Edited by: Ezequiel Alejandro Di Paolo, Ikerbasque - Basque Foundation for Science, Spain
Reviewed by: Jeffrey K. Yoshimi, University of California, Merced, USA; Andrew Christian Delunas, Gavilan College, USA
*Correspondence: Christoph Durt, TESIS Marie Curie Experienced Researcher, University of Heidelberg, Phenomenological Section, Clinic for General Psychiatry, Voßstr. 4, 69115 Heidelberg, Germany e-mail:
This article was submitted to Cognitive Science, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology.
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This article introduces the notion of shared intentional engagement and argues that the current debate around intersubjective interaction can profit from taking that notion into account. Shared intentional engagement holds between people when they relate together to the same meaningful entities. For instance, when people talk about something, they share intentional engagement as long as they don't talk past each other. But what if the entity talked about involves perceptual experience—is the quality of one's experiences not something that cannot be conveyed to others through language? Against this widespread idea, this article takes up philosophical arguments for the intersubjectivity of, on the one hand, language, and, on the other hand, phenomenal experience. It contents that language and phenomenal experience both exhibit shared structures that enable shared intentional engagement. It then considers an example for how this result matches well with empirical research on “pop out” experiences. Because shared intentional engagement is fundamental for all kinds of human interaction, it necessitates interdisciplinary investigations that are frequently hindered by the assumption that the phenomenal experiences of humans are hidden to others.
Intersubjective interaction is becoming an increasingly important topic in the literature on cognitive science, for good reason. Intersubjective interaction is a pervasive feature of human life, and thinking about it is apt to show and potentially overcome the limits of the standard inferential approach to other minds. This article looks into several recent attempts to do so, and contents that the notion of shared intentional engagement can contribute to a better understanding of intersubjective interaction. It considers the role of language and phenomenal experience for intersubjective interaction, and argues that both provide the structures that enable shared intentional engagement.
An example for the inferential approach to other minds is “theory theory,” according to which the participating subjects apply their own and possibly implicit theories about the “mental states” of others by means of a folk psychology, which is then either falsified or confirmed in the interaction. Another example is “simulation theory,” according to which one does not need a theory of the “mental states” of others, but rather employs one's “own mind as a model, with which we simulate—create ‘as if’ or pretend beliefs, desires, intentional states—and then project these mental states into the mind of the other person to explain or predict their behavior” (Gallagher,
The inferential approach attempts to explain intersubjective interaction through an observation based model. Observation surely is important for intersubjective interaction. Yet, it is a one-way relation: the observer is observing the actor, but the actor may not even know of the observation. Intersubjective interaction, in contrast, is never just a one-way relation. There are a number of recent attempts to understand what characterizes intersubjective interaction, such as the distinction between engagement and coupling by De Jaegher et al. (
While the details of the proposals of these authors are quite different, they all make an important observation: coupling is not enough for intersubjective interaction, there also has to be engagement. The notion of engagement connects to that of the second-person approach, according to which “recognizing and being recognized by a
In this article, I would like to draw attention to another form of engagement that is of fundamental importance for all human interaction. It may be dubbed
Language and phenomenal experience are often thought to be the two constituents of a dichotomy: On the one side, language is thought of as structuring otherwise unstructured phenomenal experience, which in itself only provides raw material. For instance, what pain and colors are, is thought to be due to the conventions of each language.
Usually, shared intentionality is discussed under the heading of “collective intentionality.” Collective intentionality mainly concerns intentions that obviously cannot be had by one individual alone, such as the task of carrying an object that is too heavy for one person. A paradigmatic question in the discussions of collective intentionality is if “we-intentions” can be reduced to a sum of “I-intentions” (cf. Tuomela and Miller,
Let's first consider what language has to do with phenomenal experience. There is a sense in which one can say that only the person who has the sensation can know that she has an experience of pain: in theory, she could always pretend she is feeling pain. But can we deduce from the fact that only she is having that instance of a pain that the meaning of that pain sensation can be known only to her? I think that such a conclusion would be preposterous. Wittgenstein gives strong reasons against it in the context of his thoughts on the possibility of a “private language” in
Wittgenstein's investigations into language match up well with the everyday experience of understanding other people's feelings. Of course, talking with somebody about her or his pain does not give us that person's pain. Since language and experience are different, there is always something about experience that cannot be conveyed by language. But speaking about somebody's pain can give us a pretty good idea of what the pain is like for the person. Our everyday experience is that of shared intentionality even when we refer to seemingly merely subjective feelings like pain. When doing so, we may make use of theory and simulation: we may theorize about the behavior of others, and we may try to relate it to sensations we know from our own experience. But the above consideration of the role of language for phenomenal experience suggests that phenomenal experience is not independent of rules and criteria that are expressed in language and pre-linguistic behavior. Because the rules and criteria of a language are shared between the speakers of the language, they enable shared intentional engagement.
The argument that experience is not independent of rules and criteria that are embedded in language and behavior is often misunderstood as the claim that language shapes in other ways unstructured experience. For instance, conventionalists claim that language carves out certain color experiences that could as well be carved out differently by different languages. Under this view, which hue in the (physical or phenomenal) color spectrum is called “blue” is conventional, and color words could just as well be assigned to different hues. I think, however, that this is not only a simplistic view of language, but that it also is inconsistent with the phenomenology of sensations. I now would like to shortly outline how phenomenological investigations can show that phenomenal experience itself is structured in many ways, and that these structures are not up to the individual subject.
There are some sensations that seem to force themselves upon us, or at least “pop out” from the stream of conscious experience. The experiential quality of a severe pain, for instance, demands attention, regardless of whether the pain has a serious cause or not. Other kinds of pain, such as a dull pain, are less prominent and sharply distinguished. In a similar way, a typical red, blue, or green seems to pop out much more than mixtures of these colors. In this sense, they have a characteristic phenomenal quality. For instance, when looking at a rainbow that has an equal distribution of wavelengths from infrared to ultraviolet, one would expect that the color gradient has a smooth appearance. But the phenomenal appearance of a rainbow is different; it looks as if some colors were more prominent than others, and as if there were steps in the distribution of colors. This may be the reason for why sensations are often thought to be self-intimating, that they reveal themselves to the person who has the experience just by having that experience. But this thought relies on the questionable assumption that individual phenomenal experiences are unaltered by such things as attention, the context of conscious experience, and learned distinctions, which would not only speak against the above considerations of language, but also is contradicted by the phenomenal structures of experience.
For instance, there is a structure to color sensations. One may imagine a subject that has inverted phenomenal experiences of yellow and blue, but such an inversion would at some point lead to different behaviors. When asked which experience looks brighter, the person with the inverted experiences would either have to answer that the blue looks brighter. Or, what she or he perceives as bright and dark would have to be inverted, too. Yet, due to the unequal distribution of hue, saturation, and brightness throughout the color spectrum, such inversions would become apparent with sufficient further intersubjective interaction.
Philosophical investigations are often seen as at best relevant for meta-scientific considerations. But phenomenological discoveries such as that of pop out colors go well together with empirical research. For example, Berlin and Kay, in their famous study on basic color terms (
Even researchers who try to model basic color terms on a “purely cultural route” recognize that it is “driven, on its turn, by a non language-specific property of human beings,” which they take to be physiological (Loreto et al.,
The idea that sensations are detached from behavior and language often goes back to what Fuchs and De Jaegher call the “‘inner world’ hypothesis.” They claim that it is presupposed by theory theory and simulation theory, both of which “conceive of the mental as an inner realm separated from others by an epistemic gulf that can only be crossed by inference or projection. We are hidden from each other in principle; therefore, we must infer or simulate the other's inner states in order to understand him” (Fuchs and De Jaegher,
Because shared intentional engagement is fundamental for all kinds of human interaction, it is in need of interdisciplinary investigation, which has been hindered by the notion that the phenomenal experiences of humans are hidden from each other. Intentional engagement is conditioned by, amongst other things, language and its rules and criteria, forms of behavior, membership in cultures and social groups, the structure of phenomenal experience, the physiology of sense organs and neural structures, and much more. Scientific investigations into all of these can contribute to our understanding of how shared intentional engagement shapes intersubjective interaction. Investigations into intersubjective interactions thus need to integrate a number of diverse fields of research, such as psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience, and philosophy.
The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
1Examples of sensations are very different from the main examples of the debate around internalism and externalism that emanated from Putnam and Burge. The latter usually concern scientific concepts and not experiences, and involve something that is usually thought to be part of the external world, such as H2O.
2For further considerations of Wittgenstein's thoughts in this respect see Rudd (
3Cf. e.g., Hilbert and Kalderon,