What Is the Definition of Intersubjectivity?

Intersubjectivity is the shared, mutual awareness between two or more conscious minds. It is the capacity to share feelings, intentions and understandings, and it is what makes interpersonal communication possible rather than merely audible. If you came here for one sentence, that is the sentence.

The complication worth knowing before you go further is that no single settled definition exists. Researchers have catalogued at least seven distinct ones, and they do not all say the same thing. What follows is the core meaning, then how it shifts as you carry it into philosophy, psychology and education — and what stays constant across all of them.

This page is about what the word means. If you would rather see the thing than define it, we keep a separate page of intersubjectivity examples in ordinary life. If you want the philosophical lineage and the argument about whether shared minds are even possible, that has its own page too. This one stays on the definition.

The Definition of Intersubjectivity

Intersubjectivity is the sharing of subjective states by two or more individuals, together with the awareness of self and of another's intentions and feelings in dynamic shared experience. The sociologist Thomas Scheff puts the first half of that compactly: intersubjectivity is "the sharing of subjective states by two or more individuals." It is the most quoted formulation of the term for a reason — it names the whole thing in eleven words and commits to nothing beyond what every account agrees on.

The related adjective carries a two-part definition. Merriam-Webster gives "intersubjective" as, first, "involving or occurring between separate conscious minds," and second, "accessible to or capable of being established for two or more subjects: objective." That second sense is worth reading twice. The dictionary runs the intersubjective straight into the objective, which is not a slip — it is a real and contested position, and the next section is about why.

A third formulation adds the dimension the other two leave implicit. Oxford Reference defines intersubjectivity as "the process and product of sharing experiences, knowledge, understandings, and expectations with others," which puts the emphasis on it being something people do rather than something they have. Process and product: the sharing, and the common ground the sharing leaves behind.

The root contrast is what makes the word necessary. Subjectivity is one person's inner experience — private, and inaccessible to anyone else. Intersubjectivity is what happens between minds, not inside a single one. It names the shared space where two or more people establish something in common, and it exists as a word because neither "subjective" nor "objective" could describe that space.

Definitions vary by discipline, and the variation belongs to the concept rather than to any one writer's imprecision. The social psychologists Alex Gillespie and Flora Cornish are credited with assembling seven different definitions of intersubjectivity in their 2010 paper for the Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, where they treat the term as covering a range of possible relations between perspectives rather than one idea. Each discipline emphasises a different aspect of the shared mental space, and each is describing something real.

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Subjective, Objective, Intersubjective: Where the Word Sits

Most confusion about this word dissolves once you lay the three positions side by side. A purely subjective experience is private to one mind — a personal memory, an unspoken feeling, something nobody else can reach. A purely objective fact holds independently of any mind: the chemical composition of water does not consult you about it. Intersubjectivity occupies the middle, and the middle is doing real work.

Merriam-Webster's second sense — "accessible to or capable of being established for two or more subjects" — is why some writers treat the intersubjective and the objective as near-synonyms. What two or more subjects can establish together starts to look a great deal like what is simply the case. Whether that identification holds is one of the live disagreements in the philosophy of the term, and it is not settled here or anywhere else.

The middle position refuses two extremes at once. It rejects the undiluted subjectivism that makes meaning entirely a matter of private perception, and it rejects the naive realism that treats the world's meanings as sitting there untouched by anyone's interpretation. As Oxford Reference frames the constraint, the existence, nature and meaning of things are subject to social and linguistic constraints within a culture or subculture. You do not get to decide alone what things mean, and neither does the universe.

One thing the middle position does not buy you is truth. Intersubjectivity does not guarantee it. Two people can share a false belief with complete confidence, and a whole culture can. What shared understanding provides is the foundation on which claims about a common world get built — not a verdict on whether those claims are right.

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Where the Concept of Intersubjectivity Came From

Intersubjectivity-adjacent ideas were circulating in psychology by the early 1900s. George Stout's 1903 textbook The Groundwork of Psychology is commonly cited as an early instance of the notions that would later carry the name. It is worth being precise about the limit of that claim: no source establishes a firm coinage date for the term itself, and different accounts place its arrival in the social sciences decades apart. Stout is an early sighting, not a starting gun.

What is not in dispute is that Edmund Husserl gave the concept its philosophical weight. He developed it in the fifth of his Cartesian Meditations, the work that grew out of Sorbonne lectures delivered in February 1929 and appeared in French translation in 1931. Husserl's treatment connected intersubjectivity to the problem of how one mind grasps another's experience at all — and in doing so turned a peripheral idea into a central problem for phenomenology.

A candidate for the term's origin sits in French philosophy. The psychoanalyst Molly Macdonald argued, in a 2011 paper for Philosophy Compass on Hegel, psychoanalysis and intersubjectivity, that a potential point of origin lies in Jean Hyppolite's use of l'inter-subjectivite in a 1955 essay on the human situation in Hegel's Phenomenology. That is one scholar's proposal about where a word came from rather than an established fact, and it is offered here as exactly that.

Jacques Lacan brought the concept into psychoanalysis in the 1950s and gave it a distinctive shape. In the diagram he called Schema L, the analytic dialogue is not a simple two-person encounter but a four-cornered structure — the analyst and the patient, and also the symbolic positions each occupies, shaped by language, desire and the unconscious. On this account intersubjectivity is never a transparent meeting of minds; it is always mediated by structures that exceed what either party is aware of.

Jurgen Habermas took the concept up in 1970, in an essay titled "Towards a theory of communicative competence" published in the journal Inquiry, as part of his critique of Noam Chomsky's grammar-based account of language acquisition. Chomsky emphasised the innate cognitive structures that make language possible. Habermas argued that this account was monological and missed the point: children learn to speak by participating in shared communicative practice, which makes intersubjectivity the precondition for language rather than its byproduct.

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What Intersubjectivity Means in Psychology

In psychology, intersubjectivity is the awareness of self and of another's intentions and feelings in the dynamic sharing of minds acting in companionship. That formulation comes from a 2023 editorial in Frontiers in Psychology by Theano Kokkinaki, Jonathan Delafield-Butt, Emese Nagy and Colwyn Trevarthen. Note what it adds to the philosophical definitions above: companionship, and dynamism. The psychological version is not a static state two people are in. It is something happening between them, in time.

Infant research is what reshaped the field's understanding. The same editorial dates the turn to 1960, when, in its words, studies of infants disproved the theory of the young mind as a sensory-motor computer that is "conditioned" to learn facts symbolized in language. Before that, the infant was modelled as something that learns facts first and connects second. The research reversed the order — sharing intentions and emotions turned out to be present from the beginning rather than assembled later out of simpler parts.

The best-known demonstration comes from Colwyn Trevarthen, whose films of eight-week-olds and their mothers engaging in face-to-face "conversations" showed infants and caregivers coordinating expressions and vocalisations in turn-taking patterns. Trevarthen argued that this showed humans are born possessing an innate capacity for intersubjectivity. It is worth stating the strength of that evidence accurately: films of infants suggest rather than prove, and later work places the capacity at roughly two to three months, with the eight-week mark cited as the point where infants begin taking turns in these wordless exchanges. The finding has held up well; it was not settled by demonstration alone.

The theory's roots reach outside psychology. The 2023 editorial traces intersubjectivity theory to the anthropological work of Mead in 1928 and Bateson in 1975 before developmental psychology adopted it — which connects the concept to a broader question anthropologists were already asking about how humans coordinate meaning across separate minds.

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What Intersubjectivity Means in Philosophy

In philosophy, intersubjectivity addresses how separate conscious minds can share or establish anything in common at all. The philosophical framing treats it as a condition for shared meaning rather than as a behaviour you could measure — which is the cleanest way to see how far it sits from the psychological definition above, even though both are definitions of the same word.

Husserl's treatment in the fifth Cartesian Meditation connects directly to that problem. He asked how a subject can know that another subject exists and shares a world with them, and he rejected the answer philosophy had usually given — that we reason our way to other minds by analogy from bodies that resemble our own. On Husserl's account we experience others directly as other selves, and that direct experience is the foundation intersubjectivity rests on.

Habermas turned the same concept toward language. His 1970 argument against Chomsky was that language acquisition depends on shared understanding between speakers and not on grammatical rules alone — which makes intersubjectivity not a feature of communication but its precondition.

Merriam-Webster's second sense, "accessible to or capable of being established for two or more subjects," captures what philosophy is actually worried about here: shared access. The discipline treats intersubjectivity as a precondition for meaning, for communication, and for anything anyone could call a shared reality. That is a heavier load than the psychological definition asks the word to carry, and it is why the two fields can use the same term without quite meaning the same thing.

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What Is an Example of Intersubjectivity?

The clearest documented example is the mother-and-infant face-to-face exchange. In Trevarthen's films, eight-week-olds and their mothers coordinate expression and vocalisation in something that looks unmistakably like conversation without any words in it. Each is reading the other's state and adjusting; neither is doing it alone.

An everyday adult example is two people arriving at a shared understanding in conversation without either of them stating it outright. One person nods, the other adjusts their phrasing, and both end up with a mutual sense of what was meant. Neither is reading the other's mind. They are coordinating their subjective states in real time, which is a different and more ordinary thing.

What would not count is two people talking past each other with no mutual awareness of the other's state. Intersubjectivity requires the dynamic sharing of minds acting in companionship, in the Frontiers editorial's phrase. Parallel monologues do not create it, however articulate both monologues are.

Examples are the fastest way into this concept, and there are more of them than a definitional page can hold — the glance across a room, the apology that lands, the toddler pointing at a dog and checking your face, the moment a shared field collapses in a text message. We keep those on a separate page of intersubjectivity examples, which is the one to read if recognising the thing matters more to you than defining it.

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What Is Another Term for Intersubjectivity?

The closest everyday equivalents are shared understanding, mutual knowledge and common ground. Each names the outcome — the thing two people end up holding between them — rather than the process that produced it, which is what makes them useful in a sentence and imprecise as definitions.

Several academic terms sit adjacent without being interchangeable. Theory of mind is the capacity to attribute mental states to another person; it describes something one mind does about another, where intersubjectivity describes something two minds do together. Social cognition names the wider processing of social information. Empathy is the nearest miss of all: it is feeling with someone, and it can run one way, whereas intersubjectivity is reciprocal by definition. You can be deeply empathic toward a person who never learns it, and nothing intersubjective has happened.

In sociology the concept sits close to social constructionism and symbolic interactionism, both of which treat shared meaning as the foundation of social reality rather than a decoration laid over it. Oxford Reference names both as neighbours of the term. The differences between these neighbours are where most of the confusion about the word comes from, which is why they are worth keeping distinct rather than treating as synonyms.

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Intersubjectivity and the Human Person

Asked what intersubjectivity means for the human person, the answer the tradition gives is that personhood is formed through relationship rather than assembled in isolation. On this account a self is not built privately and then presented to others for inspection. It is worked out in exchanges with people who reflect something back, and it keeps being worked out. Oxford Reference's framing of the term as the mutual construction of relationships through shared subjectivity is pointing at the same claim.

Cultural identity is where this becomes most visible. People take on common understandings within a culture or subculture, and those shared meanings shape who they become — which means a person arrives inside a web of meaning that precedes them and will outlast them. The social and linguistic constraints Oxford Reference describes are not restrictions imposed on an already-formed self. They are part of what formed it.

This is a philosophical position with a long lineage rather than a settled empirical finding, and it is worth flagging as such. The developmental evidence described earlier constrains it without deciding it: a capacity that emerges in stages across a childhood is compatible with several different accounts of what that capacity ultimately consists of.

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How Intersubjectivity Is Used in Education

In education, intersubjectivity names the shared understanding a teacher and a learner establish together — the joint focus and shared purpose that has to be in place before anything gets taught. Barbara Rogoff's account of guided participation, set out in her 1990 book Apprenticeship in Thinking, makes intersubjectivity the thing guided participation rests on: adult and child must hold a shared focus on the task, each aware of the other's attention, before the adult can build a bridge from where the child is to where the learning goes.

That reframes what a lesson is. Learning depends on the teacher and student establishing shared understanding, not on facts being transmitted across a gap. The awareness of self and of another's intentions and feelings in dynamic shared experience, in the Frontiers editorial's definition, applies to a classroom as directly as to a nursery — a student's confused expression changes the teacher's next sentence, and the teacher's next question opens something in the student.

It is worth being clear about what intersubjectivity is not, in this setting. It is not a named instructional method with steps you could follow. It is a lens for seeing what is happening in the relationship a lesson runs through, which is why the concept travels so easily into education from psychology and philosophy while never quite becoming a technique.

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Types and Characteristics of Intersubjectivity

The literature has not settled on a fixed taxonomy of intersubjectivity, and any page presenting one as official is presenting a preference. The seven competing definitions credited to Gillespie and Cornish are the closest thing the field has to a map of the variations, and their point is precisely that the variations do not collapse into a single scheme.

What does recur across the accounts is a short list of features. Every version involves two or more subjects. Every version requires mutual awareness rather than one-sided observation. Every version involves shared subjective states rather than shared external facts. And every version treats the exchange as dynamic rather than static — something happening, not something possessed. Those four hold even where the definitions disagree about everything else.

Scheff's compact formulation, "the sharing of subjective states by two or more individuals," is the common thread through all of it. Whatever else an account of intersubjectivity adds, it requires at least two minds in some form of shared experience.

There is a reason the concept resists a single fixed definition, and it is not sloppiness. Intersubjectivity is built out of overlapping subjective worlds, and subjective material is reported rather than measured. A concept assembled from what people say about their own inner states will always admit more than one honest description of itself.

One developmental framework is worth knowing as an exception to the no-taxonomy rule, because it is genuinely established and frequently misattributed. Trevarthen described primary intersubjectivity — direct face-to-face emotional exchange with no external object involved — and secondary intersubjectivity, which adds a third element around the ninth month as infant and caregiver jointly attend to something in the world. A third level, tertiary intersubjectivity, comes from Trevarthen's later collaboration with the Norwegian social scientist Stein Braten, and attributing all three to Trevarthen alone is a common error. That sequence describes how the capacity develops in a life. It does not classify kinds of intersubjectivity, which is the taxonomy this section says does not exist.

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The Short Version

Intersubjectivity is the sharing of subjective states by two or more individuals, and the mutual awareness of self and of another's intentions and feelings. Merriam-Webster gives the adjective as involving or occurring between separate conscious minds, or accessible to two or more subjects. Oxford Reference gives it as the process and product of sharing experiences, knowledge, understandings and expectations with others.

No single settled definition exists — seven distinct ones are credited to Gillespie and Cornish — and the variation is a property of the concept rather than an accident. What holds across all of them is two or more subjects, mutual awareness, shared subjective states, and an exchange that is dynamic rather than static.

The concept's early sightings appear in George Stout's 1903 textbook, with Husserl giving it philosophical depth in the fifth of his Cartesian Meditations at the end of the 1920s, Lacan and Habermas carrying it into psychoanalysis and social theory, and developmental psychology adopting it from anthropological roots that the 2023 Frontiers editorial traces to Mead in 1928 and Bateson in 1975.

And it is not only a term of art. Every conversation in which you have felt genuinely understood was an instance of it, and every one in which you did not was an instance of its absence.

Frequently asked questions

Research

• Theano Kokkinaki, Jonathan Delafield-Butt, Emese Nagy & Colwyn Trevarthen, (2023), Editorial: Intersubjectivity: recent advances in theory, research, and practice, Frontiers in Psychology, 14:1220161 — Source of the psychological definition quoted on this page, of the 1960 turning point in infant research, and of the attribution of the theory's roots to Mead in 1928 and Bateson in 1975. Both quoted passages were checked against the published full text rather than a summary. verified 2026-10-08
• Alex Gillespie & Flora Cornish, (2010), Intersubjectivity: Towards a Dialogical Analysis, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 40(1), 19-46 — The paper credited with assembling seven distinct definitions of intersubjectivity. It treats the term as covering a range of possible relations between perspectives, which is the reason this page presents no taxonomy as official.
• Merriam-Webster, Intersubjective - Definition & Meaning — Source of both quoted senses: 'involving or occurring between separate conscious minds' and 'accessible to or capable of being established for two or more subjects: objective'. The second sense is quoted in full because the run-on to 'objective' is what makes the subjective / objective / intersubjective section necessary. verified 2026-09-13
• Oxford Reference, Intersubjectivity — Source of the process-and-product definition, of the social-and-linguistic-constraint framing, and of the adjacency to social constructionism and symbolic interactionism. The verification date reflects when this entry was last read at its own page rather than through a search index. verified 2026-09-13
• George Frederick Stout, (1903), The Groundwork of Psychology, Hinds & Noble, New York — Cited as an early instance of intersubjective notions in psychology. The book and its 1903 date are confirmed here; no source establishes a precise coinage date for the term itself, which is why this page claims an early sighting rather than an origin. verified 2026-10-08
• Molly Macdonald, (2011), Hegel, Psychoanalysis and Intersubjectivity, Philosophy Compass, 6(7), 448-458 — The paper behind this page's account of a possible French point of origin for the term via Jean Hyppolite. The paper, its year and its concern with Hyppolite are confirmed; the specific attribution of the word l'inter-subjectivite to a 1955 essay is reported here as one scholar's proposal, which is the strength the available sources support.
• Jurgen Habermas, (1970), Towards a theory of communicative competence, Inquiry, 13(1-4) — The 1970 essay in which Habermas questions whether Chomsky's account of linguistic competence can support a theory of communication, on the grounds that it is monological.
• Barbara Rogoff, (1990), Apprenticeship in Thinking: Cognitive Development in Social Context, Oxford University Press — The account of guided participation behind this page's education section. Intersubjectivity - a shared focus and purpose between adult and child - is what guided participation rests on, which is the basis for describing it in education as a lens on the teaching relationship rather than an instructional method. verified 2026-10-08
• Stein Braten & Colwyn Trevarthen, Three Levels of Intersubjectivity in Early Development — Source for the developmental levels named at the end of this page. The literature attributes primary and secondary intersubjectivity to Trevarthen, with tertiary intersubjectivity proposed in his collaboration with Braten; secondary summaries commonly collapse all three onto Trevarthen alone, which is why the joint attribution is stated in the prose.