Intersubjectivity in perception Shaun Gallagher Published online: 3 July 2008 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008 Abstract The embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended approaches to cog- nition explicate many important details for a phenomenology of perception, and are consistent with some of the traditional phenomenological analyses. Theorists working in these areas, however, often fail to provide an account of how inter- subjectivity might relate to perception. This paper suggests some ways in which intersubjectivity is important for an adequate account of perception. Keywords Embodied cognition Á Extended mind Á Enactive perception Á Intersubjectivity Á Object perception 1 Introduction Perception, and cognition more generally, clearly are embodied processes. When theorists of embodied cognition say that perception is embodied, they mean that it involves more than brain processes, although, of course, the brain is part of the perceiving body and plays an important role. There are different ways to explain the role of such extra-neural contributions to perception. For example, in the contemporary parlance, there are the four ‘‘E’’s, i.e., cognition (the mind, perception, and so on) is embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive. In this paper I review these different ways of talking about cognition, and specifically about perception, in order to show that it is quite possible to develop an extremely rich and fruitful description of perception along these lines, but also that some of these approaches miss or downplay the role of intersubjectivity. S. Gallagher (&) Department of Philosophy, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL 32816, USA e-mail: gallaghr@mail.ucf.edu 123 Cont Philos Rev (2008) 41:163–178 DOI 10.1007/s11007-008-9075-8