Dr. Michael Mascolo, Professor of Psychology at Merrimack College, presents a provocative challenge to psychology’s foundational assumptions about how we gain knowledge.

Drawing on Wittgenstein’s private language argument, mirror neuron research, and developmental psychology, Mascolo argues that both subjectivity and objectivity fail as sources of psychological knowledge. Instead, he proposes that all psychological understanding originates in intersubjectivity — the shared experiential space between people.

Mascolo traces how children learn to represent their own emotions not through introspection, but through a social process where caregivers name publicly visible expressions, and children then internalize those meanings. He extends this insight to argue that psychological science itself should be reconceived as a refinement of everyday intersubjective engagement, replacing the positivist model of theory tested against objective data with a hermeneutic process of corroboration across multiple intersubjective sources.

Dr. Michael Mascolo is a developmental psychologist, co-author of seminal papers with Kurt Fischer on skill theory and dynamic development, and founder of the Common Ground Institute.

Timestamps

00:00:00 — Introduction
00:16:47 — Psychology’s Cartesian heritage
00:25:30 — Wittgenstein’s private language argument and the beetle in the box
00:34:00 — The inner and outer as two sides of the same process
00:38:20 — How children learn emotion words through social interaction
00:41:00 — Why subjectivity fails as a source of psychological knowledge
00:43:10 — Why objectivity fails: we never just see what’s there
00:48:00 — The problem of values in psychological inquiry
00:52:45 — Proposing an intersubjective epistemology for social science