How objectivity undermines the study of personhood toward an intersubjective epistemology for psychological science

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 sy

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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

Article history:

Available online 24 November 2016

a b s t r a c t

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

re-cords 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, inter-subjectivity, 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

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

peo-plednot to measure them doing ‘silly things’ and turn them into

numbers…” At the time I was rather impressed by this

argu-ment 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 do science (Ayton, 1998, pp 1e2)

Psychology seems to have a person problem Psychology is the

discipline that deals with the nature of the psychological

func-tioning 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

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

1 What is a person?

A person is simultaneously a biological, psychological and

socio-cultural being As a biological being, a person is a living system Like

all living systems, humans are capable of regulating their own in-ternal processes in response to environmental demands As bio-logical 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,

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 psycho-logical science According to the American Psychopsycho-logical

Associa-tion, Psychology consist of “the scientiﬁc study of the behavior of individuals and their mental processes” (APA, 2016) This deﬁnition,

E-mail address:Michael_mascolo@yahoo.com

Contents lists available atScienceDirect New Ideas in Psychology

j o u r n a l h o m e p a g e : w w w e l s e v i e r c o m / l o c a t e / n e w i d e a p s y c h

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.2016.11.005

New Ideas in Psychology 44 (2017) 41e48

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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

psycho-logical 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

cat-egories 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

or-ganism 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)

eval-uation 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

expe-rience (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,

historically-shaped 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

co-ordinate experience between individuals (Matusov, 1996) The

hu-man 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

prop-erties of a separate mental realm; instead, they are propprop-erties of

action in the social world.

2 Obstacles to a science of personhood

Is it possible to develop a science of the person? Common

as-sumptions 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 as-pects of psychological life to secondary status We ignore founda-tional 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,

acknowledge the intersubjective – rather than either “objective” or

“subjective” – origins of psychological knowledge (Iacombini, 2011; Overgaard, 2005) A psychology informed by a rigorous intersub-jectivity 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.

3 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 sci-entiﬁc study of the body However, psychology never really resolved the tension between the idea of a hidden, agentive, psy-chological 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 expe-riential life of persons from our observations of external behavior However, while we may understand physical objects through ex-amination and inference of their observable properties and move-ments, 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

un-derstand bodies and objects (Martin & Sugarman, 2009) Conse-quently, it makes no sense to insist that psychological science be limited to the procedures used to study objects To say that

psy-chological science must embrace objectivity because science

de-mands 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 do 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 argu-ments challenges the Cartesian idea that psychological experience

is an inherently private phenomenon A particularly powerful example isWittgenstein’s (1953)argument against the possibility

M.F Mascolo / New Ideas in Psychology 44 (2017) 41e48

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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

sub-jectivities 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

ex-pressions 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 do not experience

feeling directly or in a pre-linguistic way; we do 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 do 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

al-ways expressed People can and do learn to “hide” their feelings;

when they do, however, they do 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

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 in-fants 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 inter-subjective processes are formative in a child's socio-emotional development and provide the foundations for higher-order devel-opment (Schore & Schore, 2008) Cognitive, socio-emotional,

motivational development build upon the capacity for intersub-jectivity; they are not its precursors.

We do not enter into social relationships as strangers to one another As intersubjective beings, we do 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 knowl-edge 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 sci-ences tend to offer incomplete and simplistic discussions of the concept (Blachowicz, 2009) From the traditional approach to sci-entiﬁc 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;

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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

ob-jectivity seriously, we would scarcely be able to describe a reach in a

meaningful way: one might imagine a researcher recording

tem-poral 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.

3.3 Facts versus values

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

prin-ciple 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 do 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-un-derstandings 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

value-neutral Drawing on the fact/value distinction, objective recordings

are understood as value-neutral descriptions of what is, not

clas-siﬁcations based on value presuppositions In many psychological

analyses, value presuppositions exist but are either

unacknowl-edged 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

re-lations with others Our psychological knowledge e both lay and

professional e is inextricably linked to social values In this way,

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

psy-chological 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.

4 Toward an intersubjective epistemology for psychological science

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

Ob-jectivity is the antithesis of subOb-jectivity The concept of intersubjec-tivity 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

inter-experiential 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?

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

pre-understandings 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

un-derstanding of the whole of a text, even as one's unun-derstanding of the whole is modiﬁed by one's continuously evolving understand-ing 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 1 Inter-experientiality as an epistemological synthesis.

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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

pre-understanding is a broad one that encompasses everyday

knowl-edge and intuitions, tacit assumptions and beliefs, value

pre-suppositions, 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

inter-pretation of psychological data, it is not possible to eliminate

pre-understanding; to do 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

psy-chological inquiry as a hermeneutic process involving at least three

continuously iterating moments Fig 2 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

observa-tion When introducing any given theoretical construct, it is more

typical to ask, “How can we measure this or that process?” than

“What do we mean when we use this concept?” This practice

fol-lows from the view that concepts gain their meaning through

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 ulti-mately be corrected by careful observation However, if our pre-understandings 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 empir-ical 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 super-ﬂuous However, if our observations depend on our pre-understandings, 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 obser-vations However, self-esteem is not an entity that can be scruti-nized When people evaluate their self-esteem, they are making a

symbolically-mediated evaluative judgment That judgement

de-pends 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

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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 do 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

Con-ceptual clariﬁcation would involve forming clear deﬁnitions of the

theoretical concepts we employ It would involve not only

identi-fying 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 2at 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

in-dicators” 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

intersub-jective 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 AsWittgenstein (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 do this more or less automatically and without

reﬂectiondas part of the process of intersubjectivity, as explained

earlier In psychological inquiry, within joint reﬂection and

dia-logue, we can begin to identity what it is about a person's embodied

expression that communicates the speciﬁc nature of their

experi-ence (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

man-uals”) 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 2 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

reconstruc-tion 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 celebra-tion” What do 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 inFig 2, the

re-searchers 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

previ-ously 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

repre-sented on the videotape were not physically present and could not

be responsive to the researcher's inquiries, the researcher's classi-ﬁcation 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 pre-understandings 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 punderstandings and experiences as they engage the data, re-searchers refer to particular patterns of videotaped action repre-sented 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

re-searchers to corroborate their experience motivated further at-tempts to do so, which ultimately led to the concept of “scripted celebration”

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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 ofFig 2, pre-understandings are routinely conﬁrmed and

disconﬁrmed by the data of experience Disconﬁrmations of prior

understandings are occasions for conceptual revision and

devel-opment 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

theo-retical 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 inFig 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

correspon-dence 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.

5 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

engage-ment 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

experi-ence, 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

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