Intersubjectivity

Intersubjectivity emerges through the active engagement of individuals who mutually construct actions, interactions and meanings together. This active engagement may be the result of the conscious and unconscious responses of individuals to each other. Intersubjectivity is defined as the sum of interactions mediated by and through the larger external environment that results in the production of shared meaning, norms and values, which, in turn, lead to social, cultural, political and economic structures. The extent to which a group of individuals establishes an effective basis for intersubjective agreement is an important focus for action researchers. The implications for understanding how and to what extent intersubjectivity effectively leads to group identity, shared meanings and collective action is a critical feature of successful action research.

Intersubjectivity is a transdisciplinary concept with roots in the phenomenological philosophy of Edward Husserl. The term may be found in literature spanning all the major social sciences and generally is used to describe the experiential nature of socially constructed phenomena. Social scientists have increasingly relied on the concept of intersubjectivity to draw analytical insights from empirical observation. Social science studies of collective behaviour routinely note that the division of labour within groups can lead to disagreement about the nature of a problem, the parameters of a decision to be made and so on.

Those who draw on the concept of intersubjectivity to describe social phenomena understand that the sense of ‘self’ cannot be extracted from the rule-bound contexts that shape human interaction. G. H. Mead referred to the symbiotic relationship existing between the self and the ‘generalized other’. Intersubjectivity is constructed from the complex integration of the selves of a finite number of individuals, their generalized others and the symbiosis of them. As a construct of human consciousness, intersubjectivity is fuelled through the perceptions of individuals. Individual human perception is framed through a dialectical exchange between the individual and the wider environment.

Intersubjectivity as a feature of human perception and collective social reproduction has been featured within the philosophy of science literature in relation to objectivism and subjectivism. Those adhering to an objectivist (often referred to as positivist) orientation tend to view reality as existing independently of any individual observer and describable through the ascription of natural laws and testable hypothesis. A central assumption of objectivism is that the observer can be extracted from that which is being observed. Applied to Mead's theory of the self, objectivists approach the generalized other as something that persists independently from the self.

Those scholars adhering to a purely subjectivist lens give primacy to the perceptions of the individual. Taken to its most extreme, reality is nothing but individual perception. Continuities found within social institutions and other social structures are mere ‘accidents'. In a purely subjectivist approach, perceptions mediated through the self are, in actuality, all that exist. The generalized other appears as a figment of the imagination.

To avoid falling into the trap of absolute relativism, those adopting an interpretivist social science orientation have gravitated towards the socially constructed features of intersubjectivity, to the extent to which much of mainstream sociology, anthropology and social psychology have adopted its central premise: that social reality is predicated on social interactions [Page 459]between individuals and between groups of individuals and their wider external environments.

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