intersubjective

Intersubjective describes a quality of knowledge, experience, or meaning that arises from the interaction of two or more conscious beings. It denotes shared understanding, negotiation of meaning, or mutual recognition that cannot be reduced to any single subject’s viewpoint or to brute objective data alone. Intersubjectivity thus lies between the purely subjective and the objective, and it depends on social interaction and communication.

In philosophy and phenomenology, the term is used to describe how meanings and objects become accessible to us through a shared field of experience. Early work by Edmund Husserl and later by thinkers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Alfred Schutz emphasizes that knowledge is social as well as individual, and that the world is intelligible because speakers and hearers, observers and participants, coordinate their perspectives.

In sociology, anthropology, and psychology, intersubjectivity refers to the ways in which people align beliefs, norms, and expectations within a community. The concept supports analyses of language, culture, and the self as formed in and through interaction. In psychotherapy and psychiatry, an intersubjective approach treats the therapeutic relation as a mutual field of meaning in which both therapist and client influence each other’s understanding, empathy, and emotional experience.

Critics note that intersubjectivity can obscure power relations or suppress minority viewpoints if the aim is consensus. Others warn that it risks conflating agreement with truth. Nonetheless, the concept remains a central tool for describing how social reality is co-constructed through communication and shared interpretation.