of human sociality.”
The Journal of Mind and Behavior
“All considered, there is much to like about The Shared World. It should be read by philosophers interested in attention and perception, but also by those interested in reference and social cognition more generally. The book aspires to address philosophical issues about our perceptual knowledge of the “shared world” while drawing uponthe best available evidence from social neuroscience and developmental psychology.”
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences