Intersubjective Metacognition (1/2): The I Think You Think I Think Dialogue

Metacognition, often defined as "thinking about thinking," is one of the latest buzz words in educational psychology, but what exactly is metacognition (http://gse.buffalo.edu/fas/shuell/CEP564/Metacog.htm)?

Taylor (1999) defines metacognition as “an appreciation of what one already knows, together with a correct apprehension of the learning task and what knowledge and skills it requires, combined with the [mental] agility to make correct inferences about how to apply one’s strategic knowledge to a particular situation, and to do so efficiently and reliably” (http://academic.pgcc.edu/~wpeirce/MCCCTR/metacognition.htm).

Basically, in educational psychology, metacognition is a sort of learning tool. The term refers to learners’ awareness of their own knowledge and their ability to understand, control, and manipulate their own cognitive processes. Most metacognitive research falls within the following categories: metamemory, metacomprehension, and self-regulation. Metamemory refers to the learners' awareness of and knowledge about their own memory systems and strategies for using their memories effectively. Metacomprehension refers to the learners' ability to monitor the degree to which they understand information being communicated to them, to recognize failures to comprehend, and to employ repair strategies when failures are identified. (Learners with poor metacomprehension skills often finish reading passages without even knowing that they have not understood them, whereas learners who are more adept at metacomprehension will check for confusion or inconsistency, and undertake a corrective strategy, such as rereading.) Self-regulation refers to the learners' ability to make adjustments in their own learning processes (http://education.calumet.purdue.edu/vockell/EdPsyBook/Edpsy7/edpsy7_meta.htm).

Intersubjectivity has become a topic of considerable interest among psychoanalysts and psychologists. The term intersubjectivity refers in the most basic sense to the interaction between two subjects: the self and another person, or self and other. The intersubjective field is an area of common engagement in which one’s individual subjectivity is articulated and communicated (Roger Frie & Bruce Reis - Available http://www.pep-web.org/document.php?id=CPS.037.0297A).

The impossibility of achieving mutual knowledge—that is to say, a fully reciprocal understanding between two minds—is a familiar philosophical problem. For knowledge to be mutual, not only must you know what the other knows, but the other must know that you know it; accordingly, you must know that the other knows that you know it, and the other in turn must know that you know that they know that you know. As this regress recedes, the likelihood of achieving each of its levels diminishes to the infinitesimal; and still there is no point of rest at which symmetry is achieved between what each knows of the other. The ordinary purposes of practical communication or social interaction, of course, require rather less rigorous standards than this. Still, narrative significance oftentimes hangs upon the ability of characters to penetrate (or not) to the deeper levels of intersubjective understanding (Richard Walsh - Available http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/modernism-modernity/v011/11.4walsh.html).

Intersubjective metacognition is a term that can be used to refer to the infamous "I think that you think that I think" / "I know that you know that I know" dialouge. Check out the other post on metacognition to see how good you are at this type of logic!