Sorry for deserting you all. I've had a busy month, but now I'm ready to discuss LI 1. As I'm sure you all have noted, there's a lot in the first investigation to discuss. I think this is partly because it is really rich philosophically, and partly because of the zigzaging that Husserl mentions in the introduction (or was it the prolegomena?). Husserl constantly introduces new concepts without spending much time clarifying their place in his system or their essential features. So almost immediately we are faced with all of the primary themes of the Investigations: the structure of intentionality, parts and wholes, the theory of content, the theory of fulfillment, and of course, the subject of LI 1, the theory of expressions. One nice aspect of this is that the reader gets in view almost all of Husserl's (immense) project almost immediately, though how it all fits together is far from clear.
In LI 1 two areas really struck me. The first is Husserl's very clearly articulated internalism, and the second is his relation to Frege. I will deal with them in turn.
By Husserl's internalism I mean his claim that all meaningful acts, including expressions, gain their meaning from inner experiences. So though we can have an intuition (e.g. see) a meaningful gesture, the gesture is not meaningful in and of itself, but is an indication of an inner experience. Similarly, though we hear someone speaking, what makes that speech meaningful is the speaker's inner meaning giving act. I found this interesting because most of the philosophy that I've been influenced by (MP, MH) have rejected this idea. For them meaning is determined through external phenomena, either background social norms or bodily (depending on the type of meaning). Obviously there's a lot more to say about this, but not now.
Interlude: Husserl takes on a lot of Kantian terminology, doesn't he? Intuitions, judgments, etc. All from Kant.
Husserl's relation to Frege is the subject of a fair amount of scholarly work of which I have read very little of; however I am in the process of writing a paper on meaning in Frege so this is on my mind. In Uber Sinn und Bedeutung, which is usually translated as On Sense and Reference, Frege makes a distinction between the sense of a proper name and it's reference. Broadly speaking this can be thought of as the distinction between what a word means and what it picks out in the world; though Husserl rejects the terminological distinction (both obviously have the same meaning auf Deutsch), he accepts the gist of the philosophical distinction (Section 13 I think). The distinction, according to Husserl, must be maintained for two reasons. In the first place because two names can differ in their meaning but name the same object. For example Hesperus and Phosporous mean (respectively) the morning star and the evening star, but they both pick out the planet Venus. In Frege's terminology Hesperus and Phosphorous are each a sense and they have one reference, Venus. In the second place, the distinction must be maintained because two expressions can have the same meaning but refer to two different objects. For example "a horse" always has the same meaning (sense), but is context sensitive, picking out different horses in different contexts.
One weird thing: I said that Husserl only accepts the gist of Frege's distinction. This is because, ror Frege sentences do not refer to (real) objects, but truth values (weird!), Husserl doesn't even mention this (at least not in the bits I've read), which seems good. I'm not quite sure why Frege thinks sentences don't refer to (real) objects, but he doesn't.
One last thing: I did want to point out that, while Husserl is an internalist compared to Heidegger/MP/etc, he is still more of an externalist than Kant because he is will to attribute perception of someone speaking to intuition and not to judgment. Kant, on the other hand, would not except that there could be an intuitions of something that do not have a judgment component. Cf. "Intuitions without concepts are blind..."
ReplyDeleteColin, great point about Frege! But I don't understand your added comment: why is attributing the perception of someone speaking to intuition a mark of being more externalist? I thought the difference between the externalist and internalist was the "location" of meaning. So the externalist will count "the perception of someone speaking" as an important determinant of the meaning, while an internalist will dismiss it. For example, when one says "the dog is wagging its tail," the externalist might claim that the meaning of this utterance is different under different contexts, while the internalist will claim that the meaning stays the same as determined by the one who had something in mind when he uttered the sentence. (I hope I'm getting the in/ex-ternalist business right) I don't quite see why counting perceiving someone speaking as intuition and not as judgment qualifies someone as being more of an externalist; only if "what is intuited" includes something that determines meaning will this be true. But I doubt that Husserl will accept this based on his ending remarks in LI 1 (or the end of LI 2.1 I can't remember) that human expressions are expressed through signs - signs are not essential to meanings but are indispensable for human beings to express meanings. It seems to me that he is willing to grant that external contexts do influence some utterances to some extent (such as sentences that contain personal pronouns), but that doesn't matter for ideal meanings (scientific or perspective-less propositions, as I understand them).
ReplyDeleteI have trouble applying the in/ex-ternalist distinction to Husserl actually; it seems that he argues against both ways of understanding meaning while clearly leaning more towards an internalist account (which, by the way, makes the difference between psychology and phenomenology tricky). Both ways, because besides arguing against the externalist, he also talks about psychological states (which Husserl, I think, understands also as an "inner" state) that do not determine the meaning of an utterance at all. That's not precise: Husserl wants to claim that there is a "core" meaning that does not change in an expression such as "It's raining" no matter the utterer feels good or bad about it or not (although the latter are also parts of the whole meaning). Even more: 2+2=4 has meaning whether any human being has ever innerly experienced it or not. BUT, the meaning is only "realized" in human beings through the inner experience they have of it - and this is where the internalist stance kicks in. To put it in the language of intentionality: the ideal meaning is in the ideally intended, which is independent of the intending but which we can only get by understanding what is ideal in the intending. So I think Husserl will say, both the internalist and the externalist got parts of the picture, but even combined together it's still not the whole picture - there's a meaning of meaning that both positions fail to grasp. And that "meaning of meaning" or ideality provides his basis for a foundation of logic.