Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“Considered at its most minimal, language is grounded, as Michael Tomasello along with Eric Gans has shown, in joint attention—the capacity to pay attention to the same thing at the same time, to know that we are doing it, and to know that we know (to let each other know). It should be possible, then, to analyze all human, which is to say social, phenomena, in terms of forms of attention, articulated in ever more complex ways. I think we can reduce the basic attentional dispositions to three. First, one directs others’ attention toward oneself as the center, and joins in that attention directed towards oneself. Second, one directs others attention to something one has produced, and joins in that attention. Third, one directs the attention of others to something one is attending to and neither controls—which is both the originary disposition and, as I will suggest, a “late” one. Naturally, in each of these cases one could rewrite “one directs others’ attention” as “one’s attention is directed by another,” as both must be happening simultaneously and are really almost indistinguishable in their elemental forms. The first two dispositions can readily transition into the third, and beauty and human accomplishments are still among the most compelling objects of attention.”

— Adam Katz, The Attentional Structure of Sovereignty · May 2017 · GABlog