Sharing Thoughts and Intersubjectivity

Abstract This chapter offers a comprehensive road-map of contemporary philosophical issues pertaining to the intersubjectivity of thought and the role of thought in communication and coordination. It thus sheds light on an area of the philosophical research that has undergone a considerable boom in the last few decades. Along the way, it traces contemporary conceptions of thought sharing and intersubjectivity back to the works of Gottlob Frege and, more recently, Kit Fine; provides an introduction to the increasingly popular relational models of thought individuation and their varied understandings of the key concept of coordination; draws a distinction between subjective-first and intersubjective-first approaches to the intersubjectivity of thought and connects it to fundamental debates such as that between internalism and externalism; examines recent disputes about whether successful communication requires thinkers to grasp the same thoughts; and summarizes and locates the contributions of Sharing Thoughts in the road-map thus presented.