Justification and the First Person

Abstract

The young child unreflectively has a certain attitude towards the human beings that it encounters. It has a pattern of reactions to others out of which develops the more complex range of reactions of adult human beings to each other. It responds to another’s smile, looks into another’s eyes, seeks the comfort of physical contact and so on. What the child observes of the other is, by itself, enough to bring forth the response. Further, responses of this kind are (at least) as ‘basic’ in the child’s life as are its responses to anything else in its environment. As soon as we can see in the child’s life any recognisable responses to things around it, beyond the most primitive biological reflexes, we can see such distinctive reactions to other human beings.