Particularism is the position that perceptual content is essentially singular, and all perceptual representations are as of particulars: I see that cat. Existentialism is the position that all perceptual representations are as of general features, not particulars, which are satisfied when the world would satisfy the corresponding existentially quantified statement: I see there as being a cat. H. P. Grice famously raised the problem that existential contents could fail to refer to the particulars which made them accurate, such as when a mirror is placed in front of an object that reflects a qualitatively identical object in a different location. Christopher Hill and Mark Sainsbury have recently proposed refinements to existentialism that resolve Grice's problem, by adding a causal condition for perceptual awareness of a particular. In this article, I describe three counterexamples to this refined existentialism, from the wagon wheel effect, misperceptions of continuity, and misperceptions of seamless transition. Particularism correctly judges these to be cases of hallucination as of a particular, whereas existentialism misjudges these cases to be accurate perceptions of a particular, since a cause of the perceptual experience satisfies the existential content.
This paper asks a basic but largely neglected question: which behaviors genuinely qualify as instances of joint attention, and why? I argue that the current literature relies on an heterogeneous explanandum: very different behaviors are treated as paradigmatic cases of jointness, without a unified criterion for what makes attention joint rather than merely individual and parallel. I propose an exclusion criterion in the form of a canonical description of joint attention. In an enactivist-phenomenological spirit, I treat joint attention not as a capacity or mental state, but as an episodic phenomenon of social interaction in which subjects engage in a task whose success essentially depends on a specific kind of co-dependent and shared exercise of attention: an interwoven attentional exercise. I first use thought experiments (one-way mirrors, mutual spying and declarative pointing) to argue that attentional co-dependence alone does not warrant invoking 'jointness'. I then examine real experimental cooperative linguistic scenarios, drawing on Merleau-Pontian reading and Clark and Krych's Lego (R) task, to argue that genuine joint attention requires interwoven contributions. I close by distinguishing this proposal from close accounts and sketching a different conception of attentional overtness.
