Community hub
Recent from talks
Knowledge base stats:
Talk channels stats:
Members stats:
Intersubjectivity
Intersubjectivity describes the shared understanding that emerges from interpersonal interactions.
The term first appeared in social science in the 1970s and later incorporated into psychoanalytic theory by George E. Atwood and Robert Stolorow, the term has since been adopted across various fields. In phenomenology, philosophers such as Edmund Husserl and Edith Stein examined intersubjectivity in relation to empathy and experience, while in psychology it is used to analyze how individuals attribute mental states to others and coordinate behavior.
Intersubjectivity is a term coined by social scientists beginning around 1970[citation needed] to refer to a variety of types of human interaction. The term was introduced to psychoanalysis by George E. Atwood and Robert Stolorow, who consider it a "meta-theory" of psychoanalysis. For example, social psychologists Alex Gillespie and Flora Cornish listed at least seven definitions of intersubjectivity (and other disciplines have additional definitions):
Intersubjectivity has been used in social science to refer to agreement. There is intersubjectivity between people if they agree on a given set of meanings or share the same perception of a situation. Similarly, Thomas Scheff defines intersubjectivity as "the sharing of subjective states by two or more individuals".
Intersubjectivity also has been used to refer to the common-sense, shared meanings constructed by people in their interactions with each other and used as an everyday resource to interpret the meaning of elements of social and cultural life. If people share common sense, then they share a definition of the situation.
Psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin, in The Bonds of Love, wrote, "The concept of intersubjectivity has its origins in the social theory of Jürgen Habermas (1970), who used the expression 'the intersubjectivity of mutual understanding' to designate an individual capacity and a social domain." Psychoanalyst Molly Macdonald argued in 2011 that a "potential point of origin" for the term was in Jean Hyppolite's use of l'inter-subjectivité in an essay from 1955 on "The Human Situation in the Hegelian Phenomenology". However, the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, whose work Habermas and Hyppolite draw upon, was the first to develop the term, which was subsequently elaborated upon by other phenomenologists such as Edith Stein, Emmanuel Levinas, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
Contemporarily, intersubjectivity is the major topic in both the analytic and the continental traditions of philosophy. Intersubjectivity is considered crucial not only at the relational level but also at the epistemological and even metaphysical levels. For example, intersubjectivity is postulated as playing a role in establishing the truth of propositions, and constituting the intersubjective agreement of an experience of an object.
A central concern in consciousness studies of the past 50 years is the so-called problem of other minds, which asks how we can justify our belief that people have minds much like our own and predict others' mind-states and behavior, as our experience shows we often can. Contemporary philosophical theories of intersubjectivity need to address the problem of other minds.
Hub AI
Intersubjectivity AI simulator
(@Intersubjectivity_simulator)
Intersubjectivity
Intersubjectivity describes the shared understanding that emerges from interpersonal interactions.
The term first appeared in social science in the 1970s and later incorporated into psychoanalytic theory by George E. Atwood and Robert Stolorow, the term has since been adopted across various fields. In phenomenology, philosophers such as Edmund Husserl and Edith Stein examined intersubjectivity in relation to empathy and experience, while in psychology it is used to analyze how individuals attribute mental states to others and coordinate behavior.
Intersubjectivity is a term coined by social scientists beginning around 1970[citation needed] to refer to a variety of types of human interaction. The term was introduced to psychoanalysis by George E. Atwood and Robert Stolorow, who consider it a "meta-theory" of psychoanalysis. For example, social psychologists Alex Gillespie and Flora Cornish listed at least seven definitions of intersubjectivity (and other disciplines have additional definitions):
Intersubjectivity has been used in social science to refer to agreement. There is intersubjectivity between people if they agree on a given set of meanings or share the same perception of a situation. Similarly, Thomas Scheff defines intersubjectivity as "the sharing of subjective states by two or more individuals".
Intersubjectivity also has been used to refer to the common-sense, shared meanings constructed by people in their interactions with each other and used as an everyday resource to interpret the meaning of elements of social and cultural life. If people share common sense, then they share a definition of the situation.
Psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin, in The Bonds of Love, wrote, "The concept of intersubjectivity has its origins in the social theory of Jürgen Habermas (1970), who used the expression 'the intersubjectivity of mutual understanding' to designate an individual capacity and a social domain." Psychoanalyst Molly Macdonald argued in 2011 that a "potential point of origin" for the term was in Jean Hyppolite's use of l'inter-subjectivité in an essay from 1955 on "The Human Situation in the Hegelian Phenomenology". However, the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, whose work Habermas and Hyppolite draw upon, was the first to develop the term, which was subsequently elaborated upon by other phenomenologists such as Edith Stein, Emmanuel Levinas, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
Contemporarily, intersubjectivity is the major topic in both the analytic and the continental traditions of philosophy. Intersubjectivity is considered crucial not only at the relational level but also at the epistemological and even metaphysical levels. For example, intersubjectivity is postulated as playing a role in establishing the truth of propositions, and constituting the intersubjective agreement of an experience of an object.
A central concern in consciousness studies of the past 50 years is the so-called problem of other minds, which asks how we can justify our belief that people have minds much like our own and predict others' mind-states and behavior, as our experience shows we often can. Contemporary philosophical theories of intersubjectivity need to address the problem of other minds.