New Ideas in Psychology 44 (2017) 41e48 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect New Ideas in Psychology journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/newideapsych How objectivity undermines the study of personhood: Toward an intersubjective epistemology for psychological science Michael F Mascolo Merrimack College, United States a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t Article history: Available online 24 November 2016 As a science, psychology embraces the value of objectivity An objective observation is one that is (a) based upon publically observable phenomena (i.e., overt behavior); (b) unbiased, in the sense that it records only what was observed, without either adding or taking away from the observation, and (c) an accurate representation of the world as it truly is To understand the person, however, it is necessary to come to grips with seemingly elusive concepts such as agency, symbolism, experience, meaning, intersubjectivity, and morality Such concepts make reference to phenomena that are not observable in way that one can observe objects in the physical world of space and time In this paper, I examine how psychology's commitment to objectivity obscures our ability to understand persons A remnant of the Cartesian distinction between a mind and body, the principle of objectivity forces psychologists to seek “objective” indicators of “subjective” processes Following Wittgenstein and recent research on the mirror resonance system, I argue that psychological knowledge arises neither from within (subjectively) nor from without (objectively), but instead from between (intersubjectively) To understand what it means to be a person, we must abandon the false distinction between objectivity and subjectivity, and embrace an epistemology based on intersubjectivity © 2016 Published by Elsevier Ltd When I was an undergraduate psychology student one of my contemporaries complained to our tutor that they had chosen to study psychology because they: “…wanted to understand peoplednot to measure them doing ‘silly things’ and turn them into numbers…” At the time I was rather impressed by this argument and rather shocked by my tutor's characteristically robust response He answered by suggesting that, if the student simply wanted to ponder the nature of people, then they might be better off reading the novels of Jane Austen or Tolstoy e but we were here to science (Ayton, 1998, pp 1e2) Psychology seems to have a person problem Psychology is the discipline that deals with the nature of the psychological functioning of individuals However, with exceptions, the person is conspicuously absent in psychological theory and research (Martin & Bickhard, 2013) This was not always the case During the first half of the 20th century, seminal theorists in psychology proposed “grand theories” of personality and psychological functioning (Hall & Lindzey, 1957) Such theories fell out of favor with their failure to E-mail address: Michael_mascolo@yahoo.com http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.2016.11.005 0732-118X/© 2016 Published by Elsevier Ltd generate scientifically testable hypotheses (Bergmann & Spence, 1941) In the passage quoted above, Ayton (1998) appears to dismiss the goal of understanding persons as incompatible with the hard-nosed demands of science In this paper, I argue that it is indeed possible to study persons systematically; however, doing so requires that we proceed from a different model of science What is a person? A person is simultaneously a biological, psychological and sociocultural being As a biological being, a person is a living system Like all living systems, humans are capable of regulating their own internal processes in response to environmental demands As biological systems, humans differ from other animals with regards to many anatomical and physiological qualities, including brain size, brain organization, opposable thumb, use of energy, lacrimation, and many other characteristics (O’Bleness, Searles, Varki, Gagneaux, & Kikela, 2012) What, however, does it mean to be a psychological being? This question seeks to define the core of the subject matter of psychological science According to the American Psychological Association, Psychology consist of “the scientific study of the behavior of individuals and their mental processes” (APA, 2016) This definition, 42 M.F Mascolo / New Ideas in Psychology 44 (2017) 41e48 born of compromise rather than principle, does little to clarify what it means to speak of a psychological process It has its origins in the Cartesian distinction between “mind” and “body” As is well known, Descartes distinguished between an incorporeal mind and a material body While the subjective mind operates according to its own principles, the observable body, as a physical mechanism, operates according to mechanical laws Although psychology has long rejected the idea of an incorporeal mind, it nonetheless retained the contrast between an inner mental sphere (i.e., “mental processes”) and an outer observable one (i.e., “behavior”) A remnant of behaviorism, the reference to behavior reflects the continued quest for precision in the form of publically observable events While the invocation of “mental processes” or “mind” gestures toward some type of psychological content, its meaning is left entirely unspecified And so, what makes a process a psychological one? One way to address this question is to ask, “Is there anything that all processes that we call ‘psychological’ have in common? That is, is there anything common to sensing, perceiving, emoting, cognizing, remembering, thinking, dreaming, acting, and so forth?” One might suggest that all psychological processes appear to be activities mediated by some form of meaning (Wertsch, 1998) Expanding upon this idea, it is possible to identify a series of categories that span the range of psychological functioning An (a) activity is a process that occurs over time It implies some capacity for (b) agency (Sugarman, 2005) – the ability for the human organism to exert control over goal-related operations As an aspect of ongoing activity, (c) meaning can be understood as the structuring of experience (Werner & Kaplan, 1962) – where (d) experience consists the awareness of phenomenal aspects self and world (Farnell & Varela, 2008) A central aspect of experience is (e) evaluation e the experience of valence and the capacity to form systems of value, morality and strong evaluation (Taylor, 1989) There are at least as many forms of meaning as there are ways of experiencing Among these forms, symbolic meanings (e.g., signs and symbols) take on special significance, as they enable individuals to create worlds that extend beyond the here-and-now of immediate experience (Burke, 1963/1964) Among humans, symbolism brings forth a higher-order capacity for (f) self-awareness e the ability to turn consciousness upon itself and represent one's own processes and products In humans, the form social identities takes on great importance Perhaps the most profound of human motives is the attempt to identify and preserve valued images of self (Taylor, 1989) As socio-cultural beings, persons operate as relational agents (Gergen, 2009) whose actions are mediated by shared, historicallyshaped meanings that are distributed throughout a social group or linguistic community (Mascolo, 2004) As relational beings, social action is mediated by the capacity for intersubjectivity (Mascolo, 2016; Trevarthen & Aitkin, 2001) e the capacity to share and coordinate experience between individuals (Matusov, 1996) The human capacity for intersubjectivity supports the emergence of shared intentionality e the human ability to be jointly aware of each other's goals and intentions (Tomasello & Herrmann, 2010) Together with language, this form of intersubjectivity provides the basis for the construction of culture Bringing together biological, psychological and socio-cultural categories, one might define persons as self-conscious, agentive, relational animals who, by virtue of their capacity for symbolism and intersubjective engagement, act on the basis of their identifications with social systems of meaning and value From the standpoint of this definition, there is no need to differentiate the “mental” from the “behavioral” For example, meaning and experience are not properties of a separate mental realm; instead, they are properties of action in the social world Obstacles to a science of personhood Is it possible to develop a science of the person? Common assumptions about the nature of scientific inquiry obstruct progress toward this goal Psychology remains committed to a model of science organized around the value of objectivity Because of a priori methodological commitments, we often relegate the human aspects of psychological life to secondary status We ignore foundational questions about the psychological nature of persons: What does it mean to be an agent? How can we describe the structure of phenomenal experience? What is the role of meaning in human action? In representing psychological predicates as hidden and subjective, the quest for objectivity limits attempts to understand the psychological richness of personhood However, science is not a fixed process or static set of rules (Richardson, 1998) Arguably, the most central values of science include an unwillingness to accept truth statements simply based on authority (Manzo, 2006) and the systematic use of evidence (Allen & Clough, 2015) to advance understanding What counts as systematic and evidence, however, are considerations that must be adapted to the subject matter of the science (Yanchar, Gantt, & Clay, 2005) To create a model of the person, it is necessary to acknowledge the intersubjective – rather than either “objective” or “subjective” – origins of psychological knowledge (Iacombini, 2011; Overgaard, 2005) A psychology informed by a rigorous intersubjectivity would be empowered to confront questions about the psychological categories of personhood e namely, the nature of human agency, experience, meaning and values directly as they arise and are expressed in interpersonal relations with others To understand persons, we must move beyond Cartesian dualities In rejecting the idea that the “mind” as an incorporeal thinking substance, psychology embraced the “body” pole of the mind/body distinction e and with it, the objectivist methods used in the scientific study of the body However, psychology never really resolved the tension between the idea of a hidden, agentive, psychological interior and an observable, caused, materialist exterior (ter Hark, 1990) From an objectivist point of view, psychological events are opaque; we can only make inferences about the experiential life of persons from our observations of external behavior However, while we may understand physical objects through examination and inference of their observable properties and movements, psychological understanding is mediated by our capacity for intersubjective engagement with others (Reddy, 2015) If this is so, then the processes by which we come to know the psychological world of persons differ fundamentally from those we use to understand bodies and objects (Martin & Sugarman, 2009) Consequently, it makes no sense to insist that psychological science be limited to the procedures used to study objects To say that psychological science must embrace objectivity because science demands it is an appeal to authority If science rejects appeals to authority as a source of knowledge (Manzo, 2006), it cannot justify its own methods through such appeals A genuinely scientific approach must adapt itself to the particularities of its subject matter To this, there is a need to transcend a suite of Cartesian tensions that continue to structure psychological work 3.1 Public behavior versus private experience A series of philosophical, psychological and empirical arguments challenges the Cartesian idea that psychological experience is an inherently private phenomenon A particularly powerful example is Wittgenstein’s (1953) argument against the possibility M.F Mascolo / New Ideas in Psychology 44 (2017) 41e48 of a private language Wittgenstein was interested in how everyday feeling words (e.g., pain, anger, sadness) gain their meaning The traditional view is that such words refer to private states e subjectivities to which only the experiencing person has access From this view, we gain knowledge of our inner experiences through a process of introspection Individuals are able to “look within” themselves and inspect their private experiences Having done so, they are then able to assign words to those states This is a common view held by both laypersons and psychological scientists alike Wittgenstein reasoned that if psychological experiences were truly private states, there would be no way that we could be sure that we were using our inner state words in the same way as others If experiences were truly private, assigning words to them would be analogous to a situation in which people were asked to identify an object e call it a “beetle” e placed in a box into which only the viewer could ever see In such situations, there would be no way to ensure that people were using the word “beetle” in a similar way If no one could see inside of anyone else's private box, there could be no public way to corroborate the meaning of the word “beetle” Wittgenstein used this example to demonstrate the absurdity of the belief that experiences are inherently private states If experiences were truly private, neither the person herself nor anyone else could identify them Wittgenstein reasoned that words like pain or anger could not be private states and must gain their meaning from a process other than introspection For Wittgenstein, to gain their shared meaning, “inner state” terms must be based on some sort of public criteria e some sort of overt signal that could be shared among interlocutors If the meaning of “inner state” terms are grounded in some sort of public criteria, then they cannot be entirely “inner” There must be a public aspect of experience that communities use to corroborate the meaning of inner state terms Wittgenstein held that it is the bodily expression of psychological states (e.g., writhing in pain; sobbing in grief, etc.) that provides the public criteria that communities use to corroborate the meaning of so-called inner states Communities organize the meaning of inner state terms not through reference to so-called private inner states, but instead through the public expressions of experiential states It is essential to note that for Wittgenstein, the public expression of pain (joy, sadness, or road rage) is not a contingent indicator of an “inner” or “private” state; instead it is the public manifestation of an experiential state There is not first an internal state and then also a separate external expression that may or may not be related to the inner state Instead, the public expression is part and parcel of the “inner” experiential process, and vice-versa; it provides the criteria that organizes the public meaning, logic or “grammar” of the experiential state This is not to say that we not experience feeling directly or in a pre-linguistic way; we It is only to say that we could not make those states intelligible either to ourselves or to others if those states were not yoked in some direct way to some sort of public criteria Our “inner” experiences thus “shine through” our bodily expressions As a result, we not have to infer the content of “other minds” by deciphering the meaning of alien or mysterious configurations of external behavior Instead, we can read the other person's pain, anger, joy or grief from the public expression itself In this way, the experiential life is not an a priori private something that hides behind an opaque exterior This is not to say that experience is always expressed People can and learn to “hide” their feelings; when they do, however, they so by inhibiting the public aspects of their experience The point is therefore that psychological experience is not a priori hidden; experience is neither something that is inherently hidden nor always exposed As a result, we have more direct contact with the “minds” of others than the Cartesian mind/body dichotomy suggests Our capacity to engage the 43 experiences of others is part of the process of embodied intersubjectivity 3.1.1 Embodied intersubjectivity The rejection of the inner/outer dichotomy by Wittgenstein and others is supported by recent theory and research on “mirror neurons” and operation of the “mirror resonance system” (Iacombini, 2011) As is now well known, during the 80's and 90's, researchers identified neurons in the brains of monkeys that fired not only when an animal performed a given action, but also when the animals observed another animal perform the same action The discovery of these “mirror neurons” has stimulated new ways of thinking about the origins of human sociality Instead of thinking of infants as isolated beings who must break into social interaction by penetrating the minds of others, we can now understand how infants are able to engage in a primordial form of intersubjectivity from the very start of life (Iacombini, 2011; Reddy, 2015; Trevarthen & Aitkin, 2001) The concept of a “mirror resonance system” provides novel ways to understand such difficult to explain phenomena as neonatal “imitation”, empathy, the early capacity for intersubjectivity and emotional exchange between infants and caregivers and other phenomena (Trevarthen & Aitkin, 2001) Given something like a mirror resonance system, it is possible to imagine that an infant's experience of a mother's loving voice and smile might activate similar actions and experiences in the infant herself Such intersubjective processes are formative in a child's socio-emotional development and provide the foundations for higher-order development (Schore & Schore, 2008) Cognitive, socio-emotional, motivational development build upon the capacity for intersubjectivity; they are not its precursors We not enter into social relationships as strangers to one another As intersubjective beings, we not have to overcome a barrier in order to enter into relations with others The processes by which we gain psychological knowledge, about both ourselves and others, are not the same as those through which we gain knowledge of the physical world If this is so, then our capacity for intersubjective engagement with others provides the foundations not only for our everyday knowledge of self and others, but also for the inquiries we make as psychological scientists This is not to say that intersubjective engagement with others is the only process through which we gain psychological knowledge; it is, however, the foundation for other means of understanding persons (e.g., first person reflection; third person observation) 3.2 Inner subjectivity versus exterior objectivity The concept of objectivity has long been a cornerstone for empirical methodology in psychology Perhaps paradoxically, it is difficult to identify a clear articulation of this concept Scholars use the term in different ways and with different emphases (Hammersley, 2010); textbooks in both the natural and social sciences tend to offer incomplete and simplistic discussions of the concept (Blachowicz, 2009) From the traditional approach to scientific objectivity (Reiss & Sprenger, 2014) an objective description is one that is (a) based upon publically observable phenomena (i.e., overt behavior); (b) unbiased, in the sense that it records only what was observed, without either adding or taking away from the observation, and (c) an accurate representation of the world as it truly is A casual analysis of psychological inquiry reveals that the goals of objective description are unachievable in principle Consider the simple example of an infant reaching for a ball Depending upon one's purpose, a researcher might describe such an act by saying, “The infant reached for the ball” This statement seems innocuous; 44 M.F Mascolo / New Ideas in Psychology 44 (2017) 41e48 it could easily be included as part of an observer's checklist, a coding category, or a recording of the child's action However, despite its utility in both everyday and professional discourse, it does not and cannot meet the criteria of objectivity At the very least, the description goes beyond the information given and thus does not simply record observable behavior free from the bias of our pre-understandings The statement that “the infant reached” identities the infant as a being who has the power of agency (i.e., the infant controls the act); it also attributes a goal to the infant (i.e., the infant reaches for the ball) These meanings are part of the everyday concept of what it means to reach; they are not “objective” features of the child's movements If we were to take the principle of objectivity seriously, we would scarcely be able to describe a reach in a meaningful way: one might imagine a researcher recording temporal sequences of muscle configurations as they change over time within a three-dimensional coordinate space Such a process would not only be cumbersome, it would be virtually useless as a description of a reach both implicit and explicit value judgments play important roles in structuring theory and observation The fact that theory and observation are informed by value presuppositions is a problem only if we are committed to the principle of objectivity and the fact/value distinction This need not be the case It is neither possible nor desirable to remove value presuppositions from our constructs and descriptive categories An alternative to seeking to remove value presuppositions from psychological research is promote the practice of self-reflexivity (Breuer & Roth, 2003) Reflexivity is based on the idea that, while we cannot eliminate pre-understandings from our observations, we can become aware of them and how they affect psychological inquiry From this view, the goal of psychological research would not be to remove value presuppositions, but instead to make them explicit and even change them in the context of novel findings 3.3 Facts versus values The concept of intersubjectivity provides an alternative the subjective/objective dichotomy that continues to structure much psychological research (Kuukkanen, 2012) As indicated in Fig 1, while subjectivity is based upon the idea that experience is private and inaccessible to others objectivity expresses the idea that it is possible to understand the world as it really is without bias Objectivity is the antithesis of subjectivity The concept of intersubjectivity arises as a synthesis of the objective and the subjective e one that resolves the tensions and contradictions between them From this view, psychological knowledge originates neither from “within” nor from “without”; it arises in sign-mediated interexperiential exchanges that occur between people (Mascolo, 2016; Wertsch, 1998) If psychological knowledge arises in intersubjective exchanges, then a methodology that marginalizes this process is at best incomplete and at worst deeply flawed What would a consistently intersubjective methodology look like? The concept of objectivity is founded upon the separation of fact from value Moral philosophers have long warned that one cannot move from statements of what is to statements of what ought to be; just because something is a certain way does not count as evidence that it ought to be that way The value/fact distinction is central to the attitude of the natural sciences As indicated above, the principle of objectivity stipulates that observers should describe things the way that they are, and not as they should be Scholars have long debated the role of the scientist in public affairs Some argue that the scientist, armed only with knowledge of what is, occupies no more valid a position to make moral judgments than the everyday citizen Others suggest that scientists should assume a more active role Matters become more complex in the social and psychological sciences We ourselves are the subject matter of psychology (Hunt, 2005; Martin & Sugarman, 2009) It is often difficult to be mindful of the role moral categories play in structuring our sense of who we are and what we Psychology is replete with psychological constructs structured by (often implicit) socio-moral content For example, the concept of self-esteem is not only defined in terms of its evaluative content (i.e., how good one feels about oneself), it carries with it culturally structured moral injunctions (i.e., it is important to have positive self-esteem) From an “objective” approach, “self-esteem” would be seen as something that is discovered (or verified) by observing the behavior of others However, the psychological the concept of “self-esteem” is part of a shared cultural meaning system e an aspect of the pre-understandings that structure theory When we invoke such concepts, we bring their moral content to our work (Davis, 2013) From the standpoint of objectivity, the observable data that drive scientific progress are regarded as theory-neutral and valueneutral Drawing on the fact/value distinction, objective recordings are understood as value-neutral descriptions of what is, not classifications based on value presuppositions In many psychological analyses, value presuppositions exist but are either unacknowledged or hidden from view (Davis, 2013) For example, the finding that parents who adopt an authoritative parenting study are more likely to raise instrumentally competent children (Baumrind, 1972) is a robust, important and useful product of psychological research; it is not, however, morally neutral The concept of instrumental competence, for example, is necessarily defined with reference to social values Social values are intersubjective products of our relations with others Our psychological knowledge e both lay and professional e is inextricably linked to social values In this way, Toward an intersubjective epistemology for psychological science 4.1 An intersubjective methodology An intersubjective methodology would be a hermeneutic one (Gadamer, 1975; Martin & Sugarman, 2009) Hermeneutics refers to process of interpretation, and has its origins in the interpretation of texts From a hermeneutic framework, observation is necessarily pre-figured in some way by some form of pre-understanding, however tacit or explicit The development of understanding operates through a dialectical interplay between preunderstandings and one's engagement with a text This process is reflected in the hermeneutic circle e the idea that the various parts of a text can only be understood in terms of one's evolving understanding of the whole of a text, even as one's understanding of the whole is modified by one's continuously evolving understanding of the parts (Gadamer, 1975) One cannot comprehend any given unit of text without drawing on some form of prior knowledge The application of prior understandings structures one's sense of the text; without them, there could be no understanding at all Over Fig Inter-experientiality as an epistemological synthesis M.F Mascolo / New Ideas in Psychology 44 (2017) 41e48 time, one's sense of the parts transform one's sense of the whole e and vice-versa e including the pre-understandings that structure evolving interpretation The pre-understandings that structure psychological inquiry have intersubjective origins and are represented in our use of ordinary socio-psychological language The concept of preunderstanding is a broad one that encompasses everyday knowledge and intuitions, tacit assumptions and beliefs, value presuppositions, meta-theory, formal theory, explicit hypotheses, (and so forth) In psychological science, while we may be reflexive about how our pre-understandings structure the production and interpretation of psychological data, it is not possible to eliminate preunderstanding; to so would cut us off from the very tools we use to observe with This does not imply that rigorous, precise and useful psychological knowledge is unobtainable On the contrary, embracing an intersubjective epistemology makes it possible to build a more rigorous, precise and useful psychology Building upon these ideas, we can think of the process of psychological inquiry as a hermeneutic process involving at least three continuously iterating moments Fig provides a model of the hermeneutic alternative to the traditional objectivist model of psychological inquiry The model offers a sense of how to think about psychological inquiry as a hermeneutic process mediated by intersubjective engagement among theorists, researchers and participants The model is organized circularly in terms of three broad iterative movements: conceptual clarification, observation within conceptual schemes, and corroboration of theory and evidence 4.1.1 Conceptual clarification We are often led to believe that the first step to scientific inquiry is or should be observation, or more precisely, objective observation When introducing any given theoretical construct, it is more typical to ask, “How can we measure this or that process?” than “What we mean when we use this concept?” This practice follows from the view that concepts gain their meaning through 45 correspondence to things in the world If this were so, it would not necessary be important to clarify theoretical concepts prior to empirical observation; any flaws in those concepts would ultimately be corrected by careful observation However, if our preunderstandings arise intersubjectively, we cannot hope to clarify those concepts by parsing away intersubjective content Because our pre-understandings structure what we look for, then we cannot hope to clarify them only by looking more carefully The task of conceptual clarification is as important as that of empirical inquiry (Wittgenstein, 1953) The privileging of measurement over meaning puts the empirical cart before the conceptual horse In studying any particular psychological process, researchers tend to draw upon everyday language in the absence of thorough philosophical, psychological or linguistic analyses of the meanings of those concepts Researchers then tend to seek observable indicators assumed to be consistent with these largely unexamined definitions Because the proof of a given concept is seen as something to be found in observable data, rigorous conceptual analysis is often seen as irrelevant or superfluous However, if our observations depend on our preunderstandings, failure to clarify the full meaning of our guiding conceptions will almost certainly produce forms of data whose meaning is ambiguous with respect to those concepts Take, for example, the concept of self-esteem The literature related to self-esteem is vast The concept is generally taken to refer to a “generalized evaluative attitude toward the self” (APA, 2016) Nonetheless, researchers differ in the ways in which they define and measure the concept (Guindon, 2001) Many researchers seem to rely upon “common sense” definitions as if everyday terms named real entities that can be observed or inferred from observations However, self-esteem is not an entity that can be scrutinized When people evaluate their self-esteem, they are making a symbolically-mediated evaluative judgment That judgement depends upon beliefs and background assumptions related to a network of culturally and morally structured concepts, including self, goodness, liking, responsibility, value, and worth Further, the Fig Psychological science as an intersubjective process 46 M.F Mascolo / New Ideas in Psychology 44 (2017) 41e48 concept must be understood in relation to similar concepts, such as self-respect, self-confidence, self-efficacy and related concepts It is not possible to study “self-esteem” in a meaningful or precise way without situating the concept within this larger nomological network of meaning Doing so would help sharpen the meaning of the ideas we test; when we fail to so, we risk putting ourselves in the position of literally not knowing what we are talking about Psychological theorizing thus requires rigorous conceptual and philosophical analysis prior to data collection and analysis Conceptual clarification would involve forming clear definitions of the theoretical concepts we employ It would involve not only identifying their assumptions, value presuppositions, and background conditions, but also their relations to broader conceptions of the nature of action and persons (Raeff, 2017) This process is shown in Fig at Point A This practice would stand in opposition to the ways in which theoretical constructs are often articulated in psychology Quite often, theoretical constructs are defined in anticipation of how they might be operationalized Definitions of psychological processes are often articulated in terms of the “observable indicators” used to measure a given process in an empirical study In so doing, the experiential content of constructs is often parsed away well before the task of identifying operational definitions The a priori practice of conceptual clarification would legitimate value of exploring the full range of the psychological and experiential meaning represented by any given concept 4.1.2 Observation within shared conceptual schemes As a hermeneutic process, any observation, description and recording of psychological phenomena necessarily must occur within the framework of some conceptual scheme (Ochs, 1979) For some, this might seem to undermine the process of psychological inquiry as an unreliable, haphazard or subjective process On the contrary – once a research team builds some degree of clarity about the psychological concepts under analysis, they can use those concepts to structure inquiry with more clarity and precision More important, if psychological knowledge has its origins in intersubjective engagement, the key to meaningful psychological inquiry is to take advantage of rather than marginalize the intersubjective processes through which we gain such knowledge This would require overcoming the fear that knowledge gained through intersubjective engagement is somehow less reliable than that derived from so-called objective observation Intersubjectivity is the process of sharing and coordinating our experience of the world As Wittgenstein (1953) argued, it would not be possible to come to know the experience of others if that experience were fundamentally private Drawing on meanings represented in everyday language, one person can gain access to another's experience by reading it more or less directly from the verbal and nonverbal aspects of the other's embodied expression In everyday life, we this more or less automatically and without reflectiondas part of the process of intersubjectivity, as explained earlier In psychological inquiry, within joint reflection and dialogue, we can begin to identity what it is about a person's embodied expression that communicates the specific nature of their experience (Mascolo, 2009) We might call this process intersubjective corroboration (Rowbottom, 2008) Intersubjective corroboration is analogous to the ways in which teams of researchers create category systems (i.e., “coding manuals”) to classify psychological acts in observational research It can be seen as a philosophical extension of the ways that researchers establish “inter-observer reliability” in psychological research To illustrate, consider a study assessing the development of the emotion of pride in children (Mascolo & Harkins, 1998) Drawing on linguistic, philosophical and psychological work, the researchers proposed that Westerners feel “proud of themselves” when they attribute responsibility to the self for some valued act or way of being that enhances one's sense of self-worth As part of their study, two researchers examined the videotaped reactions of ½ year-old boy who repeatedly kicked a soccer ball into a net while playing with his mother They noted that after the child kicked the ball into the net, he often raised his arms over his head He also did this when his mother kicked the ball into the net The following is a reconstruction of an exchange between the researchers: R1: I think he's feeling proud R2: What makes you think that? R1: He is raising his hands over his head in celebration R2: He is raising his hands over his head e but he is also raising his hands over his head when his mother gets the ball into the net Why would he be feeling proud when his mother got the ball into the net? R1: Maybe he is proud of his mother? R2: But when he raised his hands when he kicked it into the net, he never looked at his mother And he doesn't seem to be doing anything else that I would call celebrating He doesn't, say, clap his hands or say “look at me!” He did smile the first time he got in, but not the other two times And he smiled each time his mother got the ball into the net R1: Maybe he has simply learned that when you get the ball into the net, you raise your arms over your head I think that what we are seeing here is something that we might call “scripted celebration” What you think of that as an initial class? R2: That makes sense to me But let's look more closely to see if we can see anything that we would call “pride” in his reactions Several forms of intersubjective engagement are illustrated in this exchange In the first, identified at Point B1 in Fig 2, the researchers coordinated their pre-understandings of the concepts that would guide their inquiries This involved developing a shared understanding of the clarified concept of pride articulated previously at Point A in the process The second form, indicated at Point B2, occurs as each researcher engaged the experience of the child and mother in the videotape Even though the individuals represented on the videotape were not physically present and could not be responsive to the researcher's inquiries, the researcher's classification is nonetheless an intersubjective process To the extent that (a) a person's experience “shines through” their expressions, and (b) we draw upon our own emotional responsivity and preunderstandings to make sense of that experience, then the act of classifying that experience is an intersubjective process The task before each individual researcher is to identify those aspects of the participant's expressed actions that form the basis of his or her classifications The third form of engagement, shown at Point B3 in Fig 2, consists of intersubjective corroboration between the researchers themselves This occurred as the researchers discursively engage the videotaped data in order identify the nature of the experiences conveyed in the videotape This is perhaps the most creative and important part of the process of inquiry, as it is through this process that novel conceptual distinctions are made Drawing upon their pre-understandings and experiences as they engage the data, researchers refer to particular patterns of videotaped action represented as forms of evidence to support one or another classification of the experience in question The formation of a category arises as researchers corroborate their experience of the videotaped data For example, an interpretation offered by one researcher (e.g., “Maybe he's proud of his mother?”) is countered by evidence offered by the other (e.g., “He never looked at his mother”) The failure of the researchers to corroborate their experience motivated further attempts to so, which ultimately led to the concept of “scripted celebration” M.F Mascolo / New Ideas in Psychology 44 (2017) 41e48 4.1.3 Disconfirmation and theoretical corroboration From a hermeneutic framework, no sharp boundary separates the hypothetical and observable worlds Nonetheless, as indicated in Point C of Fig 2, pre-understandings are routinely confirmed and disconfirmed by the data of experience Disconfirmations of prior understandings are occasions for conceptual revision and development However, if we cannot invoke the autonomy of data as an objective “corrective” to our theoretical propositions, how can we assess claims to knowledge? In the absence of objective standards of evidence, the concept of corroboration provides one way to evaluate the merits of our theoretical propositions Combining the Latin roots com (together) and robur (strength), corroboration is the process of “making something strong by coming together A theoretical proposition can thus be “made strong” (but not true) by the ways its content “comes together” with multiple forms of evidence The advantage to the notion of corroboration is its silence about the form of evidence used to support a given proposition It contains no prescription that forms of evidence be autonomous or independent of the proposition to which it is compared While evidence is never independent of a conceptual framework, neither is it wholly determined by that framework A corroborated proposition is one whose content is congruent with multiple forms of evidence from diverse sources (Points C and D in Fig 2) Just as it makes no specifications for what constitutes evidence, the concept of corroboration makes no necessary appeal to an objective concept of truth While bearing some similarity to each, it departs from the three dominant conceptions of truth in the Western tradition (Wrenn, 2014) It implies no direct correspondence between theory and an observer-independent reality; it does not make claims to knowledge based on mere coherence among propositions; and it does not identify truth with pragmatic utility Thus, from the standpoint of intersubjective inquiry, we might not be inclined to speak of the truth of any given proposition; instead, we might say that a proposition is more or less corroborated by various forms evidence The intersubjective study of intersubjective beings Persons are biological, psychological and socio-cultural beings As biological beings, the human organism is effectively understood from the third person standpoint of biological science However, the methodological presuppositions of the natural sciences are not always directly applicable to the study of persons as psychological and socio-cultural beings Properties like agency, experience, meaning, evaluation and selfhood are not the types of things that can be studied objectively We come to know these person-centered properties by virtue of our capacity for intersubjective engagement with others To build a psychological theory of personhood, it is necessary to reject both the subjective and objective poles of our Cartesian legacy, and build on the intersubjective approaches that have arisen (e.g., Gergen, 2009; Martin & Bickhard, 2013; Mascolo & Fischer, 2015; Raeff, 2017; Reddy, 2015; Shotter, 2017; Martin & Sugarman, 2009, 2017) The natural sciences have been highly successful in illuminating the nature of the physical and biological world Within limits, their embrace of the concept of objectivity is justified by their subject matter With exceptions, the natural sciences focus on objects and processes that exist within the coordinates of space and time, and thus which can be, at least in principle, observed Human experience, however, is not an object Although it is expressed in the activity of real bodies that operate in real time, experience is not something that can be observed as if it were an object in space In turn, the processes by which we gain psychological knowledge are different from those through which we gain physical knowledge (Martin & Sugarman, 2009; Mascolo, 2016) Acknowledging this 47 point does not make psychology less scientific (although it does imply that psychology is not scientific in the same way as natural sciences) On the contrary, it holds out the possibility of providing a more stable foundation on which to build a systematic psychology References Allen, P M., & Clough, S (2015) Philosophical commitments, empirical evidence, and theoretical psychology Theory & Psychology, 25, 3e24 APA (2016) Glossary of psychological terms Retrieved March 22, 2016, from http:// www.apa.org/research/action/glossary.aspx?tab¼16 Ayton, P (1998) Why does psychology need methodology? 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Oxford: Basil Blackwell Wrenn, C (2014) Truth Polity Press Yanchar, S C., Gantt, E E., & Clay, S L (2005) On the nature of a critical methodology Theory & Psychology, 15, 27e50 ... has the power of agency (i.e., the infant controls the act); it also attributes a goal to the infant (i.e., the infant reaches for the ball) These meanings are part of the everyday concept of. .. virtue of their capacity for symbolism and intersubjective engagement, act on the basis of their identifications with social systems of meaning and value From the standpoint of this definition, there... possible to understand the world as it really is without bias Objectivity is the antithesis of subjectivity The concept of intersubjectivity arises as a synthesis of the objective and the subjective