Intersubjectivity

Phenomenology

In the field of phenomenology, intersubjectivity was originally associated with the work of late 19th-century philosopher Edmund Husserl, who explored how the intersubjective world of shared social objects, constructs, and meanings must, by necessity, transcend the clearly bounded, separate, and dualistic constructs of subjects and objects. According to Husserl, the consciousness of the experiencing subjective self, or “I,” requires other subjective selves, or other “I”s, to mediate and confirm the self's understanding of the world. This requirement, described by Husserl as the intersubjective world of shared meanings, transcends the subjective world of the self and the objective world of things and events. French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty extended Husserl's work into the intersubjective dimensions of perception and language.

Another of Husserl's students, Martin Buber, applied Husserl's insights about the constitutive nature of intersubjectivity into a philosophy of dialogue that centers on a study of the I-Thou relation. Buber described how, in every interaction between human beings, there exists what Buber calls the between, a place located not in individuals or in the general world but in a space between self and other. To Buber, the relation between self and other is foundational to human existence in that the self can only come into being and exist when it is in dialogic relation with other human beings. Another philosopher of dialogue, Emmanuel Levinas, drew on Husserl's insights about the fundamental otherness, or alterity, of other subjective selves wherein the other is always, by necessity, elusive and inaccessible. Levinas describes the relation of self and other as an inherently ethical relation wherein the subjective self is always responsible for and to the other. Yet another of Husserl's students, Hans-Georg Gadamer, introduced the concept of intersubjectivity into the already existing field of hermeneutics, a branch of philosophy concerned with questions pertaining to the problem of interpretation and understanding. Drawing upon Husserl's work, Gadamer explored the insight that understanding is inherently dialogic and how, through every dialogue, something different comes to be.

Outside of phenomenology, scholars from the fields of anthropology, linguistics, and sociology drew upon insights from the tradition of pragmatics (the study of language use in particular social contexts) to explore questions about how social meanings are produced and shared. In the field of sociology, pragmatists of the 1930s such as George Herbert Mead and Alfred Schutz explored how social interaction and procedures of interpretation were social resources that produced the self's understanding of the world. Meanwhile, in the field of structural linguistics, scholars such as Émile Benveniste explored the linguistic production of identity through various grammatical structures of language, in particular through the contextual [Page 402]usage of pronouns such as I and you. In the 1950s, sociologist Herbert Garfinkel drew upon these insights to develop what he called ethnomethodology, a method of studying how people make sense of the world. This development influenced scholars in anthropology, communication, and sociolingustics, eventually leading scholars to the interdisciplinary method known as conversation analysis, or talk in action, which analyzes how the interactive structures and procedures of conversation, such as turn-taking rules, enable people to produce shared meanings and understandings. The linguist Emanuel Schegloff, for example, defends the intersubjective nature of conversation on the grounds of what he calls the procedural infrastructure of interaction, wherein misunderstandings can be identified and repaired only through rule-governed intersubjective processes. Other scholars in sociolinguistics use a variety of analytical tools, including discourse analysis, to explore how identities are intersubjectively constructed linguistically through culturally specific social interactions. Other contemporary scholars, such as the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, draw on a variety of theoretical frameworks from pragmatism and linguistics (including speech-act theory, semantics, and semiotics) to craft a theory of communicative action in which interlocutors collaborate to construct what Habermas calls the intersubjectively binding validity of understandings through argumentative processes.

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