Abstract

In this volume, volume 6, I will deal with insight and understanding, meaning and communication and intersubjectivity. (In an appendix I will include a number of –isms, cognitive biases and fallacies that might interfere in, with and distort these things.) The latter is pre-supposed by, present, necessary and operating in all four of these notions when they are employed as verbs. I hope and intend to employ these words and explore them without the need for ghost-in-the-machine like mysterious, mystical and mythical ‘mental’ processes and organs such as ‘mind’ and ‘consciousness’ but by means of different meanings, dimensions, levels of t notions of intersubjectivity. Intersubjectivity enfolds (like a pregnant mother her foetus) insight, understanding, meaning and communication. Intersubjectivity is the beginning, the ground and reason for and the end of all meanings or sense that human beings could have. I am not interested in all the details of insight, experience, understanding, meaning, concepts and ideas, dialogue, discourse, interaction, communication (for example as speculated about by Habermas and his followers, Brandom et al). etc but merely the fact that these things require, assume, presuppose (different aspects, features, functions, processes, etc of) intersubjectivity. For those who are so inclined they could execute experiments (for example in the disciplines of philosophy, psychology, sociology, cognitive sciences, anthropology, etc) to establish that what I state here is a fact and not merely speculate. I will leave speculation - about the activities and nature of the first, second and third person (the public, etc) participants in the activities and process of communication, the question of second and third contingencies, or Habermas’s interactionist cum dialogical intersubjectivity and/or Brandom’s discursive intersubjectivity, the insufficiency of the former’s coordination and the need for synthesis, modes of structuration and the temporal dimensions of communication, threefold semiotic or twofold semiological structuralist theories of signs, theories of individualist or collective learning, action-directing models cultural models, pre-supposed structural features of the social relationships that are involved in communication, the structure parameters of for example the process of communication embedded in an intersubjective context (I would say all the following themselves are intersubjective), as discursive practice, including discourse, argumentation, communication, communication exchange, linguistic communication, everyday communication, interaction, etc - those, especially Continentals and those influenced by them, who suffer from the need for metaphysical speculation and to ontologize in complex terms about the most simple and obvious notions.