Deference to First-Person Authority and Early Communicative Interactions

Abstract Many authors agree with McGeer’s (1996, 2007) view that we owe people first-person authority. While this feature is widely acknowledged, accounts rarely ask who is entitled to such authority. As a result, over-intellectualized models have often, even unintentionally, excluded many individuals from the scope of such accounts. This paper addresses this gap by examining the social practice of deference to first-person authority in its earliest form: communicative interactions between infants and adults. The paper adopts a methodological focus on the phenomenon’s early occurrence, enabling us both to avoid the narrow scope of overly intellectualized models and to achieve a more accurate understanding of its constitutive aspects. My central claim is that this practice of deference can be traced back to our interactions with pre-linguistic infants, whose communicative acts elicit responses governed by the same norms we apply when deferring to linguistic expressions of mental states.