ABSTRACT
Moghaddam (2003) argues, correctly I think, that “the dominant focus on intersubjectivity, and the neglect of interobjectivity, reflects reductionist, individualistic biases in traditional research arising out of western culture” (p. 221), and he goes on to claim that it is the interobjectivity that can be achieved within and between social groups that “enables individuals from different groups to achieve intersubjectivity” (p. 230), that is, to offer different understandings of what all in a group sense as being different understandings of the same topic, event, issue, or thing. And what is at issue for Moghaddam is that such a focus on intersubjectivity misdirects our research: we still focus on processes that go on within individuals rather than on processes that individuals go on within. Indeed, as Sammut, Daanen, and Moghaddam point out in their introduction to this volume, a seemingly ineradicable Cartesianism is still at work among the many “like-minded” academic psychologists still making use of the concept of intersubjectivity. They thus still see it as a process occurring between separate, somewhat self-contained individuals, each with their own subjective perspectives, who face the task of creating a set of shared meanings between them sufficient for the achievement of a momentary and local, shared understanding. In other words, rather than seeing interobjectivity as making intersubjectivity possible, many current researchers see it the other way around, i.e., as intersubjectivity creating the possibility for interobjectivity. Thus in the current, essentially cognitive version of intersubjectivity, as they point out in their quoting of Flick et al. (2004):
social reality may be understood as the result of meanings and contexts that are jointly created in social interaction. Both are interpreted by the participants in concrete situations within the framework of their subjective relevance horizons … and therefore constitute the basis of shared meanings that they attribute to objects, events, situations and people.
(p. 6, my emphases)