Journal of Constructivist Psychology

ISSN: 1072-0537 (Print) 1521-0650 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/upcy20

The Phenomenology of Between: An

Intersubjective Epistemology for Psychological
Science

Michael F. Mascolo & Eeva Kallio

To cite this article: Michael F. Mascolo & Eeva Kallio (2020) The Phenomenology of Between: An
Intersubjective Epistemology for Psychological Science, Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 33:1,
1-28, DOI: 10.1080/10720537.2019.1635924

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10720537.2019.1635924

Published online: 27 Dec 2019.

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JOURNAL OF CONSTRUCTIVIST PSYCHOLOGY, 33(1), 1–28, 2020
Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1072-0537 print / 1521-0650 online
DOI: 10.1080/10720537.2019.1635924

The Phenomenology of Between: An Intersubjective

Epistemology for Psychological Science

Michael F. Mascolo
Merrimack College, North Andover, Massachusetts, USA

Eeva Kallio
University of Jyv€askyl€a, Finnish Institute for Educational Research (FIER),
Jyv€askyl€a, Finland

We outline the concept of intersubjective corroboration as an epistemology for psychological sci-

ence. Psychological knowledge arises neither from subjectivity nor objectivity, but from intersub-
jective processes that occur between people. Intersubjective corroboration holds that psychological
inquiry is optimally organized around three mutually-constituting activities: Conceptual coordin-
ation involves clarifying a priori theoretical concepts by subjecting them to rigorous philosophical
analysis. Intersubjective engagement is the research process itself – a form of establishing inter-
subjectivity with participants. Intersubjective corroboration consists of verifying knowledge claims
through the corroboration of multiple sources of evidence. We illustrate the approach in a study
on the identification of emotion.

Scientific psychology has long had a troubled relationship with the study of experience. Its
ambivalence has its origins in the legacy of Cartesian dualism, which continues to influence
scientific psychology to this day (Burkitt, 1998; Shotter, 2017). Descartes famously differenti-
ated between an inner, immaterial, and subjective mind and an external, material, and objective
body. Although scientific psychology appropriately rejects the idea of an incorporeal mind, it
continues to embrace the distinction between a hidden, subjective interior and a public, object-
ive exterior. As a result, traditional approaches to psychological science adopt the view that sci-
entific knowledge about psychological processes must be founded on empirical observations of
publically observable behavior. From this view, the validity of any given system of psycho-
logical knowledge follows from the extent to which scientists can produce objective data—
unbiased observations of the world as it really is—to support theoretical assertions.
Phenomenological perspectives reject strong distinctions between subjective and object-
ive, inner and outer, and knower and known upon which the traditional Cartesian view is
based (Husserl, 1970; Merleau-Ponty, 1945; Zahavi, 2006). Classic and contemporary
philosophical and psychological research suggests that human experience is not something

Received 1 August 2018; accepted 19 November 2018.

Address correspondence to Michael F. Mascolo, Merrimack College, North Andover, MA 01970. Email:
mascolom@merrimack.edu
2 M. MASCOLO AND E. KALLIO

that is inherently private, hidden, and unknowable. Instead, human experience shines
through the body and routinely registers itself in our bodily, linguistic, and emotional
expressions (Overgaard, 2006; ter Hark, 1990). In so doing, it becomes more directly avail-
able to other experiencing individuals. The capacity for intersubjective engagement has its
origins in infancy, when even neonates show a primordial capacity to share and coordinate
experience with caregivers (Meltzoff, 2013; Trevarthen, 2009). The human capacity for
intersubjective engagement is transformed dramatically with the development of language
(Cortina & Liotti, 2010). The processes by which we come to know people are thus funda-
mentally different from those by which we come to know objects and bodies (Martin &
Sugarman, 2009). We do not come to know people by observing inscrutable configurations
of muscle action and then making inferences about the hidden mechanisms that give rise to
them (Hacker, 2012). Instead, social and psychological knowledge arise from intersubject-
ive (interexperiential) processes that occur between people (Mascolo, 2016, 2017; Procter,
2016; Reddy, 2008; Trevarthen, 2009).
We not only come to know self and other through intersubjective engagement, we must
draw on that same intersubjectivity to verify and validate our psychological knowledge
(Chiari & Nuzzo, 2004). Within a phenomenological epistemology, one cannot understand
the process of validating knowledge as one of comparing theoretical assertions against object-
ively represented events: The verification of social knowledge must occur within an interex-
periential space (Husserl, 1970). In what follows, we suggest that one can understand the
process of verifying social knowledge as a form of intersubjective corroboration. We verify
social knowledge not by establishing a correspondence between theoretical knowledge and
objective descriptions of the world but, instead, by corroborating different experiences of the
world against each other.
In making this assertion, we do not use the term experience to refer to a subjective and
unverifiable something encased in the minds of individuals. We invoke the phrase experience
of the world to eliminate the dualism between experience and world: Psychologically, there is
not subjective inner experience and then an objective external world (Greiffenhagen &
Sharrock, 2008; Husserl, 1970). We simultaneously reject both the idea that there is no phys-
ical world outside of our experience and the idea that it is possible for humans to step outside
of experience to record the world “as it is.” Ultimately, all we have is shared experience,
however mediated by the tools we use to represent, measure, and communicate that experi-
ence (e.g., language, quantitative measures, Likert scales, coding schemes, cortisol levels, and
so forth). Our goal is to show that a nonobjectivist epistemology need not result in cognitive
or moral relativism (see Basseches & Brandao, in press). An intersubjective framework pro-
vides an alternative to the prevailing objectivist epistemology while simultaneously support-
ing the production of rigorous knowledge (Mascolo, 2017; Potter, 2012b; Raskin, 2016;
Shotter, 2006).
In what follows, we first outline the ways in which psychology continues to be beholden
to the dualist legacy of Descartes. Thereafter, we review theory and evidence that calls into
question the Cartesian-inspired dualisms that continue to pervade psychology. We then out-
line an intersubjective epistemology for psychological science based on the phenomeno-
logical, constructivist, and sociolinguistic perspectives. In so doing, we show how methods of
inquiry drawn from this perspective can embrace research from first-, second-, and third-per-
son perspectives and illustrate the interweaving of such methodologies in a third-person ana-
lysis of emotion experience.
 INTERSUBJECTIVE EPISTEMOLOGY 3

THE INTERSUBJECTIVE ORIGINS OF

PSYCHOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE

Drawing on the Cartesian tradition, it is often assumed that individuals have privileged access
to their own experience. That is, experience is a private affair that can be known only by the
experiencing individual him- or herself. As a result, an observer can have no way of directly
knowing another’s experience. Persons come to know their own experiences through intro-
spection, the process of “looking within” the self. Some researchers have suggested that,
because individuals have direct contact with their experience, they cannot be mistaken about
those experiences (Ortony, Clore, & Collins, 1988). Others have called into question the val-
idity of introspective reports (Dunlap, 1923; Irvine, 2012).

Beyond the Private Interior

In a series of famous philosophical arguments, Wittgenstein (1953, 1980a, 1980b) rejected

the idea that experience is a fundamentally private affair. His rejection is based, in part, on
his argument against the possibility of a private language. In this argument, Wittgenstein con-
sidered the question of how it would be possible to use words to refer to what we take to be
“private” experiences. Wittgenstein argued that if experiences were truly private, there could
be no way to verify the meaning of the words we use to refer to them. Wittgenstein (1953)
suggested that the process by which introspection is assumed to function is akin to the pro-
cess of identifying an object (e.g., call it a beetle) placed in a box that no one except the
owner could ever see. In such circumstances, there could be no public way to verify that peo-
ple were using the term “beetle” in the same way. You might use the term “beetle” to refer to
one thing that only you can see, whereas I might use it to refer to something entirely different
(or to nothing at all). For Wittgenstein, this shows the absurdity of the belief that what we
call inner experiences are private events. The fact that we are able to coordinate the use of
words to refer to our “inner experiences” suggests that there must be some public criteria on
which to base our shared use of language. Wittgenstein suggested that public expressions of
experience (e.g., writhing in pain, crying in distress, and smiling in joy) function as the public
criteria that provide the basis for the shared construction and use of internal state language.
The importance of this argument goes beyond the question of the social origins of inner
state language. If we need public criteria to establish the meanings of inner state language,
and if those public criteria consist of expressive acts, then there must be a direct rather than
merely contingent relation between public expression and phenomenal experience. In other
words, the public expressions of experience provide the shared points of reference that are
then used to anchor our use of inner experience terms. For example, our understanding of the
experiencing of joy comes not from an introspective capacity to look within ourselves and
label a feeling we find there. Instead, public expressions such as smiling and vocalizing (say,
upon receiving a job offer) provide public criteria people use to coordinate a shared under-
standing of the experience of joy. This is not to say that the public use of inner state words
precedes our capacity to experience. To the contrary, we experience our “inner states” imme-
diately and directly. Think of the child’s bursting experience of joy at a birthday party imme-
diately experienced and expressed. Wittgenstein’s argument is that we would not be able to
4 M. MASCOLO AND E. KALLIO

use words to make such direct experiences intelligible to each other if our experiences were
truly private (Overgaard, 2006). This is what allowed Wittgenstein (1980) to write:

“We see emotion.”—As opposed to what?—We do not see facial contortions and make the
inference that he is feeling joy, grief, boredom. We describe a face immediately as sad, radiant,
bored, even when we are unable to give any other description of the features. … In general I
do not surmise fear in him—I see it. I do not feel that I am deducing the probable existence of
something inside from something outside; rather, it is as if the human face were in a way
translucent and that I were seeing it not in reflected light but rather in its own. (§570, p. 170)

In this observation, Wittgenstein indicated the coconstitutive nature of experience and

expression. For Wittgenstein, there is not experience and also expression; instead, expression
is the public manifestation of experience (Hacker, 2012; Mascolo, 2009; Racine &
Carpendale, 2008). Consistent with Kelly’s (1955) conception of emotional experience as a
state of actual or impending change of the organism as a whole, experience does not occupy
a separate private sphere that controls external behavior from within. Experience is an aspect
of ongoing activity. The wide toothy smile—that which creates the “crow’s feet” in one’s
temples—is a manifestation of joy; they are flip sides of the same process.
This does not imply that experience is never hidden, or that people cannot deceive others
about their thoughts and feelings. It merely says that spontaneous experiences are not a priori
or even typically hidden. Over time, a person can learn to hide or fake a smile. In so doing,
however, people exert control over the external aspects of their actions – not the internal
experiences themselves (ter Hark, 1990). When this happens, the attempt to control the
expression is often revealed by other forms of unanticipated expression: The inauthentic smile
is belied by the absence of crow’s feet (Gunnery & Ruben, 2016). Still further,
Wittgenstein’s point is not that we are able to directly experience the other’s experience;
instead, it is that because another person’s experience is not a priori hidden, it is knowable
by virtue of our direct rather than merely inferential access to it.

The Move to Intersubjectivity

Wittgenstein’s claims are consistent with a large and growing body of research suggesting
that psychological development is founded on an inherent capacity for intersubjectivity
with others. We define intersubjectivity as the capacity for shared or coordinated experience
within episodes of joint activity (Foolen et al., 2012; Matusov, 1996; Verhagan, 2008).
Empirical research shows that infant–caregiver dyads are capable of establishing rudimen-
tary forms of intersubjectivity soon after infants are born (Trevarthen, 2009). For example,
neonates are able to imitate facial expressions (Meltzoff, 2013) and become dysregulated in
the presence of an unresponsive adult (Nagy, 2017). Two- to three-month old infants par-
ticipate in coordinated and emotionally organized “protoconversations” involving a mutu-
ally attuned give and take of facial and vocalic mirroring (Lavelli & Fogel, 2013), a
phenomenon Trevarthen (1993) dubbed primary intersubjectivity. By three months, infants
anticipate being picked up by their caregivers, suggesting a degree of awareness of care-
givers’ intentions (Reddy, 2015). During the second half of the first year of life, infants
 INTERSUBJECTIVE EPISTEMOLOGY 5

begin to respond and comply with the verbal directives, and begin to initiate teasing
exchanges with their caregivers (Reddy, 2015).
Many have argued that in such exchanges, infant and caregiver coordinate not only their
facial and vocal action but also their emotional experiences (Colle, Becchio, & Bara, 2008;
Trevarthen, 2009). Note that “coordinating experience” is not the same as sharing, mirror-
ing, or having the same experience (Matusov, 1996; Verhagan, 2008). Coordination occurs
as infant and caregiver adjust their actions and experiences to each other in real time. This
occurs when a caregiver withdraws from intensive social engage when an infant who shows
signs of distress, or when an infant smiles and coos in an active attempt to restore the care-
giver’s engagement. The idea that young infants are capable of primitive forms of intersub-
jectivity is bolstered by the discovery of mirror neurons (Kilner & Lemon, 2013). Using
single-cell recordings, di Pellegrino Fadiga, Fogassi, Gallese, and Rizzolatti (1992) found
that a subset of premotor neurons in macaque monkeys would fire both when the monkey
performed a particular type of action and when it observed another monkey or human per-
form the same goal-directed action. The idea that similar systems may operate in humans
suggests that common neurological pathways underlie both the observation and the produc-
tion of certain classes of goal-directed motor action. Such common pathways provide a
foundation for understanding how infants are capable of entering into emotionally mediated
social interactions from the start of life (Meltzoff, 2013).

Intersubjectivity and Discursive Action

Intersubjectivity provides the basis for the development of language (Cortina & Liotti,
2010; McCune & Zlatev, 2015; Verhagen, 2008). Language is a system for representing,
generating, and communicating shared meanings that have social origins in cultural his-
tory. In development, the capacity for language brings intersubjectivity together with the
capacity for symbolic representation (McCune & Zlatev, 2015). Verghagan (2008) has
suggested that intersubjectivity is inherently “argumentative”—that is, concerned with
influencing other people’s attitudes and belief. It is built into the very structure of lan-
guage. The capacity for language not only builds on intersubjectivity, it provides the pri-
mary vehicle through which humans are able to create shared representations the
experiential worlds of both self and other. It is through our capacity to master the use of
language that we are able to make our experiential life intelligible to ourselves and to
others. Thus, a “scientific” analysis of human experience necessarily builds on meanings
represented in ordinary language, however crude and underdeveloped they might be. A
systematic inquiry into human experience requires not that we shed our everyday lan-
guage categories but, instead, that we articulate, differentiate, and refine them by compar-
ing them against the intersubjective data of human experience. The attempt to seek
scientific precision through objective observation renders psychological experience opa-
que to third-party observers. Instead of importing methodologies that have their origins in
the study of objects and bodies, it is perhaps better to study psychological processes by
exploiting the primary means through which we gain psychological knowledge in the first
place—namely, sign-mediated intersubjective engagement (Edwards & Potter, 2005;
Potter, 2012b; Zeedyk, 2006).
6 M. MASCOLO AND E. KALLIO

AN INTERSUBJECTIVE EPISTEMOLOGY FOR

PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE

The concept of intersubjectivity offers an opportunity to transcend traditional Cartesian

dualities (e.g., inner–outer, subject–object, self–other; Mascolo, 2016, 2017; Matusov,
1996; Merleau-Ponty, 1945; Overgaard, 2006). If objectivity functions as the antithesis to
subjectivity, the concept of intersubjectivity hold out the promise of synthesizing the
contradictory aspects of these concepts while resolving their contradiction (Kallio, 2011).
Although the term intersubjective is commonly employed, the term interexperiential may
be preferable. Replacing the term of subjectivity with experience preserves the phenom-
enal aspects of inner life without implying that inner states are necessarily private or hid-
den from view. In this section, we outline an intersubjective epistemology for
psychological science. Table 1 provides a summary of the conceptual and methodological
implications of three epistemological approaches to understanding persons (Davidson,
1996). These include frameworks based on subjectivist, objectivist, and intersubject-
ive traditions.

The View from Subjectivity

As indicated in Table 1, the subjective approach reflects the idea that personal experience
is the primary focus of psychological activity. It its most extreme form, a subjectivist epis-
temology reflects the perspective of the Cartesian cogito: Descartes famously sought to
identify the limits of certainty through the use of the method of doubt. Although he was
able to doubt the certainty of various aspects of the experience world, he found that he was
unable to doubt the fact that he was in fact doubting. He took this seeming certainty not
only as evidence of a separate province of the subjective mind but also as an indication of
the autonomy and reliability of reason. With the severing of mind from body, experience is
understood as a private property of the individual mind, a subjectivity to which only the
experiencing individual can gain access.
In philosophy and psychology, the concept of subjectivity typically has been used in
contradistinction to the concept of objectivity. Whereas objectivity is typically tied to the
seeming certainty of publicly observable events, subjectivity tends to be identified with its
contrast—to unverified and unverifiable personal feelings, beliefs, and values. Subjectivity
refers to the view from the first-person perspective (Zahavi, 2006)—that is, “what it’s like to
be” (Nagel, 1974) a person, a class of person (e.g., a male, female, immigrant), or certain
kind of being (e.g., a bat).
In psychology, subjectivity tends to be associated with the method of introspection, which
is attributed to the early structuralists (Titchener, 1911; Wundt, 1907). However, contrary to
popular belief, Wundt’s view of introspection was quite conservative. He limited it to the
analysis of lower-order perceptual phenomena, and embraced different methods for the study
of the cultural aspects of human life that he saw as primary (Danziger, 1980). Introspection
was embraced as a primary method only by 19th-century advocates of psychology as a sci-
ence of mind and subjectivity (H€offding, 1892; Lewes, 1879; Sully, 1892). Interest in intro-
spection as a primary methodological tool waned after Wundt’s founding of the first
experimental laboratory in 1879. From that time, advocates of introspection (Angell, 1913;
 INTERSUBJECTIVE EPISTEMOLOGY 7

TABLE 1
Experience, Methodology, and Agency Under Three Epistemological Frameworks

Methodology and
Experience Verification Agency

Cartesian Subjective experience is Introspection and self-report Cogito controls action

Subjectivism primary, immediate,
and private
Objectivism Private derivative of brain
or bodily Processes
Embodied Ongoing aspect of relational
Intersubjectivity action manifested in
bodily activity
(a) unbiased observation;
(b) operational definitions;
(c) experimentalism
and control
(a) Intersubjective
corroboration;
(b) methodological pluralism
(first-, second-, and third-
person methods)
Behavior and experience are
caused outcomes; agency
is derivative or difficult
to explain
Activity as continuous
property of biological and
psychological systems;
conscious control as
aspect of already existing
hierarchical control

James, 1890; Wheeler, 1923; Woodworth, 1931) tended regard it as an adjunct or corrective
to emerging objectivist (Johnston, 1905) and behavioral (Watson, 1915) approaches of the
20th century.
The term introspection is often used as a synonym for self-report. However, this usage
glosses over deep theoretical and methodological concerns. Introspection has its origins in the
Latin introspicere, “to look into.” Introspection is thus structured by ocular (i.e., looking) and
spatial (i.e., inside/outside) metaphors (Fernyhough, 2006; Hurlburt & Schwitzgebel, 2011).
We (Hurlburt and Schwitzgebel, 2011) think of experiences as entities that lie within a con-
tained space; introspecting is thus the act of looking into that space. The problem, of course,
is that experiences are not entities located within space. It is not possible to look into the self
or mind in order to observe experience: There is no place to look and no thing to see. This is
not to say that we do not (Fernyhough, 2006) experience. It is merely to say that what we
call describing experiences has little in common with observing entities in the world
(Edwards & Potter, 2005). If I am called on to describe my experience of a rose, I do so dis-
cursively in an act of reflection—that is, through the semiotic capacity for consciousness to
loop back and take itself as its own object of awareness (Mead, 1934; Zahavi, 2006). The act
of reflecting on experience is a discursive skill that develops over time (Harre & Gillett,
1994). It is mediated by the use of words to construct shared representations of phenomenal
experiences that change over time and that typically have already passed from the present to
the immediate or distant past (Potter, 2012a; Shotter, 2006; Zahavi, 2006).

The Search for Certainty Through Objectivity

The objectivist approach embraces the opposite pole of the Cartesian dichotomy—the idea
that the person is a mechanistic system governed by physical laws. As indicated in Table 1,
8 M. MASCOLO AND E. KALLIO

from this view, psychological inquiry requires the use of objective observation—accurate
recordings that are free from bias and framed in a theory-neutral language (Reiss &
Sprenger, 2017). Within an objectivist framework, experience—conceived as a subjective
process—can be studied only if it is operationalized using external indicators. What we call
“mind’ is understood as a derivative product of brain activity. As a result, it becomes diffi-
cult to understand how experience can play a causal role within the mechanisms of the
brain. Although materialists may agree that people experience themselves as personal
agents, strict adherence to a mechanistic-causal model implies that our sense of agency is
illusory (Wegner, 2003). As a result, it becomes difficult to consider people as self-deter-
mining agents. Thus, from an objective-mechanistic view, persons are not so much movers
as they are simply moved.
If we operate from within the traditional subjective-objective polarity, the task of studying
experience becomes difficult if not impossible. As noted, if experiences are viewed as inher-
ently subjective, there can be no way to be certain about what another is experiencing, or even
that another person is experiencing. One way scholars have attempted to address this problem
is to seek objective indicators of subjective experience (Anderson, 2015). This may occur, for
example, when researchers seek to define subjective feeling states operationally in terms of pat-
terned facial acts, vocalizations, postural changes, instrumental actions, verbal reports, or even
neurobiological changes. Again, if experiential states are private events, it becomes difficult to
see how this is possible. In order to identify objective indicators of subjective events, one must
already have knowledge of the nature of the subjective event and its relation to the public indi-
cator. Such an endeavor thus presupposes the very knowledge that is assumed to be beyond the
reach of objective inquiry (Greiffenhagen & Sharrock, 2008; Mascolo, 2017).
For example, a researcher who attempts to identify the neural correlates of fear might
operationalize fear using, say, facial actions or self-report (Anderson, 2015). However, the
claim that such actions can identify the subjective experience presumes already existing
knowledge about the “subjective” state in question. The subjective-objective dichotomy thus
puts us in a bind: If we assume a person’s experience is private, then it cannot be objectively
observed. However, the ability to identify subjective states using objective indicators presup-
poses already existing knowledge of the relation between the two. But where does this know-
ledge come from? Either the link is guessed at or taken on faith or the so-called private state
is not actually private after all. Either way, strong distinctions between the subjective and
objective, inner and outer, and private and public begin to dissolve.

The Intersubjective Synthesis

As indicated in Table 1, the situation changes the moment we acknowledge the intersubjective
basis of psychological knowledge. Our capacity to make terms like pain, joy, or jealousy intelli-
gible to each other presumes an interexperiential frame of reference (Edwards & Potter, 2005).
On the one hand, this is made possible because of the ways that the experience of others shines
through their bodily actions, and how we ourselves are moved by those experiences (ter Hark,
1990). We immediately experience expressions of pain in others with our own empathic pain,
or with sympathy, fear for the well-being of the other, or a desire to help. On the other hand, at
a cultural and symbolic level, our social interactions are mediated by linguistically mediated
systems of meaning (Edwards & Potter, 2005). Our capacity to enter into the experiential world
 INTERSUBJECTIVE EPISTEMOLOGY 9

of others is mediated by our capacity to represent the states of self and others in terms of histor-
ically evolved psychological lexicons (Burkitt, 2012; Potter, 2017). Thus, psychological know-
ledge is not a subjective product of examining private experience; nor does it require breaking
through a person’s opaque exterior in order to figure out what is inside. Humans gain psycho-
logical knowledge in ways that are fundamentally different from the ways they come to
know inanimate objects (De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2008; Legerstee and Markova, 2008;
Mascolo, 2017)—namely, through the intersubjective and mutual incorporation of experience
between people
It is perhaps ironic, therefore, that the objectivist approach functions as the dominant meth-
odology in psychological science. Psychology’s use of objective methodology has its origins in
its desire to emulate the processes through which the natural sciences achieved their success.
However, this line of thinking raises significant problems. First, unlike inanimate objects,
humans act on the basis of the meanings that events have for them (Kelly, 1955; Mascolo,
2017; Shotter, 2006). If this is so, psychological research must be targeted toward understand-
ing the meanings that mediate human action. Second, psychological scientists are in the busi-
ness of studying people. Unlike the natural scientist, the psychologist cannot divorce his or her
experience as a person from his or her role as scientist. Indeed, to do so would marginalize the
primary way that humans gain psychological knowledge—through intersubjective engagement.
To say that intersubjective engagement is a primary means for understanding people is not
to suggest that it is infallible. It merely states that the methods we use to understand psycho-
logical experience cannot be divorced from their intersubjective origins. This is true whether
our inquiries operate from the first-, second-, or third-person points of view. From an intersub-
jective perspective, first-person accountings (erroneously called introspection) operate as
second-order reflections on experience mediated by socially coordinated symbol systems
(Feest, 2014). Second-person inquiries occur through direct engagement or discursive inter-
action with others (de Jeagher & di Paolo, 2008). Third-person inquiry occurs when we exam-
ine what people say and do in actual social encounters. This occurs when researchers observe
or record the activity of others with whom they are not directly engaging in person-to-person
encounters. Third-person methodology is essential to analyze psychological processes that oper-
ate outside of awareness, as well as understanding the workings of the biological substrata that
mediate various forms of psychological action. Thus, from an intersubjective view, there is no
a priori reason to reject any particular method of study. There is a need, however, to recognize
and exploit the fundamentally intersubjective processes through which we gain basic psycho-
logical knowledge, including the ways in which first- and third-person modes of inquiry operate
within and are informed by those intersubjective exchanges.

PSYCHOLOGICAL INQUIRY AS INTERSUBJECTIVE

CORROBORATION

From the standpoint of objectivity, the validity of any given recording of events refers to the
extent to which it provides an “accurate” description of the event as it really is. The standard
approach to assessing validity involves comparing psychological assessments on any given meas-
ure to other assessments assumed to measure the psychological events in question. Such a proced-
ure, however, presumes that the assessments against which we assess the validity of any given
measure already provide accurate measures of the psychological events in question. Because this
10 M. MASCOLO AND E. KALLIO

is never possible, traditional approaches to validation reduce to comparing the extent to which
two assessments believed to measure the same variable are correlated. In this way, even in
research performed from an objectivist perspective, what we take to be validity is really a form
of intersubjective corroboration—the process of assessing the correspondence of one set of medi-
ated experiences of the world against other such forms of mediated experience (Krause, 2012).
The concept of intersubjective corroboration is meant to provide a framework for under-
standing how to approach psychological and social research that is neither objectivist nor sub-
jectivist, neither universalistic nor relativistic, neither realist nor skeptical.1 Intersubjective
corroboration seeks to assess theoretical claims neither in terms of their correspondence
(Popper, 1963; Russell, 1912) to an independently existing reality, their internal coherence
(Davidson, 1986; Thagard, 2007), or their pragmatic utility (James, 1909; Rorty, 1982) in
explaining the world. Instead, it embraces the idea that the value of any given claim to psy-
chological and social knowledge grows as a function of a process by which it is corroborated
by—or transformed so as to be integrated with—various forms of sharable evidence gathered
from various perspectives. The credibility of knowledge claims is thus limited by the exist-
ence of contradictions and conflicts among knowledge claims themselves, different sources
and forms of evidence, and variations in the pretheoretical background conditions that frame
psychological inquiry and interpretation. Epistemic conflicts can exist between and among
theoretical statements, sources of evidence, pretheoretical assumptions and values, methodo-
logical presuppositions, beliefs about what counts as evidence, and so forth.
From this viewpoint, more adequate knowledge develops through a process of resolving
conflicts between and among the theoretical statements, background conditions, and sour-
ces of evidence. As a result, scientific knowledge claims are not to be judged as true, accur-
ate, or objective reflections of an independently existing reality, even as that reality may be
assumed to exist. Instead, theoretical statements can be said to be more or less highly coor-
dinated with each other and corroborated by various forms of sharable evidence. It follows
that inquiries conducted under different theoretical or assumptive frameworks, or under dif-
ferent rules of evidence, should not be regarded as inherently incommensurate.
Intersubjective corroboration holds out the possibility that differences in understanding cre-
ated under competing frameworks can be coordinated or reconciled—that it is possible to
achieve intersubjectivity between alternative versions of the world through rigorous mutual
interrogation of conflicting perspectives and experiences, or through a process of resolving
conflicting interpretations by constructing higher-order syntheses (Basseches & Brandao, in
press; Valsiner, in press).
As a model for understanding the processes by which research can be performed in the
psychological sciences, intersubjective corroboration involves three basic interconnected
processes. Conceptual clarification is the process of ensuring that the a priori concepts
invoked by investigators within any given study are defined clearly against the backdrop of
other possible ways of defining a given psychological category (Hacker, 2009; Hutto, 2009).
Intersubjective engagement refers to the process by which researchers assess psychological
states in terms of intersubjective meanings, however direct, mediated, or emergent within the
research process (de Quincey, 2000; Finlay, 2016). Between-person corroboration is the pro-
cess by which the meaning of any given datum or body of data—that is, the outcomes of dif-
ferent forms of intersubjective engagement—is verified through the corroboration of evidence
between and among researchers (Duranti, 2010; Kjosavik, 2012; Rowbottom, 2008).
 INTERSUBJECTIVE EPISTEMOLOGY 11

Conceptual Clarification and Coordination

It is sometimes said that the scientific process begins with observation, and that observation
provides the ultimate test of the validity of a theoretical concept. This line of thinking can
lead an investigator toward the erroneous conclusion that the task of defining a theoretical
concept is something to be done through observation alone. As noted, this is not the case. If
psychological knowledge has its origins in intersubjective processes that occur between peo-
ple, then the criteria that define instances of any given psychological state are already prefig-
ured to some extent in the category itself. If this is so, then psychological inquiry is not
something that can begin with objective observation defined as the recording of events inde-
pendent of shared preunderstandings. It is more correct to say that any given observation of
psychological events relies on already existing understandings that identify what counts as an
instance of any given psychological category. Such understandings are sometimes explicit,
but quite often are implicit and unarticulated. If this is so, an initial task of psychological
inquiry is to articulate and clarify the philosophical, theoretical, and conceptual foundations
of the psychological terms we employ. (For rigorous examples of philosophical, phenomeno-
logical, and conceptual analyses of psychological categories, see Bennett & Hacker [2003],
Bonner & Friedman [2011]; Purshouse [2001], and de Rivera [2006].)
Conceptual coordination consists of the rigorous philosophical and conceptual analysis of
the a priori meaning of the theoretical constructs used in any given study, and in identifying
relations between such meanings and those endorsed by other theorists and researchers. From
an intersubjective perspective, the meaning of any given term depends on how it is used in dis-
cursive exchanges. Theorists and laypersons alike use psychological terms in different ways
(Liberman, 2012). For example, Feinberg, Willer, and Keltner (2012) defined embarrassment
as an emotion experienced when individuals feel they have violated a social convention or dis-
rupted ongoing social interactions. Purshouse (2001) held that embarrassment reflected the
experience of exposure to which one is averse. For Sabini and Silver (1997), embarrassment
involved the exposure of what can appear to be a flaw in one’s character, but actuality is not.
As shown in Figure 1, there are implications of adopting one or another of these meanings.
The abstract idea that embarrassment involves a violation of social convention makes it difficult
to discriminate it from other emotions, such as guilt and shame. In contrast, thinking about
embarrassment as a reaction to aversive exposure helps differentiate it from the experience of
guilt. In guilt, because making amends allows people to correct their wrongdoing and maintain
their integrity, they are often willing to expose their wrongdoing. In this way, aversive exposure
would appear more relevant to embarrassment than guilt. However, this definition makes it more
difficult to differentiate embarrassment from shame, which occurs when one’s spoiled identity is
exposed to others (Lindsay-Hartz, de Rivera, & Mascolo, 1995). Under the definition that embar-
rassment is the experience of appearing but not actually being flawed, it becomes possible to dif-
ferentiate embarrassment, shame, and guilt. In any given study, our methods and measures are
structured by the questions we ask and the concepts we seek to test. Failure to differentiate our
use of any given term from other possible uses has important implications for theory, research
design, and interpretation. If we fail to clarify the concepts that structure our research, we not
only will be unaware of whether our measures are relevant to our research goals, we also will be
unable to understand what the results of our studies mean relative to those goals.
In psychology, the premium placed on empirical observation tends to cast a priori philo-
sophical and conceptual analyses as peripheral at best, and at worst, as a source of
12 M. MASCOLO AND E. KALLIO

FIGURE 1 The process of conceptual coordination.

unconstrained speculation that obscures the quest for theoretical and empirical precision.
However, if psychological knowledge has its origins in intersubjective processes, this pre-
supposition is not simply unwarranted, it does damage to the process of empirical inquiry.
Far from being a source of unwanted speculation, rigorous philosophical, linguistic and
conceptual analysis of psychological categories is necessary in order to clarify the struc-
ture, richness, and boundaries of the constructs that structure theory and research.
Philosophical and conceptual analyses do not replace empirical inquiry. Instead, they func-
tion to clarify the full range of our theoretical concepts and presuppositions so that we can
properly understand what empirical data can and cannot reveal about our theoretical ideas.
Without a full conceptual and even philosophical analysis of psychological concepts, it not
only becomes difficult to construct so-called operational definitions, it becomes difficult to
know exactly what such operations are intended to measure. In this way, the failure to sub-
ject our psychological categories to rigorous conceptual and philosophical analysis actually
diminishes rather than enhances their scientific viability. Clarifying our theoretical con-
cepts sharpens the network of intersubjective meanings that organize psychological inquiry
(Hammersley, 2006).

Psychological ‘Measurement’ as Intersubjective Engagement

The second moment in the process of intersubjective corroboration involves the measurement
of psychological states and processes. We maintain that psychological measurement operates as
a form of intersubjective engagement. From an objectivist approach, psychological measure-
ment proceeds by developing operational definitions of psychological constructs—indicators of
psychological events that are publicly observable and quantifiable. The experiences of both the
participant and the researcher are assumed to be hidden, unreliable, or unverifiable as public
sources of evidence. However, not only do we have deeper access to the experiences of others
than is ordinary appreciated, but our ability to identity so-called objective indicators of inner
experience depends on already existing intersubjective knowledge. It is such taken-for-granted
knowledge that makes classification and communication—and thus any form of psychological
inquiry—possible (Husserl, 1970; Mascolo, 2009). Instead of marginalizing intersubjective
knowledge as something unverifiable and unscientific, it is better to build a psychological sci-
ence by extending and refining the intersubjective processes through which we gain psycho-
logical knowledge in the first place (Mari, Carbone, & Giordani, 2017).
The process of intersubjective engagement occurs both directly and indirectly. In social
inquiry, the most direct form of intersubjective engagement occurs in face-to-face interactions
 INTERSUBJECTIVE EPISTEMOLOGY 13

between researchers and participants (e.g., interviews, ethnographic analysis) or third-person

observational analysis of social interactions that occur between people over time (e.g., natur-
alistic observation, discourse analysis). In such studies—often qualitative rather than quantita-
tive in nature—the processes by which observers interpret the meaning of what participants
say and do draw heavily on everyday processes of social interpretation (Hammersley and
Atkinson, 2006). In everyday social interaction, social partners draw on (a) shared knowledge
represented in everyday language—much of it implicit and intuitive—about the emotional
meaning of various facial, vocal, and bodily actions; (b) shared understandings of how cir-
cumstances of everyday events are typically interpreted by members of a given community;
(c) implicit and explicit expectations for normative action in typical social circumstances; and
(d) their own experiences and psychological reactions as they arise in response to the emo-
tional expressions of their partner (Mascolo, 2009).
In most qualitative research, the process of interpreting the meaning of what people
involves refining and reflecting on these everyday sign-mediated sociointerpretive processes
(De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2008; Edwards & Potter, 2005; Finlay, 2016). In intersubjective
engagement, the researcher’s intersubjective experience of the participant’s bodily and ver-
bally expressed experience functions as the primary and most basic research instrument. This
is so regardless of whether the researcher is engaged in second-person, face-to-face inter-
action or the observation of the third-person behavior of others. In any given act of observa-
tion—for example, observing the actions of people recorded on videotape—social
interpretation operates as a linguistic (Edwards & Potter, 2005; Harre & Gillett, 1994), reflex-
ive (Burkitt, 2012; Finlay, 2016), and hermeneutic process (Chiari & Nuzzo, 2004; Lawn,
2003)—an iterative cycle engagement, intuition, and reflection.
Any social interpretation begins as an act of (a) engaging with the experience of the other
as it is revealed in their actions, expressions, and verbalizations. Within acts of engagement,
the researcher’s sense of the other’s experience (b) arises intuitively. An individual observer’s
interpretation of the other’s experience is grounded by his or her own personal conceptual
and emotional systems (Chiari & Nuzzo, 2004; Kelly, 1955). Although embedded in and
appropriated from shared symbolic meanings located within one’s culture (Burkitt, 2002), the
observer’s interpretations are nonetheless mediated by his or her own personal meanings and
experiences (Mascolo, 2009). These include the observer’s understanding of psychological
terms, how he or she feels as a product of the other’s expressed words and actions, the rela-
tion between what is said and done—and what is not said and done—to local norms and
expectations, and so forth. It follows that the observer’s intuition of the other’s experience is
not a mere cognitive affair; it is a product of the full range of affective, cognitive, and rela-
tional experience that occurs within the researcher in the context of his or her ongoing
engagement with the other (Burkitt, 2012; Mascolo, 2009). Having registered such experi-
ence, the researcher’s task then becomes one of (c) reflecting on the bases of the intuitive
judgment in order to articulate a preliminary representation of the other’s experience. This
articulation becomes a kind of hypothesis that, in further acts of engagement, are tested
against the actions, expressions, and vocalizations represented on the videotape—or, more
precisely, against the data of the researcher’s intersubjective engagement with actions, expres-
sions, and verbalizations of videotaped actors (Figure 2).
We maintain that quantitative and experimental research also operates as a form of
intersubjective engagement between researcher and participant, albeit in a less direct and
obvious way. The use of any behavioral measure as an index of a psychological process
14 M. MASCOLO AND E. KALLIO

FIGURE 2 Psychological inquiry as intersubjective engagement.

or state relies on already existing intersubjective knowledge about the meaning of the
psychological process being investigated and its relation to the measure in question. For
example, consider Ekman’s (1993) classic research seeking to establish the existence of a
universal set of basic emotions that are revealed by a set of universal facial patterns. With
meticulous detail, Ekman (1993) and his colleagues identified a series of facial patterns
that are commonly taken as expressions of “basic” emotions in Western cultures (anger,
contempt, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise). A variety of studies have shown that
members of diverse literate and preliterate cultures identify these same facial patterns as
expressions of these same emotional categories at high levels of agreement.2 These
important studies provided the foundation for a suite of studies demonstrating that emo-
tional states identified by specifiable facial patterns show a variety of systemic properties
(Cordaro et al., 2018).
Given such findings, it is tempting to say that patterned facial actions function as objective
indicators of subjective emotional states (see Anderson, 2015). Nonetheless, as valuable as these
studies are, it would be a mistake to say that the emotion–facial expression links are products
of objective observation. This is because what counts as an emotion and its expression is
already specified by the shared experiences and understandings that define the meaning of
everyday emotion words like anger, contempt, joy, and so forth. Furthermore, claims of univer-
sality depend on the a priori capacity to translate the meaning of emotion words into other dif-
ferent languages. In this way, the task of identifying both the emotion and the particular
expression of that emotion presupposes a capacity to coordinate and share the meaning of emo-
tion words. Thus, even so-called objective methods of psychological inquiry presuppose a foun-
dation of intersubjective knowledge and operate as a form of intersubjective engagement
between researcher and participant. These statements subtract nothing from the importance of
Ekman’s research. However, they do help clarify what Ekman and his colleagues have accom-
plished. Ekman has not established objective links between inner emotions and outer facial
expressions. It is more correct to say that Ekman’s research suggests that facial expressions
operate as universal public criteria that communities use to create the linguistic categories com-
munity members use to identify and express their emotional experiences.

Between-Person Corroboration

The third mode of intersubjective corroboration involves between-person corroboration. The

corroboration of experience between researchers provides a means to verify that researchers
 INTERSUBJECTIVE EPISTEMOLOGY 15

are able to refer to the data of their experience in shared ways. Epistemologically, we suggest
claims to knowledge gain their validity not through a process of comparing psychological cat-
egories to the world as it is but by corroborating experiences of the world—however medi-
ated by language or psychological tools—against each other. In observational research, this
process is similar to the concept of interobserver reliability, the quest to establish the degree
to which observers are able to classify psychological events in the same way (Hammersley,
1987). The fact that observers are able to establish high levels of between-person reliability
does not mean that they have described the world objectively; it only means that they are
able to coordinate their understanding and use of psychological categories to describe particu-
lar facets of human action and experience. Any claims to knowledge that result from such
studies are defined with reference to the shared understanding and practices the researchers
have been able to establish between and among them and the research community at large.
Thus, knowledge claims are made not by comparing descriptions of the world to the world as
it is but by corroborating one set of sign-mediated experiences-of-the-world against others.
This process is indicated in Figure 3.
What does it mean to speak of knowledge claims from an intersubjective perspective? If it
is not possible to check out theoretical propositions against the world as it really is, by what
means can we determine the merits of our theoretical statements? Is it appropriate to speak of
truth? If not, are all claims to knowledge relativistic? The idea that we are not able to
describe the world as it is does not render claims to knowledge to be subjective or unreliable;
it simply means that knowledge claims cannot gain credibility through an appeal to a world
unmediated by experience. Instead, within an intersubjective epistemology, knowledge state-
ments gain credibility through their capacity to be corroborated by various forms of evi-
dence—that is, mediated experiences of the world—which themselves gain credibility
through their capacity to be corroborated between researchers and between studies. In this
way, instead of speaking of this or that statement as true or valid, it might be better to speak
of knowledge claims as more or less corroborated by different sources of mediated evidence.
Furthermore, the statement that we cannot describe the world independent of our experienc-
ing does not imply that knowledge is subjective. This is because experience is not a “mental”
something that is encased within a private cogito. By experience, we mean experience of the
world, and that experience is capable of being shared and corroborated between people. It is
through the capacity to corroborate our experiences of the world against each other that we
are able to put knowledge claims to the test. In this way, intersubjectively corroborated know-
ledge is neither subjective nor arbitrary. In fact, freed from the limiting constraints of object-
ivity, researchers may be able to produce even more rigorous descriptions of psychological
states than might otherwise be possible.

AN ILLUSTRATION OF INTERSUBJECTIVE CORROBORATION

We illustrate the process of intersubjective corroboration through a group analysis of a single

emotional expression as it occurred in a videotaped exchange between a student and his
teacher. The goal of the group analysis was simply to describe the nature of the emotional
experience being expressed at the moment at hand.
16 M. MASCOLO AND E. KALLIO

FIGURE 3 Knowledge verification as between-person corroboration.

A Corroborative Analysis of Social Experience

Several sources of data were available for the task of addressing this question. These include
(a) videotape of the entire conversation that occurred between a teacher and student; (b) the
student’s own first-person account of his experience (recorded on the videotape); and (c) a
third-person moment-by-moment descriptive representation of the student’s specific words,
gestures, and bodily responses as they occurred in relation to each other time during the 10-
second period on which the target exchange occurred. The process of analyzing the video-
taped interaction involved a corroborative analysis among three researchers whose task was
to compare, corroborate, and reconcile at best as possible their respective second-person
experiences and interpretations of the student’s videotaped emotional expression. The method
of between-researcher corroboration operated as follows:

1. Identification of data. Each researcher was given a (third-person) transcript of the

videotaped interaction including the dialogue between the teacher and student, the
student’s (first-person) reflections on his experience, and the moment-by-moment
(third-person) descriptive representation of the target experience. The researchers’
attention was called to the particular moment in the videotape. The researchers
were able to watch the target segment—and any other segment of the tape—as
many times as they wished.
2. Intuitive classification of data. When viewing the target segment, each researcher is
asked to describe the nature of the student’s experience. This could take the form of
emotion words; descriptions of the student’s thoughts, feelings, or other experiences;
or any other form of description. Although such descriptions are typically understood
as operating from a third-person perspective, in approaching the data as a form of
intersubjective engagement (Point 2 in Figure 3), the researchers approached the task
as if they were operating from a second-person perspective. That is, they did not
approach the task as one of describing simply what was seen but, instead, of drawing
on the full range of the intuitions, experiences, and understandings that arose within
 INTERSUBJECTIVE EPISTEMOLOGY 17

the researchers as it relates to their attempt to interpret (achieve intersubjectivity

with) the student’s experience. All intuitions, descriptions, or identifications were
accepted as hypotheses that could be tested against the full range of first-, second-,
and third-person data available.
3. Conceptual clarification and coordination. As interpretations, categories, and
descriptions were offered, researchers were asked to articulate, as clearly as pos-
sible, their definitions of the terms being used (Point 1 in Figure 3). Whenever pos-
sible, theoretical definitions of concepts from the scholarly literature were invoked.
Definitions of key interpreted terms were articulated as clearly as possible and
coordinated between researchers.
4. Interrogating the data of self and other experience. As researchers offered their
particular intuitions, interpretations, and description of the student’s experience,
they were asked to return to the videotape (Point 2 in Figure 3) and identify the
specific forms of evidence that provided the source of their interpretive experience:
“Specifically, what in the tape makes you feel that the student is experiencing X?”
The researchers were asked to interrogate their own intuitions and experiences as
they related to the tape in order to identify the specific source of those intuitions,
to articulate them, and to make them explicit.
5. Corroborating interpretive descriptions between researchers. As any given
researcher identified the sources of his or her interpretive description of the target
experience, the other researchers (B and C) were asked to compare their own expe-
riences of the source of evidence in question in an attempt to corroborate those of
researcher offering the interpretation. As interpretations arose, researchers sought to
corroborate each other’s interpretations by pointing to particular forms of first-,
second-, and third-person evidence that either confirmed or disconfirmed the inter-
pretations provided (Point 3 in Figure 3).
6. Reconciling conflict and synthesizing a corroborated explanation. The process
of interrogating one’s experience of the data and corroborating it with that of other
researchers proceeded until conflicting interpretations were resolved or were shown
to be unresolvable in the time allowed (Point 3 in Figure 3).

The research process proceeded as an attempt to corroborate evidence from any relevant
first-, second-, or third-person source without necessarily privileging any single source of
evidence. In what follows, we identify several key moments in the process of developing an
intersubjectively corroborated description of the student’s emotional state.

A Case Illustration

The case involved a discussion between a student and his teacher about circumstances related
to the development of the student’s capacity to complete his writing assignments. In previous
discussions about the student’s difficulties in completing his work, the student suggested that
he had difficulty becoming motivated to complete assignments about topics that did not inter-
est him. The professor suggested that one way to approach the problem was to try to find
meaning in the assignments. The professor offered two ways in which this could be done. In
18 M. MASCOLO AND E. KALLIO

the first, if the student could find something personally meaningful, he might find himself
more interested in the topic. Alternatively, the student could try to find some meaningful rea-
son—external to the assignment itself—to complete his work. In so doing, he could use the
external goal to motivate himself to complete his assignments. Finding the first option chal-
lenging, the student opted for the second. The student indicated that one way he could make
uninteresting assignments meaningful was to treat them as if they were a workout in the gym.
In the past, the student reported having been “fat” and, not wanting to remain so, had decided
to persevere through difficult workouts to lose weight. The student indicated that he could
think about being a “good student” as analogous to “becoming thin” (i.e.,“losing the fat”). In
this way, the task of performing unpleasant assignments was akin to persevering through
workouts in order to lose the fat.
The target exchange began as the teacher, in a discussion of the student’s recent work,
comment on its improved quality. In light of the improvement, the professor indicated that,
consistent with the student’s earlier statement, the student’s capacity to complete his writing
assignments indeed seemed dependent on his ability to “find meaning” in order to become
motivated. At this point, the teacher, referring to the earlier assignment on “mindset” with
which the student had difficulty completing, asked, “How does this relate to the ‘mindset’
paper?” At this point, already looking down while shuffling some papers, the student smiled
briefly and exhaled audibly. The professor then asked, “Why did you go [exhale]?” the stu-
dent made momentary eye contact with the teacher, smiled faintly (partial upturn of the lips),
and turned away to put his papers on the desk behind him. In so doing, the student again
smiled and said, in a softer and breathier voice approaching a whisper, “I know.” The ques-
tion at hand is how to describe the student’s emotional experience in these particu-
lar moments.
In an act of conceptual clarification, after initially viewing the videotape, the researchers
identified shame, guilt, and embarrassment as three possible emotion categories to guide
their inquiry. Drawing on emotion theory and research (Lindsay-Hartz, de Rivera, &
Mascolo, 1995; Sabini & Silver, 1997), the researchers defined each emotion in terms of a
set of three basic components: a form of engagement with the world, a bodily experience,
and action tendency. The emotion definitions are provided in Table 2. Drawing on these
definitions, the next step was to test these conceptions against the full range of the first-,
second-, and third-person sources of available data. The data available included (a) the
videotape itself and its transcription, (b) a moment-by-moment third-person representation
of the student’s concrete emotional acts as they were organized in relation to each other
over time for target episodes, and (c) the student’s own first-person interpretation of his
experience. In this regard, the student’s first-person explanation of his emotional state was
informative:

And um I didn’t do that [push myself to learn the material]. I kinda just said hey you know I
don’t wanna do this I don’t have the motivation so I’m just gonna push it off. … Before this
class I didn’t know what a fixed and growth mindset was. And now that I do know I know that
I’m doing [the fixed mindset] and that’s what makes me feel bad.

The student here indicates a discrepancy between what he felt he should be doing (pushing
himself to learn the material) and what he did do (pushing off the assignment). The student
says that he feels “bad” because he is using the “fixed mindset”3 when “you’re not sposta to
 INTERSUBJECTIVE EPISTEMOLOGY 19

TABLE 2
Definitions of Emotion Used in the Case Analysis

Phenomenal and
Form of Engagement Bodily Experience Action Tendency

Shame I look at myself through the
eyes of others and realize
that I am who I should
not be and cannot
be otherwise.
Guilt I am responsible for
committing
a wrongdoing.
Embarrassment I have acted in front of
others in a way that
makes it seem as if I am
flawed or foolish,
although I am not.
Threat to Exposes an aspect of myself
Self-Image that threatens the valued
image I have of myself.
I experience myself in terms
of a single flawed
characteristic that defines
who I am. I am worthless
and exposed for all
to see.
Feeling as if we are a bad
person, on the boundary
of the community, cut off
from who have
been wronged.
My action is exposed for all
to see; although I appear
flawed to others, I know
that this flaw does not
define me.
I feel that a potential flaw
that I have not yet
resolved has been
exposed to both to self
and other.
Hide the face or self (e.g.,
gaze aversion, covering
the face, removing
oneself from view).
Repair the moral order (e.g.,
confessing, apologizing,
making reparations, fixing
the wrongdoing);
reentering the community
or relationship.
I am motivated to remove
myself from the judging
gaze of others or mitigate
the exposed flaw (e.g., by
smiling, affiliating
with others).
Depending upon impending
circumstances, I am ready
to protect my self-image
by moving against,
affiliating with or
avoiding the gaze of the
source of the threat.

think like that.” This assertion is consistent with aspects of guilt (i.e., the idea of feeling bad
because he should have used a growth mindset but did not). However, several aspects of the
student’s expression were inconsistent with guilt. For example, he did not express a desire to
repair or fix the situation. In fact, moments after exhibiting the target emotional reaction, he
explicitly rejected the idea that he should actually adopt a growth mindset, “the growth mind-
set is not supposed to matter.” The researchers turned their attention toward other aspects of
the student’s expression:

A: And so he smiles and when he smiling he’s moving toward us, but there’s a shame
component to the smile because the smile means I want to affiliate with you so as to diminish
your gaze …

B: Mm-hm.

A: Or to diminish the shameful feeling.

20 M. MASCOLO AND E. KALLIO

Here, A suggests that the smile functions as a form of affiliation—an attempt to diminish
the painful gaze of the other. At this point, A is thinking of the smile as an aspect of shame.
However, given the definition stated in Table 2, although looking away from the teacher is
consistent with the desire to hide the self in shame, affiliation is not. The smile seems to indi-
cate something different. B offers an alternative interpretation of the affiliative aspect of
the smile:

B: Or the—you said before—the “you got me.”

C: Yeah.

A: “You got me.” So that also could be “you got me” you’re saying?

B: Right ’cause I see that as like you … it was a threat to his self-image that you called him
out and he smiled like, “okay, you got me, I don’t really believe in the mindset or I’m not
using mindset.”

C: Mm-hm.

A “You got me I’m not using the growth mindset.”

B: Right.

Under this interpretation, the student’s smile is consistent with the unwanted exposure of
embarrassment. The student was “caught” by the teacher for not using growth mindset as the
teacher wanted. However, further interrogation of the tape revealed concerns not consistent
with embarrassment:

C: Also right after he smiled—I don’t know if this matters—I forget what you said, but then he
said, “I know.”

A: “I know.” [A imitates the soft and plaintive tone used by the student.]

C: Like in a painful way.

A: Like, “this weighs on me, this is something I’ve been pushing away for a long time.”

Here, A suggests that the student’s acknowledgment of not using the growth mindset (“I
know”) feels as if he is acknowledging a burden that he recognizes but yet has been neglect-
ing or “pushing away” for a long time. This suggestion leads to a discussion of the meaning
of the student’s exhale:

C: Yes and then he exhaled like “Yeah … (exhalation sound). Again

 INTERSUBJECTIVE EPISTEMOLOGY 21

B: Yeah, he did the …

C: So I feel like that was another piece.

A: Oh wait … wait, wait, wait. That’s big, I didn’t see that. So the exhale … “Something that
I’ve been pushing away for a long time or it weighs on me and so I exhale in collapse.”

C/B: Mm-hm.

A: “Or in a preparation for effort or a collapse.” Here’s collapse, you know?

C/B: Mm-hm.

A: When we (exhalation sound) “Now I gotta deal with this,” and I’m getting ready.

B: Exactly. Yes.

A: Or (exhalation sound) “I can’t deal with this.”

C: Yeah.

A: It’s like overdetermined and the exhale is like a movement—it could be—this is like a state
of readiness.

B: Yes.

A: I’m ready.

B: But I was going to say you’re right, you can either fight or flight at that point.

Although the student’s emotional expression yield components of guilt, shame, and embar-
rassment, the student’s emotion reflects a subtlety not fully captured by any of these con-
cepts. The bottom panel of Table 2 describes the corroborated structure of the student’s
experience, which the team called an exposure of a threat to self-image. The professor’s
question exposed a flaw that constituted a threat to the student’s image (i.e., “I was using a
fixed mindset … but you’re not sposta to do that”). Unlike in embarrassment, where the
exposure is experienced as if it were a self-defining flaw, in the student’s case, the exposure
brought forth a problem that was genuinely inconsistent with his self-image as being able to
persevere through difficult work. The team experienced the student’s smile as an acknow-
ledgment of the exposure, and his gaze aversion as an attempt to mitigate the professor’s
judging gaze. The researchers experienced the student’s breathy and almost whispered, “I
know,” not only as an acknowledgment of the threat to his self-image but also as an indica-
tion that the student’s awareness that he was using a fixed mindset was an ongoing and unre-
solved burden. The research team experienced the student’s punctuated exhale as an
22 M. MASCOLO AND E. KALLIO

acknowledgment that an issue had been raised that he was called upon to face—a state of
readiness to respond in different possible ways depending on the unfolding of circumstances.
What is to be gained by adopting this approach to understanding the experience of others?
Why isn’t it sufficient simply to say that the student’s experience reflects elements of embar-
rassment, shame, or guilt, perhaps at different levels? This is a possible strategy. Indeed, one
could argue that much of the student’s experience could be described as a form of embarrass-
ment. However, when examined more closely—at a level that is generally prohibitive in
research operating from an objectivist framework—the particularities of the student’s emo-
tional experience cannot be fully captured by extant categories or their combinations. Instead,
the subtlety and particularity of individual emotional experiences are revealed (Ben-Ze’ev,
2000). It is likely that many—perhaps most—emotional experiences do not conform to ideal
types but, instead, reflect forms of engaging the world that are not fully captured by our exist-
ing emotion lexicon (Illouz, Gilon, & Shachak, 2014). Although it is important to start
research with our existing emotional lexicons, we must guard against the temptation to
explain human action using abstract constructs that are assumed to generalize across persons,
places and the particularities of context (Kagan, 2007). In the study of emotion, not all expe-
riences named by a single emotion term are the same. To move beyond general abstractions,
there is a need for detailed analysis of the particular forms of emotion produced in particu-
lar contexts.

PSYCHOLOGY AND INTERSUBJECTIVITY

Traditional approaches to psychological science embrace the ideals of objectivity and the for-
mation of general laws. Toward this end, psychological scientists seek to identify relations
among abstract variables. It is permissible to study subjective processes, but only if those
processes can be measured using objective indicators. To ensure objectivity, psychological
scientists define variables operationally in terms of observable behaviors. However, the privi-
leging of the objective over the subjective creates deep problems: In the search for objectiv-
ity, how much of any given psychological process is left over after one has identified it in
operational terms? If the intersubjective processes by which we come to know people are dif-
ferent from the ways we come to know objects and biophysical processes, what is lost when
we use the methods of the natural sciences to study human action and experience? When we
construct variables by abstracting and aggregating observations across individual and context,
what happens to our understanding of psychological activity that operates at the level of indi-
vidual persons?
As psychological beings, persons act on the basis of the meaning events have for them.
Meaning has its origins in the structuring of experience, which itself consists of the phenom-
enal aspects of ongoing action in the world (Mascolo, Basseches, & El-Hashem, 2014).
When, in the name of objectivity, we parse experience away from behavior, we lose access
that which makes us human. To be able to recognize ourselves in our research, there is a
need to return to first principles: If sociopsychological knowledge has intersubjective origins,
the key to understanding psychological activity is to exploit the power of intersubjective
engagement, not to import assumptions and methodologies created for the purpose of study-
ing biophysical processes of a different order.
 INTERSUBJECTIVE EPISTEMOLOGY 23

In his analysis of the origins of scientific knowledge, Husserl (1970) showed how inter-
subjectivity provides the basis for both subjectivity and objectivity. From a phenomenological
approach, observation—scientific or otherwise—is a form of experiencing. Once cannot sep-
arate the act of experiencing from the object that is experienced. There is no need to doubt
the existence of a world beyond our experience; however, we cannot engage that world inde-
pendent of our experience. We do not simply live in a “natural world”; we live in a life world
(lebenswelt)—a public, largely implicit, and taken-for-granted world of shared experience
and symbolic meaning.
According to Husserl (1970, pp. 128–129), whereas natural sciences “give the impression
that [they] are based on the experience of objective nature,” objective nature is simply not
something that can be experienced. An objective observation is not a matter of recording
nature as it is; it is a matter of building up, over time, shared categories that reflect regular-
ities in our experienced world, however mediated by cultural or scientific tools. What we call
objectivity is a matter of synthesizing—within an intersubjectively shared life world—catego-
ries and meanings for everyone, rather than merely categories for just me or just you (subject-
ivity). Our call to understand the scientific process as a form of intersubjective corroboration
does not suggest that science is unreliable. It simply suggests that the fruits of science are
produced through the systematic clarification and coordination of theoretical concepts, and
the corroboration of experiences—however mediated by measurement tools—whose mean-
ings are defined within the framework of an already existing intersubjectivity.
An intersubjective epistemology does not prescribe any single methodology (qualitative
or quantitative) or perspective (first-, second-, or third-person) from which research should
be conducted. It does not privilege qualitative over quantitative methods. It holds no bias
against experimental design or the use of operational definitions. What it does do is to
expose the ways in which psychological knowledge has its origins in intersubjective under-
standing. Fully embracing this principle would serve emancipatory functions. It would free
researchers from the scientistic (rather than scientific; Williams & Robinson, 2017) belief
that scientific observation requires the elimination of the researcher’s preunderstandings
and presuppositions. From an intersubjective perspective, it is precisely those intersubject-
ive presuppositions and preunderstandings that make observation possible in the first place.
Instead of casting off the researcher’s preexisting concepts, knowledge, beliefs, and experi-
ences in a Quixotic quest for objectivity, it is better to exploit those concepts, articulate
their foundations, and subject them to rigorous analysis and critique. It is only by doing so
that we can use those concepts effectively to understand the data of our experience of self
and others, however mediated and structured those data are by our research instruments
and methods.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to acknowledge the contributions of Jennifer Evans and Nora Cochrane for
their able assistance in the analysis of emotional experience presented in this study. We are
also deeply grateful to the student who acted as a research participant in this study. We also
thank Carmen Dell’Averssano for her contributions to the ideas expressed in this article.
This research was made possible by a Cygnaeus Scholarship provided by the Finnish
Institute for Educational Research, Univeristy of Jyvaskyla, Jyvaskyla Finland.
24 M. MASCOLO AND E. KALLIO

NOTES

1. Not all forms of intersubjective activity involve intersubjective corroboration. We propose the concept of
corroboration as a principle for understanding what it means to verify or give credibility to scientific and
social scientific claims. Most everyday forms of social engagement are not directed explicitly toward testing
the adequacy of claims to knowledge.
2. The question of the existence, nature, and universality of basic emotions and their expressions is a
controversial one. Some theorists have discriminated between basic and higher-order emotions. From this
view, basic emotions refer to discrete neurophysiologically based reactions to particular motive-relevant
events that emerge early in development, are organized around a particular feeling tone, and are expressed by
a characteristic facial pattern (Anderson, 2015; Ekman, 1993). Others deny the existence of basic emotions,
and argue that there is greater variability in the constitution and expression in emotions that have been
described as basic (Ortony & Turner, 1990; Scherer & Ellgring, 2007). For example, some have suggested
members of different cultures classify facial expressions that have been seen as reflections of basic emotions
in different ways, thus calling attention to the assumption of universality (Gendron, Roberson, van der Vyver,
& Barrett, 2014). The question of whether emotions exhibit universality is independent, however, of
Wittgenstein’s suggestion that bodily expressions (facial or otherwise) provide public criteria on which
cultures organize the meaning of emotion words. From a Wittgensteinian framework, it is not only possible
but also likely that there would be variation among cultures in the ways in which people use words to parse
their experience of the world, including the world of emotional experience. The argument is not that bodily
patterns express universal emotions (although this is possible); instead, it is that in order to be intelligible to
one another, the meaning of the words we use to refer to our experiences must be grounded in some sort of
public criteria. It is plausible and even likely that different cultures will seize on different modes of
expressive behavior as grounds for the communal construction of categories of emotional meaning.
3. The course in question was devoted in part to promoting the development of a growth mindset in students.
According to Dweck (2006), because students with a fixed mindset believe their abilities are given and
unchangeable, to protect self-esteem, they tend to avoid tasks at which they might fail. Students with a
growth mindset believe that their abilities come into existence through effort and perseverance. For them,
failure does not threaten self-esteem; it merely indicates that more effort is needed to learn

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Michael F. Mascolo is a Professor of Psychology at Merrimack College.

Eeva Kallio is an Adjunct Professor at the Finnish Institute for Educational Research at the
University of Jyvaskyla, Finland.

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