Chapter in: Wolfgang Tschacher & Claudia Bergomi (eds.), The implications of embodiment: cognition and communication. Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2011. Please refer to the published version. Expanding perspectives: The interactive development of perspective-taking in early childhood Sanneke de Haan*, Hanne De Jaegher°, Thomas Fuchs*, Andreas Mayer* * University of Heidelberg, Department of Phenomenological Psychopathology and Psychotherapy, Germany ° University of the Basque Country, Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science, Spain Introduction We propose an account of the child’s development of perspective-taking as a process of de-centring and expanding perspectives, in which the child gradually learns how its own and the other’s perspectives differ and are interrelated. This growing complexity in perspective-taking develops through interactions with the environment in general and with the main caregivers in particular. We take ‘perspective’ to mean the subjective access to the world, centred in the lived body and mediated by it. The novelty of our approach lies in the proposal that interaction is the ‘mechanism of change’. In a way we offer an alternative account of the development of the capacities that Theory of Mind theory (ToM) aims to explain. ToM-theorists explain the possibility of second-person understanding out of the ability to implicitly or explicitly theorize on a social interaction from a third-person perspective (Bogdan, 1997; Hutto, 2004). Crudely put, the picture of social capacities that arises from ToM-theories resembles a game of battleship: a boardgame where two people try to localize each other’s hidden submarines. They do so by ‘dropping bombs’ on a coordinate system, at first randomly but gradually, depending on the ‘hits,’ more precisely. Likewise, we could say that on a ToM-story, one has to guess beneath the surface to infer the hidden mental states of the ‘opponent’. Gallagher and others (Gallagher, 2001, 2008; Hutto, 2004) have extensively criticized this model of social cognition for being neither embodied nor interactive. Gallagher argues that the kinds of situations and capacities that ToM investigates concern only a small segment of our social lives. The explanation and prediction of another person’s behaviour in terms of their hidden mental states is something that we might occasionally engage in, but it is not the pervasive form of our social interactions. Rather than regarding primary and secondary intersubjectivity as pre-cursors to the real thing, Gallagher points out that these embodied interactions are