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chiastic_slide
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25 Jun 2012, 1:29 pm

I'm doing a study of two interviews I did with two asexual individuals for my psychology degree. We have to analyse with reference to the phenomenological concept of "intersubjectivity". I've found it tricky to get my head around this concept even after reading the textbook which is not like me. It has something to do with sharing the same social world and being in relation to others but I can't quite grasp what it means in concrete terms of analysis that I can actually use in analysing these transcripts and explaining in the study. I'm just wondering if anyone has come across this in psychology or philosophy and can help?



Awesomelyglorious
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26 Jun 2012, 12:44 pm

My understanding of intersubjectivity is that it is the things that are not objective features of reality, but still shared between individuals enough such that they can make common reference to it.

So, let's say that individuals believe a government is "legitimate". Is this an objective fact about the nature of a certain social institution? Or is this something that there is subjective beliefs about? Do these subjective beliefs then usually correspond to some set of facts(whether the government behaves consistently with rhetoric) which most individuals agree upon. This may be a bad example, but it's just what popped into my head. Another possible one is beauty. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder but human beings often agree on certain things being beautiful, and beautiful for certain common reasons such that they can agree. What status does beauty have then? (Sorry if I seem confused. I don't have a lot of time)