Abstract
Proper timing and other temporal factors are often viewed as important for rhythmic and synchronised social interaction. The chapter attempts to clarify what roles temporal properties play in interpersonal coordination. The tools for investigating the role of time in intersubjectivity are taken from Craver’s account of explanation, which I extend to intersubjective processes. A distinction is made between causal relevance, constitutive relevance, temporal constraints and background conditions. With the help of these tools, various cases of intersubjective coordination are scrutinised: the interaction between mother and infant and Thomas Fuchs’ phenomenological accounts of schizophrenia and depression, where the disturbance is supposed to involve both intersubjectivity and temporality. Thanks to these fine-grained distinctions we can give specific and different verdicts about the role of time in each particular case.
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Notes
- 1.
Of course, when pre-linguistic processes are analysed in terms of an analogy with language, as a kind of “protolanguage,” the irony is not big (see Halliday 1979).
- 2.
Creating live music is often given as an example of a synchronised interaction. Not all members of the band are doing the same thing but they adjust their own playing to that of the others. This kind of mutual responsiveness is what is meant by synchrony here. Trevarthen (1999b, 157) takes this analogy a step further and writes about musicality as the innate “psycho-biological need in all humans.” See also Malloch and Trevarthen (2009).
- 3.
This is not such a big break from more traditional approaches to causation as it may seem. Craver (2007, 95) notes that more usual causal relata such as events or processes can be easily replaced by variables as those can be understood in terms of their potential values (for example, an event can occur or fail to occur).
- 4.
There is a question of whether reciprocity is real or illusory. Some have suggested that the illusion of reciprocal interaction comes from the fact that the mother adjusts her behaviour to infant’s spontaneous movements leaving the impression that the infant responds to mother (Papoušek and Papoušek 1995, 127). However, I examine the case under the assumption that it is as it seems. For a corroboration of Murray and Trevarthen’s results, see Nadel et al. (1999).
- 5.
- 6.
Since the clinical aspects are not my main focus, I just proceed from Fuchs’ notions of schizophrenia and depression, without attempting to compare them to standard classifications such as DSM or criticizing his approach. For a recent critique of Fuchs, see Ratcliffe (2012) who argues that depression is more varied than Fuchs conceives it.
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Acknowledgments
Work on this chapter was supported by the COST Action TD0904 (Time in Mental Activity), institutional research funding IUT20-5 of the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research and a grant ETF9117 from the Estonian Science Foundation. I am grateful to Colwyn Trevarthen for reading suggestions and to Alexander Davies for checking my English.
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Mölder, B. (2016). Time in Intersubjectivity: Some Tools for Analysis. In: Mölder, B., Arstila, V., Øhrstrøm, P. (eds) Philosophy and Psychology of Time. Studies in Brain and Mind, vol 9. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22195-3_11
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