Intersubjectivity

I always associate the idea that objectivity is really just intersubjectivity with Donald Davidson, the analytic philosopher. There is nothing perfectly out there, we might say; things are imperfectly between us. This idea, as I recall it, occurred to me while reading Davidson's ideas about the "coherence theory" of truth, especially when I came to understand his image of how we "triangulate" our sense of reality. We discover what is real, what is really "out there", what "objects" there are, by discovering what other people take to be real. Reality never impresses itself upon us as such, by itself. We are impressed largely with the impression reality leaves on others.

This social sense of "what there is" (ontology) is now quite commonplace. In the strong form of social constructivism, reality itself is a social accomplishment. A somewhat weaker version (and a more defensible one) says that, while there's obviously something "going on" out there beyond our shared experience of it, what we call "reality" is that which we can agree on the existence of. Davidson made me see that this constructivism (which I don't think he ever called by that name) does not imply any sort of relativism. "There is exactly one world," he says somewhere.

Why am I thinking about these things this morning? Academic writing is a great example of intersubjectivity. A journal article deals with a shared reality, grounded in a shared body of knowledge. Our "objects" are merely the stable themes of an ongoing conversation between knowledgeable peers. Keep that in mind when you are writing. You are not just trying to establish an individual relationship to the individual things you find in your field work. You are representing your peers when you go out to observe the world. You must see what they would see, not just report your own impressions. And then you must talk about what you have discovered with them.

This means that each paragraph you write should, ideally, make a claim about reality, and this claim should, in each of those paragraphs, then be related to the concerns of a network of already interrelated subjects, who are interested in, and know something about, the object that the claim is about. Knowledge does not get any more objective than our ability to take our responsibility to other inquirers seriously.