Intersubjectivity

In philosophy, psychology, sociology, and anthropology, intersubjectivity is the relation or intersection between people's cognitive perspectives. is a term coined by social scientists to refer to a variety of types of human interaction. For example, social psychologists Alex Gillespie and Flora Cornish listed at least seven definitions of intersubjectivity (and other disciplines have additional definitions): people's agreement on the shared definition of a concept; people's mutual awareness of agreement or disagreement, or of understanding or misunderstanding each other; people's attribution of intentionality, feelings, and beliefs to each other; people's implicit or automatic behavioral orientations towards other people; people's interactive performance within a situation; people's shared and taken-for-granted background assumptions, whether consensual or contested; and "the variety of possible relations between people's perspectives". 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 as "the sharing of subjective states by two or more individuals". 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. The term has also been used to refer to shared (or partially shared) of meaning. Self-presentation, lying, practical jokes, and social emotions, for example, all entail not a shared definition of the situation but partially shared divergences of meaning. Someone who is telling a lie is engaged in an intersubjective act because they are working with two different definitions of the situation. Lying is thus genuinely intersubjective (in the sense of operating between two subjective definitions of reality).