Intersubjectivity refers to the variety of possible relations between perspectives. It is indispensable for understanding human social behaviour. While theoretical work on intersubjectivity is relatively sophisticated, methodological approaches to studying intersubjectivity lag behind. Most methodologies assume that individuals are the unit of analysis. In order to research intersubjectivity, however, methodologies are needed that take relationships as the unit of analysis. The first aim of this article is to review existing methodologies for studying intersubjectivity. Four methodological approaches are reviewed: comparative self-report, (...) observing behaviour, analysing talk and ethnographic engagement. The second aim of the article is to introduce and contribute to the development of a dialogical method of analysis. The dialogical approach enables the study of intersubjectivity at different levels, as both implicit and explicit, and both within and between individuals and groups. The article concludes with suggestions for using the proposed method for researching intersubjectivity both within individuals and between individuals and groups. (shrink)

The philosopher David Lewis is credited by many social scientists, including mainstream economists, with having founded the modern (game-theoretical) approach to conventions, viewed as solutions to recurrent coordination problems. Yet it is generally ignored that he revised his approach, soon after the publication of his well-known book. I suggest that this revision has deep implications (probably not perceived by Lewis himself) on the analytical links between coordination, uncertainty and rationality. Thinking anew about these issues leads me to map out an (...) alternative social scientific research programme. The traditional ontological equipment of methodological individualism should be reinforced in order to admit the existence of an “intersubjective” world beside the two familiar worlds: the “objective” world of observable things, and the “subjective” world of expectations and individual beliefs. In particular, language becomes necessary to understand coordination via conventions, rather than the other way round. That has led a group of institutionalist economists and pragmatist sociologists to develop an enlarged model of rationality, no longer isolated from questions of coordination and values. This model is the basis for the “Economics of Conventions”. (shrink)

There is no room for the concept of need in the prevailing neoclassical school of economics. Not so, however, in classical political economy. Through close analysis in this paper, I wish to trace the concept’s prominence in Adam Smith’s thought and to fine-tune its definitional aspects. The thrust of Smith’s argument is to delineate the mechanism via which the needs of the poorest in society are satisfied. Grounded in an understanding of need as limited and exhaustive rather than infinite, like (...) desire or preference, his theory is one of affluence rather than scarcity. But his justification of commercial society (from which the neoclassical school only lifts the conclusion) rests on becoming actually satisfied that these needs are, indeed, satisfied—an erroneous belief (at least according to the terms of Smith’s own definition) and an internal contradiction in the development of his argument, occasioned, I wish to suggest, by certain colonialist discourses. Finally, Smith’s ontology of need, as reconstructed here, corresponds to similar enquiries recently undertaken in philosophy and in some heterodox schools of economics. (shrink)