Intersubjectivity

The terms intersubjectivity and intersubjective describe the capacity to share feelings and understandings which affords interpersonal communication.

Notions of intersubjectivity appeared early in the 1900s, one example being a 1903 textbook by George Stout called The Ground Work of Psychology. In the late 1920s and 1930s, the phenomenological philosophy of Edmund Husserl incorporated the concept of intersubjectivity into the fifth of his Cartesian Meditations. Husserl's work led Jacques Lacan to introduce a sophisticated four-cornered notion of intersubjectivity into his treatment of the structure of psychoanalytic dialogue in the 1950s. Then in 1970 the concept of intersubjectivity was taken up by Jurgen Habermas in his critique of Noam Chomsky's grammar-based account of language acquisition as lacking any way of accounting for infants' mastery of the performative or agentic dimension of speech (as treated by speech act theory). Such mastery was something which Habermas argued language-use required, and the work of researchers like Lois Bloom proved to exist, prior to infants' first meaningful employment of words and grammar. Preverbal infants must therefore have an awareness of what Habermas called 'dialogue-constitutive universals': it was this capacity which underpinned their ability intentionally to decode and influence other speakers' intentions -- and Habermas called it intersubjectivity.

Habermas's work was quickly taken up by the philosopher and feminist Joanna Ryan whose essay 'Early Language Development: Towards a Communicational Analysis' was circulating in photocopied form as early as 1972. Her essay inspired Colwyn Trevarthen to assert that his films of eight-week-olds and their mothers engaging in face-to-face 'conversations' proved that humans are born possessing innate intersubjectivity. The idea that preverbal infants manifested a capacity for intersubjectivity was soon taken up by other psychologists like Jerome Bruner.