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The intersubjective is an essentially relational realm: it is the realm that lies between subjects—between ourselves (for we, of course, are among the subjects to whom the term refers)—and as it lies between, so it also represents the realm that is common to all, the realm of what is essentially public and open, the realm of communication and active engagement with others. Through our participation in such a realm we come to know something of how others feel, of what they believe, desire and hope, of who and what they are.
Yet within modern philosophy, in particular, our access to such a realm, and so our access to the feelings, beliefs, desires, hopes and identities of others, have both been viewed as questionable. The so-called ‘problem of other minds’ is just the problem of whether we do indeed have access to such intersubjectivity and, with it, to the subjectivity of others, as well as of the nature of that access. The problem at issue here is, of course, primarily epistemological—it concerns our knowledge of others and of their mental lives—but epistemological issues are not the only issues that arise in relation to intersubjectivity and neither is it only in relation to epistemological matters that intersubjectivity emerges as philosophically problematic. The very nature and possibility of intersubjectivity is itself open to question. To what extent, for instance, is intersubjectivity necessarily tied to language? To what extent is it tied to materiality and the body? What role might be played by the objective world in the structure of intersubjectivity? And might intersubjectivity already be implied in the very idea of subjectivity itself?
Inasmuch as the idea of the intersubjective brings a number of such questions with it, so there is not, within philosophy, any single, well-recognised or clearly defined ‘problem of intersubjectivity’ on which discussion can focus (something reflected in the absence of ‘intersubjectivity’ as a heading in most dictionaries and