Social Interaction Theory

One of the major questions in the philosophy of mind is how people come to understand one another and engage in social cognition. Gallagher, Varga, Fuchs, and De Jaegher all attempt to address this question by embracing a conception of sociality that holds that people come to understand each other and engage in collective meaning-making through robust second-person interactions. In this paper, I will attempt to show that such a conception of sociality can address many of the problems that have plagued more traditional theories of social interaction and, when taken together with research from the social sciences, offer a framework for understanding in-group/out-group psychology and accompanying social phenomena.
Historically, one of the major …show more content…
Gallagher insists that the “other person’s emotions and intentions are normally and frequently apparent in their embodied and contextualized behaviors, including their vocalizations, gestures, facial expressions, eye gaze, and situated postures” (Gallagher 2012, 3377). If emotions and intentions are apparent through observation, they do not need to be accessed through inference in order to interact with …show more content…
The phenomenological method is a way of examining experience and the structures of consciousness that involves suspending assumptions about the metaphysical nature of the objects of experience and examining the remaining “phenomenological residuum” to ascertain how the way one experiences objects of perception is different from the perception of the objects themselves. In other words, phenomenology is a way of examining how we experience through a critical examination of the relationship between our experience and our perception of its intentional