Individual and Joint Situations

Abstract In recent years, various metaphysicians have made use of qualifications that may apply to different entities relative to different individuals in accounts of such phenomena as color, secondary qualities, subjectivity, and relations. The primary purpose of this paper is to propose a further use for relative qualifications in an account of situations, where situations here are understood as engaged orientations toward the world. My central claim is that situations are distinguished from one another through the ways in which entities are qualified differently relative to different individuals. Thus, to imagine another person’s situation is to imagine entities as qualified differently—as they are for the other rather than for oneself–and need not involve directly imagining anything about that person. I show how situations involving multiple individuals may be derived from individual situations by suppressing conflicting qualifications. The resulting joint situations retain more or less of the action-guiding structure of individual situations depending on the similarity or diversity of the individuals involved.