Exploring different intersubjective structures in relation to dialogue

Overview: Dyads and triads in the classroom

Consider the following situation: in a philosophy seminar, two students in the group have an exchange about whether human free will does or does not exist. Student A argues that the scientific case for a deterministic universe rules out the possibility of free will, while Student B argues that free will can be demonstrated experientially and that determinism must hence be false. A third student, Student C, interjects, suggesting that free will should not necessarily be understood as the capacity to ‘do otherwise’. The other students, including both Students A and B, interpret this point as addressed to Student B, namely as a critique of her position, and thus anticipate that the next appropriate move in the dialogue would be a response by Student B to Student C, and a back-and-forth exchange of ideas between the two. However, Student C clarifies: her point is addressed to both Students A and B. Student C identifies that both of the other students have presupposed what freedom itself is, but that this presupposition can be called into question. The conversation opens up as an exchange between Students A, B and C together, rather than two separate (albeit connected) conversations between A and B, followed by B and C. The content of the conversation similarly expands to an examination of the presuppositions of the first conversation, rather than continuing to operate within these presuppositions.

This example of a short interaction between students should, I hope, be familiar to seminar facilitators. However, this quotidian example opens up a number of questions. What are the differences between a dyadic (two-person) and a triadic (three-person) exchange? Why might this be important? This paper will consider: (i) What are, or could be, the nature of the intersubjective structures which underpin dialogical exchange between more than two people? (ii) In the light of this, how might an understanding of these different structures help educators and other facilitators of dialogue in Higher Education contexts, particularly in the Humanities, to facilitate genuinely multi-voiced dialogue?

My thoughts in relation to the first question are largely motivated by the observation that the philosophy of intersubjectivity has tended to privilege the dyadic encounter. I will focus on the work of philosopher Beata Stawarska (2008, 2009) as a way of demonstrating the nature of this ‘dyadic paradigm’. I will argue that the fact that the dyadic paradigm is the dominant philosophical framework used to interpret interpersonal experience has practical and pedagogical consequences. This paper hopes to illuminate some of the dyadic assumptions that can be present in ordinary experience, practice and interpretation of dialogue. These assumptions can limit our apprehension of the ambiguity, and thus appreciation of the possible meanings, present in the ways that dialogical address is given and received.

I will argue further that an enriched philosophical understanding of intersubjective structures beyond the I-you dyad offers resource to facilitators and participants of Humanities seminars by making explicit the kinds of address that are possible in the seminar context. Each of these different ‘structures’ can be used to help us access and interrogate possible presuppositions which shape the dialogue itself.

My argument will make use of Sebastian Mitchell (2006) who writes clearly on the methodology and function of dialogue in the seminar room. Mitchell’s thoughts may, I argue, be enriched by drawing attention to the multi-person nature (which is to say: involving more than two people) of the seminar setting. While Stawarska and Mitchell take very different approaches to dialogue – not simply insofar as they give different analyses, but insofar as they approach the phenomenon from different disciplines and with different objectives (Stawarska offers a phenomenological analysis, Mitchell a pedagogical perspective) – my ambition is to bring these perspectives together in a way that serves educators. My ambition, more broadly, is to introduce the philosophy of intersubjectivity at large (represented in this case by Stawarska) to the theory and work of those engaged in pedagogical praxis.

Dialogical phenomenology

I begin with an overview of Stawarska’s key claims. She outlines and defends a ‘dialogical phenomenology’. ¹ Phenomenology is a methodology which is concerned with the description and analysis of phenomena, i.e. that which appears or manifests itself to the first-person perspective. This is not to say that phenomenology is mere introspection: the first-person perspective is always ‘in-the-world’, so this is not a case of looking at ‘merely subjective’ states. Phenomenology focuses on the lived experience of phenomena, aiming to understand the meaning of phenomena rather than provide causal explanations. ²

Dialogical phenomenology has two aspects, it is (i) the phenomenological analysis of dialogue itself, and (ii) phenomenology practised from a dialogical standpoint:

Phenomenological reflection practised from a dialogical standpoint consistently recognises [an] inherent first-to-second person connectedness. It does not abolish the first person, but neither does it absolve the first person from the primary interpersonal relationality to past, present and potential interlocutors. (Stawarska, 2009: 16)

Nevertheless, Stawarska’s account helpfully articulates some key features of the I-you. She argues that the pronouns ‘I’ and ‘you’ are co-definitional. This is to say that the meaning of each of these pronouns cannot be grasped without implicit reference to the other. We might be tempted to think that the content of the pronoun ‘I’ comes first in our understanding, and that an understanding of the use of ‘you’ is derived from this. Against this, Stawarska argues that there are good phenomenological, developmental and conceptual reasons for thinking that we grasp the meaning of the use of ‘I’ and ‘you’ in tandem, as each requires the other to be meaningful. In her words:

If I have not grasped the I–you reversal and understood that the personal pronoun ‘you’ addressed to me by the speaker reverses into the pronoun ‘I’ in my response, I have not grasped the meaning of the first-person pronoun fully. (Stawarska, 2008: 403)

The multiple meanings of ‘we’

I turn now to outline another aspect of Stawarska’s philosophy which has implications for seminar dialogue, namely her analysis of ‘we’-intersubjectivity. Stawarska outlines that use of the pronoun ‘we’ necessarily involves: (i) one speaker, who acts as the ‘spokesperson’ for ‘us’ and (ii) at least one non-speaker covered by the pronoun, which may or may not be the addressee. She identifies that the meaning of the pronoun ‘we’ varies in different contexts, depending on whether the addressee is being included in or excluded by the uttered ‘we’. To illustrate, Stawarska asks us to consider how the meaning of ‘we are leaving’, uttered, say, at a party, differs depending on who makes the address. The addressee may be the one who is being left with, or the one being left behind. She concludes that the nature of the I-you relationship between a single addresser and single addressee determines the ‘we’, even though the addresser speaks on more than her own behalf. ‘The relation [between the addresser and] the addressee is always involved in the utterance of the “we” pronoun, whether the addressee is included or excluded from its referents’ (Stawarska, 2008: 410).

I agree that a phenomenology of the ‘inclusive we’ vs the ‘exclusive we’ can be identified. This kind of analysis is of great use to practitioners of dialogue in prompting reflection on the meanings contained in the use of certain pronouns and the implications that they bring to dialogue itself. The use of ‘we’ when used in a seminar can always be interrogated. Consider a student stating, as one of the presuppositions of her argument: ‘we live after the death of God’. Who is the ‘we’ here? Who is being included and who is being excluded? If the seminar facilitator, and indeed, any of the other participants, can bring such questions into the dialogue itself, then this opens up a new avenue of reflective discussion within the dialogue itself.

However, while the categories of inclusion and exclusion provide a way of thinking about the ambiguity and multiplicity of meanings conjured by the use of ‘we’, I disagree that we must conclude that the ‘I-you’ is the most fundamental unit of intersubjectivity, as I will elaborate further. ⁴

The dyadic paradigm

Stawarska’s claim that the I-you encounter is the only possible basic unit by which we are to measure other varieties of intersubjectivity is tantamount to saying that all varieties of intersubjectivity must ultimately be analysed in terms of their constituent dyads. This approach runs the risk of making multi-person intersubjectivity a ‘mere addition’ of dyads. This is the ‘dyadic paradigm’ that I want to identify as prevalent in current philosophical thought. ⁵ Stawarska notes many times that the philosophical tradition has offered an either/or between the solitary ego and the impersonal collective, ignoring the ‘primordial duality’ of the personal dyad. ⁶ This is a crucial point to uncover, but I think that the recent wave of intersubjectivity theories in philosophy must be careful not to run the risk of a problematic dichotomy of their own – between the personal dyad and the impersonal collective.

As well as explicit claims that dyadic I-you relations are the basic unit with which we should analyse intersubjectivity, this paradigm can also be found more implicitly throughout the philosophical literature. Talk of intersubjective relationship with an other (singular) and others (plural) is often run together as though interchangeable. Instances of interaction between self and a single other are used as illustrative of the nature of intersubjectivity, and the observations and interpretations gleaned from these are then applied directly to interactions with multiple others. Stawarska, for example, moves between talking about ‘the other’ (singular) and ‘interlocutors’ (plural), without looking at how these two types of intersubjectivity may differ (2009: 16). This kind of conflation is typical, and it can be found throughout the philosophical literature and beyond. ⁷

The implicit assumption here is that multi-person intersubjectivity is simply an extension of dyadic intersubjectivity, that an interaction between multiple subjectivities is effectively a cumulative phenomenon, come to by ‘adding together’ the relevant self-other dyadic relationships. Even if multi-person relationships are acknowledged, if nothing is said about the difference between dyadic and multi-person interactions then the presupposition in play is that such interactions are simply an extension of the dyad. Although Stawarska would presumably acknowledge that dialogue can happen in a multi-person context, the fact that these contexts are not distinguished betrays the assumption that the dyadic model can be applied to multi-person dialogues in a linear way.

This is important because the dyadic paradigm fails to account for a range of intersubjective configurations that we find in everyday experience. Just as Stawarska argues that it is problematic to reduce the social world to a series of ultimately self-sufficient monads, so in a similar way we must beware reducing the social world to a series of self-sufficient pairs or dyads. Against this, I will argue that Stawarska’s dialogical phenomenology should be expanded to include other varieties of intersubjectivity which go beyond I-you interactions.

Multiple intersubjective structures

I will stay with Stawarska’s example (‘we are leaving’) as a way of outlining some of the intersubjective structures that I have in mind. In the ‘inclusive’ sense of ‘we are leaving’, a collective intention is expressed which presupposes I-you connectedness between members of the ‘we’. It might also be the case, however, that an ‘inclusive we’ is uttered to define itself against the prevailing relational context. Imagine a tone of voice in which ‘we’re leaving’, spoken to one’s partner at the party, derives its meaning from the distinction between the ‘we’, and the rest of those at the party. In this case an intersubjective we-they structure is in play, and this structure contributes to the meaning of the utterance.

Similarly, in ‘exclusive’ utterances of ‘we’, the intersubjective structure in play may be that of we-you (addressing a singular host, perhaps). In such cases, the members of the ‘we’ (and not just the ‘I’, even though only one person speaks) face and address the other (or, as I will consider below, multiple others). A complex network of relations and interrelations between all three parties is needed to make this address intelligible. The ‘we’ and the ‘you’ in a we-you interaction are importantly co-definitional, as per Stawarska’s insight, but they do not necessarily need be reduced to a series of separate I-you relations. This is not to devalue the I-you relationship, but rather to recognise that there are a plurality of intersubjective structures that underpin the meanings and possible meanings that can emerge in multi-person dialogue.

The irreducibility of the second-personal plural

We also see the dyadic paradigm in Stawarska’s account insofar as we see no substantial mention of the second-person plural in her work. The second-person plural often gets lost in the English language particularly because it is not distinguished from the second-person singular, as it is in other languages. Employing the lesser-used ‘yous’ helps us to articulate the distinction between singular and plural address. To the list of possible intersubjective structures begun above with we-they and we-you, we can include an I-yous structure. For example, when I meet up with two friends, the structure of my interaction with them is not simply the addition of my relationship with X, my relationship with Y and X’s relationship with Y. Rather, I relate to X-and-Y as a ‘yous’. With a single statement I can address X-and-Y at the same time with a ‘double address’, just as I can individually address one or the other.

Further, we can identify a we-yous structure. Think back to the party, and a ‘guys, we’re leaving,’ addressed to the whole room. This kind of structure is in play in dialogue between two different established communities, and notably we-yous structures require at least four participants.

How are we to understand the distinction between ‘you’ and ‘yous’ on Stawarska’s account? We might interpret her as saying that this distinction is comparable to the relationship between ‘I’ and ‘we’, but there a number of issues that arise here. Does Stawarska think that the utterance of ‘yous’ contains an I-you dialogical structure as in the case of ‘we’? In the case of an I-yous address, there is a clear single addresser, but multiple addressees. Does she think that there is a principal ‘you’ who acts as the ‘spokesperson’ (or receptive equivalent) for the ‘yous’, in being primary addressee, and whose I-you relationship with the addresser provides a determining factor for the meaning of the utterance of ‘yous’, as analogous to her claim about ‘we’? It is plausible that this is sometimes the case, but it seems equally clear that there are many cases where this isn’t what is happening – that we address ‘yous’ in a way that is irreducible. Many (singular) [you]s together give a yous (plural). However, this is also not a case of mere addition, but rather there is some relevant relationship between the ‘you’ and ‘you’ and ‘you’ in order that this group can be coherently and meaningfully be addressed as ‘yous.’ This ‘yous’ (plural) is hence not best understood as in terms of a set of I-you relations in series – this would make it merely additive.

This ambiguity of the second-person plural becomes relevant when we apply these analyses to the practice, facilitation and interpretation of dialogue. Here an example of a single address to a plural audience used by H. Peter Kang as an example of the fluidity of performative meanings makes for a useful illustration:

When my mother says ‘I love you’ to my whole family during dinner, the meaning of this statement differs with respect to those who hear it—to me it means one thing, to my father it means something very different. Both meanings can be ‘true’ in relation to the respective hearers without requiring one to think the other’s reception of the statement is false. (Kang, 2009) ⁸

Back to the classroom

We can now bring these thoughts back to bear on interpreting and engaging in dialogue in Higher Education contexts. Sebastian Mitchell argues that pedagogical excellence in the seminar context is possible where the Socratic Method of question and answer is embedded in the form of the seminar itself. Mitchell offers a helpful overview of developments of the Socratic Method by various thinkers, with a focus on Leonard Nelson and Gustav Heckmann. ⁹ Interestingly for my purposes here, Mitchell notes that ‘Nelson’s version of the Socratic Dialogue transformed the exchange between philosopher and single interlocutor into a group discussion’ (Mitchell, 2006: 185). However, the scope of Mitchell’s paper is such that only some of the implications of this shift are considered. Mitchell’s focus is on the tutor’s move from active participant to facilitator, rather than on how the expanded intersubjective structures of the group contribute to the dialogical method itself. This latter factor will be my focus here.

Mitchell (via Nelson) points to a dyadic emphasis in the Socratic dialogues. We almost always see Socrates engaging with one interlocutor at a time, in series. Certainly this is the case in Meno, the dialogue that Mitchell focuses on. Again, I note the dyadic paradigm that the philosophy of intersubjectivity has inherited, and the consequences of this on the practice of dialogue. I want to argue that our understanding of how the Socratic Method is best employed in group contexts should be expanded to take into account the fact that the questions and answers exchanged in this context can be construed as having multiple or differing meanings in the light of the different intersubjective structures outlined above.

As Mitchell helpfully articulates, the seminar facilitator should aim to minimise her ‘active contribution’ to the dialogue in favour of enabling the students to discuss amongst themselves (2006: 185). This ensures that the dialogue does not become a series of I-you teacher-student dyads, where the conversation is at every point fed through the teacher. However, this doesn’t only mean that direct I-you interactions between students open up; this would be to continue to think about the seminar dialogue in dyadic terms. It also means that I-yous, we-you, we-yous and I-you-you addresses and consequent interactions can be identified by participants.

In my opening example above, Student C can be understood as addressing Students A-and-B with an ‘I-yous’ address, a double address. The meaning of her interjection is transformed when it is understood as an I-yous and not (or not only) an I-you address. Here, the Socratic Method reveals that the first two students both held presuppositions (within their ‘we’), which can be called into question. By addressing a shared presupposition held by Students A and B, Student C successfully creates space for the examination of a new idea. As such, the multi-person Socratic Method embedded in seminar contexts does not only challenge ideas in individuals in parallel, but challenges ideas that are shared by pairs or groups within the group, and which underpin features of the form and content of certain dialogues themselves.

The above is an example of an I-yous interaction. We might also consider we-you(s) interactions, where, for example, a student draws on something previously articulated by another student in order to address yet another person or persons in the group. Alternatively, a student might draw on a shared experience, or shared beliefs, between themselves and other members of the group, in order to address another member. We might think of seminar discussions in gender studies or comparative religion where these intersubjective structures can be seen particularly starkly due to the content under discussion. Aligning oneself as a ‘we’ to address others could be explicit, the result of I-you dialogue, but it could also be implicit, the result of an existing ‘jointness’ of some kind, such as in the case of shared experience or shared intention.

Where students find themselves addressed as part of a ‘yous’, or address others as part of a ‘we’, this has the power to prompt the further exploration and/or substantiation of ideas qua shared ideas, and their implication not only for me, but for us, or not only for an individual, but for a group, or whole culture. This doesn’t mean that all addresses must be understood in this way – the individual I-you address is an important and necessary part of the group dialogue. What I emphasise here is that it is not the only kind. Rather, we have a number of different lenses with which we might interpret dialogues.

Pronoun-use is often implicit and ambiguous. It may not always be clear if someone is addressing an individual or a collective, or if they take themselves to be speaking on behalf of themselves alone, or on behalf of others. However, knowing that all or any of these varieties of address could be in play opens up different ways of looking at someone’s act of addressing another. We might ask ourselves, how would the meaning of a speaker’s claim change if she were actually speaking on behalf of others as well as herself? How might I respond to someone’s address if I engage the possibility that they are addressing not only me but a collective that I’m part of? What is being assumed about the collective in the address? The Socratic aim of eliciting new ideas is complexified, by virtue of being able to consider questions and answers in this variety of ways. Finally on this point, it’s worth noting that the claim that meanings ‘open up’ in multi-person contexts does not mean that the conversation automatically becomes more ‘open’ in that it is necessarily easier for the dialogue to flow – indeed, it can make it harder! Sub-groups within a group may feel attacked: men in a gender seminar may feel this, for example, even before a word has been said. ¹⁰ This is precisely why the facilitator’s role is important – and why practitioners of multi-person dialogue should be on the lookout for the multi-person intersubjectivities in play in a dialogue: recognising ‘we’ and ‘yous’ assumptions and ambiguities are needed so that they can be critically and collectively examined.

Importance for the Humanities

I want to draw this examination of multi-person dialogue to a close with a few thoughts on why these observations are valuable to the Arts and Humanities specifically. In a recent issue of this journal, Jan Parker writes: ‘[The Humanities offer] experience of living and working with complexity and supercomplexity: complex and incompatible knowledge systems inscribed in multi-faceted, multi-voiced narratives’ (Parker, 2014: 6).

A multi-voiced dialogue isn’t simply one in which multiple perspectives are given space to co-exist. It is also a context in which these perspectives can interact, and further, these interactions themselves are interacted with. This is brought to excellence in a multi-person context, where we-you and I-yous configurations of dialogical interaction are possible. For Students A, B and C in the philosophy seminar above, for example, the dialogue becomes a trialogue because C interacts with the interaction between A and B, rather than interacting with A, then B, as two separate interactions.

Critical reflection on what it is to advocate plurality in our methodologies doesn’t just require the involvement of an ‘other’ or ‘difference’, but of multiple others and differing differences. It is to reflect on how we are required and enabled to think not only about our relationship with otherness, but also how we engage with interaction between ‘the other’ and ‘the other other’.

Conclusion

I have argued that that remaining within a dyadic paradigm is unhelpful if we want to map as many varieties of intersubjectivity as possible and to interpret them in dialogical contexts. As soon as we start looking at ‘we-you’ or ‘I-yous’ encounters, then we start to look at contexts which necessarily involve more than two. Philosophy has tended to try to understand intersubjectivity on a dyadic paradigm, which limits the analysis which can be given. Stawarska contrasts her polycentricism with egocentricism, which is an important contrast to make, but if the former only gives an analysis of this orientation as though we only ever related to one other person at a time, as though we went through life relating in a series of dyads, then it is not truly polycentric.