The Dynamics of Cognition and Intersubjectivity

What the participants share, their common “sense” of the world, creates a foundation, a framing, an orientation, that enables human actors to see and act in coordination with one another. The methods the participants use to understand each other as they act, also produce, either intentionally or unintentionally, partial understandings, lack of understandings, and misunderstandings, which are also a part of what makes for intersubjectivity. Further complicating matters is the idiosyncratic and historical character of each interaction. Nevertheless, the intersubjective space in which actors operate can become richer and easier to produce with the recurrence of behavior. The first part of this paper develops a cognitive model of intersubjectivity that accounts for the sameness of, and changes between, two similar types of encounters occurring at different times. The second part of the paper presents a ethnographic study of an online cooperation that documents the interactive, constructive, and productive parts of the model.