Chapter 24: The Intersubjective Turn

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Welcome back to The Deep Dive, the place where we take complex, often dense research and philosophical movements and, while we distill them down to the core insights you need

well informed.

Today, we are strapping in for a deep exploration of how we actually understand each other socially, focusing specifically within the radical framework of Fourier cognition that's embodied, embedded, and active and extended.

That's right.

And the source material we have today, it centers on a truly crucial philosophical and scientific shift described by Honda Jager.

She calls it the intersubjective turn.

The intersubjective turn.

Yeah.

And our mission for this deep dive is really to move past that traditional dualistic view of social cognition, a view that frankly dominated the 20th century.

And it still has a huge hold on a lot of fields.

Oh, absolutely.

The goal is to grasp the new embodied understanding of how we truly connect.

You know, traditionally, when classical cognitive science looked at social interaction, the foundational assumption was always, it was a premise of radical isolation.

We were seen as these individual isolated minds trapped inside our own skulls, constantly trying to guess or infer or, you know, simulate what was happening in the other person's mental black box.

It's a very lonely picture of social life, really.

It really is.

It was by definition this elaborate and exhausting game of mental state inference.

And the central thesis of the chapter we're diving into is that this foundational focus needs to fundamentally change.

I mean, we have to shift the entire unit of analysis.

The whole game.

The whole game.

Instead of viewing social understanding as just inferring hidden mental states, we have to recognize how subjects actively engage with one another and create meaning together.

So it's not a discovery process.

It's a creation process.

It's a creation process through these complex ongoing embodied interaction processes.

This isn't just a minor update to mind.

It changes everything about how we study human connection.

Okay.

Let's unpack this.

Starting with the philosophical roots of this turn, and maybe why that old model was just not cutting it anymore.

So we hear a lot of talk these days about an interactive turn in cognitive science.

Researchers finally acknowledge that, hey, maybe we shouldn't study isolated subjects pressing buttons in labs.

Maybe we should actually watch how two people interact, you know, externally.

A revolutionary idea.

It is.

But the author argues that within the 4E approach, especially the inactive sciences of mind,

what we are witnessing is something far more profound than just acknowledging external behavior.

It is an intersubjective turn.

So what is the critical difference here between mere interaction and this bigger idea, intersubjectivity?

That distinction is vital.

And it really lies in the separation of the components of word itself.

Inter, which means between and subjective subject.

Interaction, purely speaking, it focuses on the external observable processes, the behaviors, the movements, the shared space, you know, the synchronization of two bodies.

The mechanics of it all.

The mechanics, exactly.

Intersubjectivity includes all of those processes, but it insists on recognizing a second necessary and vital component.

Which is?

The experience of interacting.

Ah.

So it's not simply about the mechanics and the choreography of the dance.

Who stepped when, but also what it feels like to connect the personal felt sense of being in sync or being completely misaligned.

Precisely.

You know, an interaction can happen between two billiard balls on a table.

Sure.

Intersubjectivity requires two subjects whose internal experienced worlds are mutually affecting one another.

Researchers like Sean Gallagher, Peter Hobson, Vasu Reddy, Colton Trevis, they all emphasize this absolute need to recognize connecting.

Connecting.

And that word, it fundamentally connotes both the external interaction dynamics and its personal subjective aspects.

It means we have to study the interaction through these twin lenses of individual experience and the collective dynamic.

And this return to the centrality of the personal, the felt experience, this comes from a powerful philosophical background, doesn't it?

I'm thinking of the phenomenological tradition.

That's where the knockout punch to classical cognitivism really originates.

Okay.

Nominologists like Matthew Ratcliffe and Dan Zahavi, they diagnosed a major foundational flaw in the old social cognition research.

And what was that flaw?

By focusing exclusively on abstract internal mechanisms, like hypothesis testing or simulation, and treating the body as just a vehicle for input and output.

A meat robot.

A meat robot, exactly.

Yeah.

Classical cognitivism just overlooked the human, personal, experiential, and even existential aspects of subjectivity and interaction.

They basically stripped away context and experience, creating this sterile lab -based environment for social study.

What did we lose when we did that?

We lost the very coherence of social life.

Ratcliffe, for instance, he focuses on what he calls existential feeling.

Existential feeling.

Yeah, that background sense of being in the world that makes every interaction meaningful to begin with.

If you treat the mind as a calculating machine separate from the lived body and its context, you just can't account for that.

It's like trying to understand a fish without water.

That's a perfect analogy.

By prioritizing this dualistic idea of an internal mind modeling an external world,

researchers essentially reduced human connection to an exercise in engineering.

They sterilized the study of social life.

And that led to a really incomplete, almost robotic understanding of how humans operate together.

It did, because they missed the inherently meaningful nature of the body in the world, which is a concept central to thinkers like Merleau -Ponty.

So subjectivity and interaction were just repeatedly overlooked, leaving cognitive science stuck in this perpetual game of catch -up.

Right.

But now, with a renewed interest in historical figures like Vygotsky on social development or Goffman on social ritual, and with the increasing sophistication of experimental tech, we can finally start to integrate that personal experiential layer.

Okay, so let's get really clear on the definitions.

What was the old dualist approach trying to accomplish, and why was that goal itself just fundamentally flawed from this new and active perspective?

Well, the old approach defined social understanding as, and this is a direct quote,

the prediction and explanation of another person's mental states.

Prediction and explanation.

Right.

And the problem wasn't just the mechanism, whether it was or inference.

The problem was the goal.

What do you mean?

It assumed this radical insurmountable lack of access.

Since we couldn't perceive the other person's intention or emotion directly, we had to either infer it or simulate it.

So you're always one step removed.

Always.

And crucially,

this inference was based on outward stimuli movements,

sounds, facial expressions that were considered in themselves to be meaningless.

Meaningless until the internal mind, your mind slaps a mental label on them.

You got it.

That's the core idea.

Wow.

It sounds like every single social encounter was an elaborate high -stakes inference puzzle.

It's exhausting just to think about the computational power you'd need just to figure out if your friend is happy or just tired.

Indeed.

And the intersubjective turn offers a much more direct and frankly more efficient dynamic alternative.

It's one that's founded in a shared reality, not in internal guesswork.

So what's the new definition?

Developmental psychologist Vasu Reddy provides a really foundational succinct one that just sidesteps the whole inference problem.

She says intersubjectivity is simply engagement between subjectivities.

Engagement between subjectivities.

That's it.

It puts the connection first.

That's beautifully simple, but maybe a little abstract.

To flesh it out, the chapter points to a definition from outside traditional cognitive science.

It draws on the feminist psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin.

It does, yeah.

What does Benjamin's perspective add to the mix that really grounds this definition for us?

Benjamin offers a much more detailed emotionally rich and I'd say ethically charged description.

She defines intersubjectivity as a relationship in which each person experiences the other as a like subject, another mind who can be felt with, yet has a distinct separate center of feeling and perception.

Whoa, okay.

That definition is incredibly complex.

It captures the shared experience, the feeling with the emotional resonance, while at the same time insisting on the radical autonomy and separateness of each individual's perspective.

It sounds almost aspirational, like it's capturing the ideal connection.

It does have that quality.

So how robust is this framework when you're dealing with situations where subjects don't want to be felt with or where they're actively trying to manipulate their distinct center of feeling?

That's a crucial challenge.

And the framework has to account for both successful alignment and fundamental miscommunication or conflict.

And it does.

It does, by making the dynamic the central object of study, not the internal state of one person or the other.

So the core consequence which is driven by this richer definition is this,

understanding each other is not a primary question of figuring out hidden internal mental states.

So what is it then?

It becomes a matter of participating in the creation and transformation of meaning together.

Participating actively.

Actively.

We're constantly shaping a shared social reality through acting and interacting.

And this requires respecting that each person maintains their own inherently meaningful evolving perspective, even as that perspective is being modulated by the interaction itself.

Okay.

And this is where the Fourier connection really crystallizes, isn't it?

This view of meaning creation seems perfectly compatible with the inactive approach.

It's naturally compatible with all of embodied, embedded, and inactive cognitive science.

But the inactive perspective is critical here.

Why?

Because it posits that things are inherently meaningful to subjects, to sense makers,

simply by virtue of their biological self -organization and their perpetual struggle for self -maintenance.

Right.

Staying alive matters.

It matters.

That intrinsic meaning, the valence, the significance, provides the mechanism to understand the role of embodied interaction processes in both establishing and modulating meaning together with others.

So shared meaning becomes this dynamic live entity.

Exactly.

It's continually negotiated and transformed, not a static, calculated guess.

The body's need for coherence drives both individual survival and our social engagement.

Now we move into the theoretical toolkit required to actually study this immense topic.

And this chapter is incredibly ambitious.

It argues that any comprehensive framework for intersubjectivity has to meet five foundational requirements.

Yeah, they're pretty demanding.

What are these criteria?

Okay, so requirement one is the most complex.

The framework must account for social interaction and subjectivity in all its bodily, experiential, existential, and historical sociocultural complexity all at once.

All at once, that sounds— A unified theory of everything social.

Which, as the author readily concedes, is practically impossible for any single empirical investigation to achieve.

So how does inactivism approach this impossible multifaceted task without just collapsing under its own weight?

Well, inactivism manages this burden by fundamentally changing the unit of study.

So classical psychology fragments the mind into these isolated components.

You've got memory over here, emotion over there, decision -making somewhere else, and then it tries to connect them later on.

Like Lego bricks.

Exactly.

Inactivism, in contrast, starts from the contextualized coherence of meaningful behavior.

The whole picture first.

It starts with the whole dynamic system in a specific context, the interaction.

By doing that, it shifts the investigation toward finding the critical differences that make a difference within that dynamic, rather than trying to puzzle together isolated parts that were artificially severed from the start.

That's a fundamentally holistic starting point.

What's the second requirement that must address the scope of the problem?

Interdisciplinarity.

The framework has to connect physiological, neural, interactional, linguistic, and societal aspects and levels of explanation.

So no more silos.

We can no longer afford to have neuroscientists who ignore culture or linguists who ignore embodiment.

And this demands metaconceptual tools that genuinely span disparate disciplines.

Okay, and the third requirement focuses on grounding the theory in the real world.

Correct.

It must encourage applications and facilitate active, structured dialogue with field experts, teachers, therapists, clinicians.

The theory needs to be testable, applicable, and grounded in lived human reality, not just academic abstraction.

And the fourth requirement introduces a crucial element of critical self -awareness into the scientific process itself.

Indeed.

Fourth, the framework must explicitly recognize and make explicit the underlying values embedded in the theory itself.

So be honest about your own biases.

Precisely.

If we propose that human connection is essentially based on cooperation and shared significance, we need to be critically aware of how that framework influences and is influenced by existing societal institutions and norms.

That's a call for reflexive practice and research.

And finally, given the subject matter is literally how we treat each other, the fifth requirement has to be ethical.

Absolutely.

Because the subject matter is fundamentally about how people

understand,

accept, miscommunicate with, and just deal with each other, the framework must be inherently prepared to deal with ethical questions and dimensions.

We have to acknowledge that the way we conceptualize the mind, it has profound implications for how we construct society and how we treat those with conditions or differences.

Okay, so let's drill down into the core theoretical element that's used to meet these demands.

Right.

And that's the concept of participatory sense -making, or PSM.

It was developed by de Jager and de Paolo.

And it's really the mechanism that explains the interdependence between interaction and individual subjectivity.

So PSM is the cornerstone here.

It is.

It's built on the inactive theory of individual autonomy.

But its application to social life is what's so radical.

The key idea is that social interactions can self -organize.

Self -organize.

Or take on a life of their own, creating an autonomous dynamic that is more than the sum of its parts.

Wait, hold on.

An interaction itself can become autonomous.

Separate from, and potentially overriding, the immediate intentions of the people involved.

In a precise technical sense, yes.

PSM posits that a social interaction exists when two conditions are met.

First, a relational dynamic must emerge and then maintain itself for a significant period.

Second, and this is crucial, this dynamic must not destroy the autonomy of the individuals involved.

They can't break them.

Right, though it can certainly modulate it, it can increase it, decrease it, or even challenge it.

That structure encapsulates that definition of intersubjectivity we heard earlier,

a dynamic between distinct subjects.

Exactly.

And this concept directly overturns classical cognitivist individualism, which always assumed the individual mind was the only effector locus of intention and explanation.

Right, the captain of the ship.

PSM proposes that social interaction processes as effective factors can actively modulate individual intentions.

Interactions don't just happen because individuals intend them.

They form, they transform, and they constrain those intentions once the dynamic is underway.

This brings us to the most crucial theoretical distinction in the chapter.

The difference between contextual, enabling, and constitutive factors.

The key to everything.

If interaction can modulate intention, we need to know exactly how powerfully it is acting.

Before we apply this to social understanding, can we define these three concepts clearly, maybe with a non -social analogy, just to make sure we all grasp the magnitude of that third term, constitutive?

That's a great idea, because this distinction is really the meta -conceptual key for all of 4E research.

Let's use the analogy of a runner competing in a marathon.

Excellent, let's do it.

First, a contextual factor.

This just affects the runner's properties.

Think of the weather, it's hot or it's rainy.

Okay.

This modulates the runner's performance, right?

It makes them slower or faster.

But it is not necessary for the running to occur, and it's not part of the running itself.

It just sets the scene.

Got it.

The weather is background noise that matters.

What's the next level?

Second, an enabling factor.

This is necessary for the running to occur.

If it's missing, the marathon won't happen.

Think of the physical road or the supply of oxygen.

Can't run without a road.

Right.

The road is necessary for the runner to maintain pace, but it is not part of the runner's physical act of running or their autonomous movement.

It just sets the necessary conditions.

And now the most important game -changing category, the one PSM claims for interaction.

The constitutive factor.

This factor is necessary for and is also part of what makes the phenomenon what it is.

For our runner, the arrangement of their musculoskeletal structure, the reciprocal flexion and extension of their muscles, their self -regulating metabolism, those are constitutive factors.

They don't just enable the running.

They are the running.

So if we apply that really rigorous distinction back to social understanding, if interaction is proposed to be constitutive, what is the key implication of that?

The key implication is profound.

It means social understanding is not reducible to individual internal processes like theory of mind.

It's not just in the brain.

It's not just in the brain.

In fact, in some senses, social understanding is not possible without social interaction because the shared dynamic structure is part of what makes the social performance what it is.

So the starting point for research has to be the dynamic, not the individual.

Exactly.

That's the huge move.

It places the social interaction on the same causal and explanatory footing as say individual brain activity.

Hashtag tag 2 .3 rethinking the subject and agency.

So given the constitutive role of interaction, we have to refine our view of the individual involved, the subject.

Within this inactive framework, the person is characterized as a sense maker.

Okay.

What does it mean to be a sense maker in this context?

Well, sense makers are autonomous, biologically organized beings who perpetually enact and engage with their environment based on its significance and valence for them.

Significance and valence.

So what's important to them?

Exactly.

They're autonomous because they self -organize under precarious circumstances, constantly working to maintain their identity and coherence.

This makes them inherently sensitive to what is beneficial, what has positive valence or what is pernicious has negative valence for their self -maintenance.

And this inherent sensitivity.

That's the definition of subjectivity here.

Yes.

Subjectivity just means things literally matter to the sense makers.

And this ranges from the fundamental level of metabolic self -maintenance, you know, staying alive, all the way up to complex existential and societal concerns like maintaining a reputation or achieving a role.

So subjects are experientially and existentially sensitive.

Which is the cornerstone of why they seek connection in the first place and why the breakdown of connection is often so painful.

So if the subject is a sense maker driven by significance, how do we define social understanding in this new dynamic account?

Social understanding is defined as the coordination of intentional activities in and through interaction.

The result is that individual sense making processes are affected.

And critically,

new domains of social sense making can be generated that were not available to each individual alone.

So they create something truly new together.

A shared understanding, a new skill, a new emotional response.

Something that neither one of them could have generated separately.

That sounds like genuine emergence, but in the social realm.

It is emergence applied socially and it has vast implications for development.

This reframes concepts like social skills and social agency.

Social skills are now seen as partly constituted in interactional histories.

They aren't just preloaded, universal cognitive modules waiting to be switched on.

Not at all.

They are refined, honed, and sometimes even created through the demands of specific social dynamics.

And social agency then, it isn't just about exerting your individual will.

Correct.

Social agency becomes the development of increasingly sophisticated capacities like self -control, emotional regulation, or the skillful use of languaging.

Specifically designed to deal with the inherent tension between individual autonomy and the demands of interactional autonomy.

It's about learning to navigate the dynamic that sometimes overrides your personal will.

Exactly.

That tension between individual will and emerging interactional dynamics can be.

It can be tricky to grasp abstractly.

The chapter uses a wonderful everyday thought experiment, one we've all experienced, the narrow corridor situation.

This thought experiment is immediately relatable because of its absurdity and its awkwardness.

The awkward shuffle.

The awkward shuffle, yes.

Imagine walking down a narrow corridor toward a colleague.

You intend to pass on the right, but they simultaneously move to their left, blocking you.

Then in an instant, you both adjust, moving to the other side, and you block each other again.

This pattern can repeat several times before someone just freezes or signals their intentions clearly.

And in that moment of repeated blocking,

your individual intention, which is just to pass and continue your journey, is being completely thwarted by the shared self -sustaining dynamic that has momentarily taken control.

Exactly.

That repetitive blocking dance demonstrates an interaction dynamic emerging that maintains itself for a period over and against the wishes, the explicit passing intention of the individuals.

The autonomous interaction dynamic temporarily overrides the individual's executive will.

Right.

But the real power of this example is how it reveals the layering of intersubjectivity that this comprehensive framework has to account for.

Okay, let's break down those layers.

First, there's the bodily layer.

At the most fundamental level, this involves what Merleau -Ponty called the bodily schema.

Your body is not an object.

It's an organized structure of possibilities in the world.

When you attempt to pass, your bodily schema automatically anticipates the other person's bodily schema.

The awkwardness arises because this usually seamless non -conscious coordination just fails.

We are experiencing a temporary collapse of our habitual embodied interactional autonomy.

And then we have the layer of social norms and roles.

The reason it's awkward and not just a physical problem is cultural, right?

Absolutely.

The entire scenario is layered with social norms and roles, what the sociologist Irving Goffman termed facework.

Facework.

Facework is the social ritual we perform to maintain dignity and manage the impression we give off.

The failed passing attempt is a minor social transgression.

It threatens the face of both participants by suggesting clumsiness or a lack of coordination.

So the meaning of the failed passing attempt isn't just about movement.

Not at all.

It's about social etiquette, status negotiation, and managing minor embarrassment.

So a simple awkward shuffle is actually this multi -layered negotiation of bodily action, social rules, and as you noted before, even underlying desire.

Yes, because perhaps your underlying desire was not simple passing, but using the encounter as an excuse to talk.

The unintentional awkwardness breaks the social ice and creates a shared momentary situation that is off -script and that opens a door for new interactional possibilities.

The dynamic structure itself modulates the possibility space for individual action.

And finally, this all happens at both personal and sub -personal levels, linking the body back to the whole.

The dynamic requires a physiological account.

While you can report on the intentional overt meanings of the encounter,

underneath, sub -personal processes, small shifts in heart rate, breathing synchrony, or even neural coupling are regulating the interaction, often way below the level of conscious awareness.

So the comprehensive framework has to account for all of it.

All of it.

The conscious intentions, the embodied reality, the cultural norms, and the sub -personal physiology all co -regulating the moment.

Okay, so the framework requires connecting these wildly disparate levels.

The neural, the physiological, the interactional dynamic, and the socio -cultural context.

This sounds like an overwhelming research challenge.

It is.

It's just rife with the danger of simply confusing correlation with constitution.

So how does inaction provide a systematic way to handle this complexity and make it scientifically productive?

The author suggests the solution lies in the systematic application of the theoretical tools we've already discussed.

First, the phenomenologically and biologically sensitive logic of inaction itself.

You know, how autonomy, emergence, sense -making, and experience all fit together.

And second.

Second, that crucial metaconceptual tool, the contextually consented distinction.

So how does that distinction provide systematic rigor for interdisciplinary research?

How does it actually work in practice?

It allows researchers to generate precise, testable hypotheses that move beyond just finding correlations.

Instead of just stating that the brain is involved in social interaction, you ask a sharper question.

Okay.

Is this specific neural process, say, mirror neuron activity?

Is it merely contextual to the social interaction?

Is it enabling the social understanding by providing necessary machinery?

Or is it constitutive?

Meaning it's part of what makes the social phenomenon what it is.

Exactly.

And that it requires the social dynamic to fully exist.

That forces a much higher bar for explanatory power.

It does.

It forces researchers to move beyond just dialoguing between disciplines and to actually intervene in one discipline using the methodology of another.

It helps to build novel empirical paradigms designed to test the limits of individual versus interactional explanation.

This is a massive theoretical claim, though, that the interaction is the social understanding.

How do you possibly design an experiment to test a concept that complex?

Hashtag, tag, tag, shoe 3 .2, the perceptual crossing paradigm.

Well, we turn to one of the most elegant and influential experiments in this entire field.

The perceptual crossing paradigm, pioneered by Alvary and his colleagues.

Okay.

This experiment is a minimalist masterpiece.

Yeah.

It's specifically designed to isolate and test the power of interactive dynamics against individual sensory processing.

Describe the setup for us because the simplicity here is really key to isolating that constitutive factor, right?

It is.

The experiment involves two participants, each using a computer, operating a cursor in a shared virtual 2D environment.

But crucially, they cannot visually see this world.

No visual cues at all.

None.

Their only input is a tactile stimulus, a vibration on their fingertip, which they receive whenever their cursor encounters any object.

Any object.

Any object.

And the world contains various objects.

There are fixed dummy objects, non -human objects moving randomly, and of course, the other participant's avatar.

And what's the critical experimental design element?

What's the catch?

The catch is that every single object, the fixed objects, the randomly moving objects, and the other person's avatar generates exactly the same intensity and frequency of tactile stimulus on the participant's fingertip.

Exactly the same.

The sensory input is identical for everything they touch or cross.

So based purely on internal sensory data, there is no way for the participant's perceptual system to distinguish the other person from a piece of environmental noise or an inanimate object.

If classical cognitive theory were right, that we infer meaning from meaningless sensory data, they should completely fail this task.

They should.

And yet, despite this identical sensory input, participants can reliably and consistently tell the difference.

They can even track the location of the other person's avatar significantly better than chance.

Wow.

They can tell that's another subject versus that's just a rock.

That's stunning.

They are performing a social distinction that is simply not encoded in the sensory input.

Exactly.

And this performance can only be explained by taking into account the interactive dynamics that spontaneously and mutually emerge between the participants.

So they aren't inferring a mental state based on a sensory cue.

No.

They are recognizing the other through the self -organized dynamic that arises when two autonomous sense -makers mutually couple their actions.

This provides powerful empirical support for the constitutive role of interaction dynamics in social performance and in the experience of another's presence.

The interaction itself creates the condition for recognition.

Rather than merely enabling some internal mechanism.

Yes.

Hashtag 3 .3.

Real -world physiological and cultural connections.

That experiment is amazing.

It establishes a constitutive role in a controlled minimalist setting.

Now, how does the framework show that connection across the real -world levels, the physiological, personal, and cultural, which the framework is required to integrate?

Well, we can see this immediately in studies of physiological coordination, showing how the social dynamic can modulate basic biology.

OK.

Take the dramatic example of the fire -walking ritual study, conducted by Convalenca and colleagues in Spain.

During a community ritual where a fire -walker crosses hot coals, researchers measured the heart rates of the fire -walker and several audience members.

That physiological link between the fire -walker and his relatives is stunning.

It suggests culture and kinship literally modulate our biology in real time.

It moves that idea of synchrony out of the lab and into deeply meaningful cultural performance.

It does.

They found that audience members' heart rates synchronized with the fire -walker's heart rate, but only those in the audience who were his close relatives.

Only the relative.

Only the kinship group.

Unrelated spectators did not synchronize.

This is a powerful demonstration of a complex, interwoven interaction where shared personal identity and cultural context mediate a purely physiological effect.

It's a perfect fit for the comprehensive framework.

And how does this idea of intersubjective co -creation play out in fields focused on learning and creativity, like, say, pedagogy?

The work on music pedagogy by La Roche and Cadouche provides a brilliant illustration.

They studied an improvisation -based piano teaching method that begins with a student playing a musical pattern they're comfortable with, something within their spontaneous achievement zone.

OK, so they start with what the student already knows.

Exactly.

The teacher then engages with this pattern, initially supporting the student's sense -making.

But then the technique takes a surprising turn, right?

The teacher intentionally complicates the shared dynamic.

Precisely.

The teacher later begins to intentionally challenge or break down the musical interaction.

They'll introduce novelty or dissonance that doesn't fit the existing dynamic.

It's a strategic move that establishes an intersubjective demand.

By challenging the comfortable dynamic, the teacher co -oaks the student out of their predictable patterns, forcing them to recover the musical situation by developing novel solutions that fit the new shared demand.

So the learning isn't transmitted from teacher to student?

Not at all.

It's co -created and emergent through the dynamic tension of the intersubjective situation.

This process fosters spontaneous, interactively generated new means of meaning.

And finally, the framework also has to account for how culture shapes our deepest relational structures right from birth, doesn't it?

Yes.

The chapter highlights the work by Callie and colleagues on Zulu mother -infant interaction in South Africa.

They observed a particular fast, energetic hand -waving gesture used by the mother during interactions.

Okay.

Now, in many Western cultures, such a fast -paced, high -intensity gesture might be overwhelming or interpreted by the infant as frightening.

I could see that.

However, the Zulu infant understands this gesture, in its context, as a request for thula, which means silence.

And the response confirms the intersubjective understanding.

It does.

The baby becomes quiet, settling down instead of becoming distressed.

This demonstrates how culturally specific expectations and the mutual regulation of effect are learned extremely early through these lively, embodied exchanges.

It proves the interconnectedness required by that second framework mandate.

Exactly.

This framework has demonstrated its rigor through philosophy and experiment.

Now, let's discuss the third framework requirement, applications.

How does this comprehensive intersubjective view help us understand and address real -world issues, particularly in psychopathology?

The guiding principle for application remains investigating what matters to sense -makers.

What matters?

That's the focus.

And this focus on inherent significance allows an active theory to provide a comprehensive, integrative picture of various psychopathologies, not as isolated brain failures, but as specific complexes of difficulties and meaningful engagement and interaction with the world.

Let's take autism, for example.

The inactive approach seems to provide a deeper, more constructive account than simply labeling it a social deficit.

It grounds the difference in embodiment itself.

That is the critical distinction.

An active theory grounds differences in embodiment.

For instance, unusual or jerky postural adjustments,

difficulties with visual motion integration,

and distinct patterns of motor coordination variability.

And this links embodied differences to specific forms of social relational modes.

So tell us more about that link between motor control and social difficulties.

Social interaction relies heavily on predictive temporal coupling,

the ability to anticipate the timing of the other person's subtle movements and adjust one's own action seamlessly.

The rhythm of the interaction.

The rhythm, exactly.

If one's own mode of control is less fluid or predictable, or if one has deficits in integrating visual motion, as is often the case in autism, this makes rapid, spontaneous temporal coupling very difficult or even overwhelming.

And that difficulty in bodily coordination.

It leads to interactional breakdowns, which over time manifest as apparent rigidity or literalness in thinking and just different modes of social relating.

And the resulting therapeutic implication of grounding these differences in the body is profound then.

Absolutely.

If the disturbances have such a strong bodily anchorage, if the problem is partly one of motor synchronization and embodied self -regulation, the logical conclusion is that specific bodily forms of therapy.

Like movement therapy.

Exactly.

Or martial arts or dance will yield high remedial benefits.

They can potentially offer pathways for connection that purely talk -based or cognitive behavioral approaches might miss.

What about a condition like schizophrenia?

Here, the systematic investigation of experience phenomenology is crucial.

Phenomenological studies reveal a strong relationship between certain symptoms and feelings of loss of self and hyper -reflectivity.

Hyper -reflectivity.

What's that?

It's an excessive, painful self -awareness where basic, usually automatic bodily processes or sensations become objects of anxious scrutiny.

Wow.

That sounds like the subject is fundamentally losing their non -conscious, taken -for -granted grip on reality and their own sense of self.

Exactly.

And this experience of a precarious, fading self pushes an active theory to confront and incorporate deep existential questions.

The fundamental concerns of being an autonomous, yet constantly threatened self in the world.

The theory has to explain more than just cognition.

It has to explain not just how a person fails to categorize an emotion, but how they experience the very coherence of their self falling apart.

It's striking how this framework is being applied across such diverse fields.

You've mentioned clinical interactions, augmented communication for cerebral palsy, martial arts, literature, narrative studies.

It really demonstrates that the comprehensive requirement is being met across the spectrum of human endeavor.

It's a very fertile approach.

Hashtag tag key 4 .2, critical engagement, and the ethical dimension.

We have to address the ethical dimension now, which the chapter insists is unavoidable.

Since our theories of mind structure are perception of what a person is, they inevitably have profound societal relevance.

How we define cognition directly impacts how we treat people.

And this point can be powerfully illustrated using the challenges of dementia care.

Traditional cognitive deficit models, they often focus on the degradation of individual capacities, like impaired memory or emotion categorization.

If you start from the premise that social skills depend purely on these cognitive tools, you risk concluding that people with dementia are just socially impaired.

Or that their meaningful engagement potential has just vanished.

Which tragically leads to less humane care practices.

This narrow understanding ignores the subjective, the personal, and the interactive aspects, what the individual still cares about, what they still respond to.

So what's the alternative?

The foundational work by people like Kitwood and Zeiler demonstrates that focusing on the personal significance and value for the person, the intersubjective core, is a far better basis for providing compassionate, coherent care.

And the inactive framework.

It provides the necessary theoretical backing for this humane perspective.

Because it starts from the question of what matters to the individual and what processes constitute her as a unique sense maker.

This leads to a major, and I think not obvious, shift in how we can sexualize responsibility.

If the interaction is constitutive, then responsibility cannot reside solely in the individual.

This is the critical ethical consequence, discussed extensively by thinkers like Colin, Betty, and Torrance.

Full responsibility for a situation, a successful outcome, or a moral failure is no longer understood as lying exclusively with the individual agent's internal intention or character.

It's not just on you.

It's not.

Instead, responsibility shifts and becomes more or less possible or potent within a particular intersubjective situation.

Can you elaborate on what it means for responsibility to shift within the situation?

It means that if an interaction dynamic is set up, perhaps by cultural or institutional rules, that symptomatically limits one person's ability to participate, coordinate, or express their autonomy.

Then the responsibility.

For any resulting failure or harm is shared by the dynamic structure itself.

It requires a nuanced case -by -case assessment that acknowledges how the complex interactional dynamic enables or constrains moral agency.

So an interaction isn't just a neutral backdrop for ethical action.

The interaction itself can carry moral weight.

Absolutely.

The interactions themselves can be judged as ethical, as fair, or just discriminatory or not based on how they enable or constrain individual participation and autonomy and how they align with or challenge sociocultural customs and practices.

The dynamic structure of the relationship carries moral weight precisely because it is constitutive of the shared reality.

Hashtag outro.

Yeah.

So the intersubjective turn is not just a trend.

It is a rigorous foundational pushing past the dualist and individualistic folklore of classical cognitivism.

Right.

It is led by the comprehensive theory of participatory sense -making, which successfully integrates interaction, autonomy,

subjectivity, sense -making, and embodiment.

It provides a dynamic multi -level framework for studying how we truly understand one another, often without a single inference taking place.

As we look forward, the chapter lays out critical questions needed to bring coherence to this burgeoning intersubjective science.

We have to constantly anchor our research in two core principles that unify the whole project.

The first one is what matters to the sense -maker?

What is fundamentally at stake for their identity, their autonomy, or their self -maintenance in this particular engagement?

And the second.

And second.

How does this fundamental significance relate to how they move and are moved, act and perceive in social interactions with the world?

This integration of the personal stake with observable movement is the core challenge.

That focus on what matters is such a powerful, unifying thread.

But the author suggests one final frontier for coherence that is perhaps the most radical requirement of all.

Gaining a better systematic understanding of the experience of interacting itself.

This is the most provocative conclusion.

The intuition that what it is like to interact matters cannot remain a philosophical footnote.

It has to become part of the science.

It has to.

In order for it to truly inform our research, we need systematic, hand -on ways to grasp that interactive experience's structure and significance.

And this means that researchers must incorporate their own experience as embodied, embedded subjects into the investigation.

So we can't treat experience merely as external data.

We can't.

We have to acknowledge our own subjectivity in the process of discovery, bridging the gap between empirical measurement and first -person experience.

It challenges centuries of objective scientific tradition.

We have to step out of the objective tower and acknowledge that to study human connection, we have to use our own capacity for connection.

A brilliant capstone to a deep dive into what it means to truly connect.

Well said.

We hope this exploration of the intersubjective turn gives you plenty to reflect on regarding the nature of your own, richly complex, and constantly shifting intersubjective experiences.

Thanks for joining us for this deep dive.