The study of human social phenomena in
their proper scope demands the integrated effort of many disciplinary
traditions. This fact is widely acknowledged but rarely acted upon. It is in
practice often difficult to cross disciplinary boundaries, to communicate across
different vocabularies, research goals, theories and methods. The aim of this
Research Topic has been to make some progress in stepping across these
borders.
Not attempting this crossing in a
subject as multi-faceted as intersubjectivity inevitably binds us to remain
within self-enclosed conceptions. By this we mean a bundle of self-reinforcing
perspectives, hypotheses, experimental methods, debates, communities and
institutions. Traditional ways of thinking about social cognition frame the
questions that are deemed worth researching. These all revolve around the issue
of how we figure out other minds, assuming that other people's intentional
states are hidden, private and internal. The proposed answers rely only on how
the perceived indirect manifestations of other people's mental states are
processed by individual cognitive mechanisms (Van
Overwalle, 2009).
We would like to raise, instead, the
question of what an embodied science of intersubjectivity would look like if we
were to start from different premises than those that delimit classical
approaches to social cognition. For doing this, we thought the time was ripe for
bringing together work that crosses disciplinary boundaries and informs us about
different conceptions of how people understand each other and act and make
meaning together.
The move is timely. The internalist
assumptions in social cognition research are beginning to shift. We have more
and better tools to explore the role of interactive phenomena and interpersonal
histories in conjunction with individual processes (Dumas
et al., 2010; Di
Paolo and De Jaegher, 2012; Konvalinka
and Roepstorff, 2012; Schilbach
et al., 2013). This interactive expansion of the conceptual and
methodological toolkit for investigating social cognition, we now propose, can
be followed by an expansion into wider and deeply-related research questions,
beyond (but including) that of social cognition narrowly construed.
Our social lives are populated by
different kinds of cognitive and affective phenomena apart from figuring out
other minds. They include acting and perceiving together, verbal and non-verbal
engagement, experiences of (dis-)connection, relations in a group, joint
meaning-making, intimacy, trust, secrecy, conflict, negotiation, asymmetric
relations, material mediation of social interaction, collective action,
contextual engagement with socio-cultural norms, etc. These phenomena are often
characterized by a strong participation by the cognitive agent, in contrast with
the spectatorial stance of social cognition (Reddy
and Morris, 2004; De
Jaegher and Di Paolo, 2007). We use the broader notion of embodied
intersubjectivity to refer to this wider set of questions.
Forty-two contributions to this
Research Topic explore several of these themes. They combine ideas and methods
from psychology, neuroscience, philosophy of mind, phenomenology, psychiatry and
psychotherapy, social science, and language studies. The number of contributions
confirms our suspicions that there is a genuine interest in embodied
intersubjectivity.
All of the contributions in some way
or other move beyond traditional cognitivist perspectives. Here we can simply
highlight some of the most interesting ways in which this happens. As already
mentioned, there is a recent trend to investigate the dynamics of actual
interactive encounters between people. Several empirical studies in this
Research Topic continue further along this line. They look at interactive
encounters using methods such as thermal imaging, interactive virtual
environments, or 1/f noise analysis, or combine existing methods with novel
theoretical starting points.
Other work looks at aspects of
embodied social understanding which are pertinent even in the absence of ongoing
interaction. These include the richness of body kinematics, affect regulation,
and life-story analysis. A few contributions focus on how embodied and
interactive perspectives impact on developmental research. They study real-life
interactions between infants and their care-givers in various contexts (infant
pick-up, book sharing, pointing, cooperation, and expressiveness during play in
chimpanzees). Aspects of psychopathology are explored also from an embodied
intersubjective angle, inspiring research on intra- and inter-personal emotion
regulation, social affordances, personal biography, and therapeutic play, and
their effects on somatic symptom disorders, autism, and
schizophrenia.
Broadening the scope of relevant
questions for embodied intersubjectivity inevitably means including research on
language. Many of the contributions make headway on this matter, questioning the
notion of the common ground, the role of conformity in social understanding, the
processes involved in the activity of reading texts, and the links between
conversational coordination and meaning-making. Others investigate the
participatory nature of understanding narratives, and the role of
organizational, temporal, and inter-affective aspects in language. Similar
advances can be made in the area of connecting the cognitive and the social
sciences. This is a very fruitful but still largely unexplored territory. A
discussion is offered along Marxist lines concerning the interaction between
categories of understanding and modes of social exchange and production. And the
lessons of embodied/enactive approaches to intersubjectivity are summoned to
contribute to understanding the phenomenological and social effects of solitary
confinement.
Finally, some contributions elaborate
theoretical and methodological implications and concepts, and in this way
contribute to shaping the core of an embodied science of intersubjectivity.
Methodological issues include whether dynamical systems concepts can bridge the
multiple scales involved in social understanding, from the biological and neural
to the personal, interactive and societal, how second person perspectives in
cognitive science can help psychopathology research, and whether techniques used
in theater can refine intuitions and theoretical concepts about interactive
experience. Theoretical advances include radically embodied accounts of
intersubjectivity that bring together conceptions from enactivism and ecological
psychology, the notion of intersubjective time, and a socially embodied notion
of the human self. Other discussions offer links between interpersonal
interaction and phenomenal experience, between social normativity and conceptual
abilities, or unearth the importance of opacity, i.e., the secret, silent or
hidden aspects of personal experience, for understanding each
other.
It is noteworthy, and especially
satisfying, that many novel themes and questions emerged, several of them in
some way related to personal meaning. To name a few: joy, secrecy, solitude,
influence of capitalist mode of production on cognition, book sharing in
infancy, the search for comprehensiveness and integrity in interacting,
literature, and enactivism, ethics of care, shame in relation to interaction,
and the interactive building blocks of culture and institutions.
Once again, we notice that the
contributions to this Research Topic demonstrate the richness of enquiry and
research work that is opened by the combination of novel methods and the
bringing together of fields that traditionally work in isolation from each
other. It also shows that criticisms of classical approaches as being sometimes
too narrow are not just idle but point to genuinely new perspectives on concrete
and everyday intersubjectivity that are opened to investigation.
Conflict of Interest Statement
What's up with fruit? Fruit is a healthy choice and loaded with vitamins and antioxidants, as well as fiber (key to weight loss because it is good for your metabolism, and a natural appetite suppressant. However, it still contains calories and carbohydrates, which is problematic if you are limiting carbohydrate intake generally to 100 grams per day (a common target), and the carbs you do eat should be mostly based on complex grains. So as long as you stay within your specified range… 
