There is now a vast body of literature on collective intentionality, group cooperation, and the notion of the “we.” These related phenomena have been studied in the fields of phenomenology, analytic philosophy, and cognitive science. In this literature, very little has been done on the ways in which the notion of “we” is differentiated across languages, how different kinds of “we” are employed in spontaneous interactions, and whether the choice of which “we” (if there is a choice) matters for invoking or recognizing the sense of the “plural subject” postulated by philosophers David Carr and Margaret Gilbert and discussed in Dan Zahavi’s, 2025 Being We. I approach this topic by examining the use of first-person plural pronouns and adjectives in a Polynesian language, Samoan, that distinguishes between inclusive and exclusive “we/our” as well as between dual and plural “we/our.” I use the Samoan examples to argue that the choice of certain first-person plural pronouns (or adjective) can be shown to be constitutive of being a “plural subject.” (Key words: collective intentionality, plural subject, first-person pronouns and possessive adjectives, Samoan grammar).
Contemporary phenomenology and cognitive science have increasingly converged on the idea that social understanding is embodied, interactive, and enacted in real-time engagement. Interaction theory and enactivism have challenged cognitivist models of social cognition by emphasizing direct perception, affective attunement, and participatory sense-making. Yet while current interactive approaches offer sophisticated accounts of how intersubjective coordination emerges in local encounters, they remain comparatively underdeveloped in explaining the various ways that such coordination becomes normatively stable, scalable, transmissible across time and integrated into complex social formations. In this paper we argue that (1) the phenomenological concept of sedimentation as it applies to enactive accounts of habit and organizational routine, and (2) a Xunzian account of ritual (li 礼) as a theory of social formation, can help to clarify some aspects of how such coordination is cultivated and sustained. Such accounts help to explain how, to a significant extent, intersubjectivity is a culturally and institutionally cultivated achievement. By bringing Xunzi into dialogue with phenomenology and contemporary debates on intersubjectivity, we hope to contribute both to comparative philosophy and to ongoing efforts to integrate social, affective, and normative dimensions of embodied cognition.
K. E. Løgstrup’s work remains largely absent from phenomenological research about sociality. The aim of this paper is to rectify this neglect by articulating and situating Løgstrup’s work on this topic in a phenomenological context. After clarifying Løgstrup’s credentials as a phenomenologist, I argue that one of his central contributions is the development of a second-personal phenomenology of social life, in which communicative trust—trust as involved in paradigmatic communicative exchanges between a speaker and an interlocutor—constitutes the bedrock of the social world. I go on to argue that as distinguished from two major phenomenological approaches to the foundations of sociality—the Husserlian and Heideggerian approaches—Løgstrup’s approach doesn’t prioritise the experiential asymmetry between self and other, nor an impersonal and anonymous way of being with each other, but rather the spontaneous trust towards one other that we take for granted in paradigmatic communicative or—as I also call them—second-personal interactions.
Vervaeke and Mastropietro’s 4P model of knowing is a non-representational and process-oriented framework that integrates four interrelated ways of knowing: propositional, procedural, perspectival, and participatory. In this paper, we revise this model, drawing on the enactive approach and insights from Madhyamaka and Yogācāra Buddhist traditions of philosophy. We first provide an integrated overview of the 4P model and identify three questions concerning the conceptualization of participatory knowing and the ontological status of distinctions between the four ways of knowing. We then introduce the enactive and Buddhist resources that inform our treatment, and address these questions through a non-dual and reflexive treatment that preserves the framework’s pedagogical and transformative potential. Finally, we discuss how the revised framework can inform fields as diverse as education, psychotherapy, and contemplative pedagogy.
The psychiatric diagnostic encounter has recently been subjected to renewed philosophical scrutiny, particularly through the lens of epistemic injustice. Within this literature, the diagnostic interview is often conceived as a testimonial encounter in which patients present self-reports that clinicians judge. This paper examines whether such a “testimonial model” adequately captures the epistemic dynamics of psychiatric diagnostic interviews, with particular attention to the semi-structured, phenomenological interview. Conceptually, we argue that prevailing accounts overstate both patient passivity and the transparency of their lived experience. Psychiatric symptoms are rarely available as simple, namable objects, readily available in self-reports; rather, the symptoms’ clinical significance typically emerges through dialogical exploration. We propose that the semi-structured, phenomenological interview can be understood as a co-constructed epistemic space in which the clinical significance of patient experience, interpretation, and behavior are jointly explored within a trustful patient–clinician relationship. Empirically, we draw on data from a study in which patients underwent both a fully structured interview and a semi-structured, phenomenological interview, supplemented with written evaluations of their experience of the interviews. Despite relying on the same diagnostic manual, the two interview formats yielded different diagnostic outcomes, with the phenomenological interview systematically eliciting psychopathological phenomena not captured by the structured interview. Thematic analysis of patient evaluations indicated that most patients experienced the phenomenological interview as more dialogical, meaningful, and better able to capture their difficulties. Collectively, these findings suggest that epistemic richness and diagnostic accuracy are closely intertwined, supporting a conceptualization of the psychiatric diagnostic interview beyond the testimonial model.
