Four Senses of Intersubjectivity to Account for Maintenance of Communication

The historical origins of intersubjectivity are philosophical: From Husserl, to Heidegger, Levinas or Gadamer, philosophers have asked the transcendental conditions of the possibility of dialog, of the existence of the other. These philosophical steps led to consider intersubjectivity as an idea that explains how empathy develops between people or how people reach new meanings together. Socio-cultural psychologists adopted this togetherness view of intersubjectivity to become a central idea in their theory of human development. Intersubjectivity was primarily meant to express a general idea of overlapping of subjectivities or prolepses communicative moves speakers take for granted things that not have been (yet) discussed. Even before language is mastered, a baby is born anticipating a sympathetic, interactive social environment, in which he or she will encounter fellow-human loving, care-taking and responsive subjects, available as companions in the baby’s encounterwith theworld, interested in the baby’s experience and enjoying the baby’s responses or sharing his/her fears. Another sense of intersubjectivity refers to the construction of a sharedmeaning by people to interpret social and cultural life, or a specific situation. This sense is very frequent in adults’ guidance of children’s explorations. It has also been adopted to describe some situations of collaboration among peers, for example, when jointly solving problems. A different sense given to intersubjectivity— shared divergences of meanings, is necessary to understand how practices such as lying, disputes and jokes “work”. Lying is genuinely inter-subjective as it operates between two subjective definitions of reality. It entails partially shared divergences of meaning: the liar shares with his/her interlocutors the meanings of a situation— divergent for him/her, he/she wants to “share”with them. Disputes are fueled by the common recognition of divergent views on a situation. So far, the senses of intersubjectivitywe reviewed have in common the sharing of subjective states by two or more individuals, and stress that shared cognition and consensus is essential in the shaping of our ideas and relations.