Husserl on Meaning and Grammar (original) (raw)
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Husserl on Meaning, Grammar, and the Structure of Content
Husserl Studies, 2018
Husserl's Logical Grammar is intended to explain how complex expressions can be constructed out of simple ones so that their meaning turns out to be determined by the meanings of their constituent parts and the way they are put together. Meanings are thus understood as structured contents and classified into formal categories to the effect that the logical properties of expressions reflect their grammatical properties. As long as linguistic meaning reduces to the intentional content of pre-linguistic representations, however, it is not trivial to account for how semantics relates to syntax in this context. In this paper, I analyze Husserl's Logical Grammar as a system of recursive rules operating on representations and suggest that the syntactic form of representations (both mental and linguistic) contributes to their semantics because it carries information about semantic role. I further discuss Husserl's syntactic account of the unity of propositions and argue that, on this account, logical form supervenes on syntactic form. In the last section I draw some implications for the phenomenology of thought and conjecture that the structural features it displays are likely to convey the syntactic structures of an underlying language-like representational system.
2018
Lecture notes from Husserl's logic lectures published during the last 20 years offer a much better insight into his doctrine of the forms of meaning than does the fourth Logical Investigation or any other work published during Husserl's lifetime. This paper provides a detailed reconstruction, based on all the sources now available, of Husserl's system of logical grammar. After having explained the notion of meaning that Husserl assumes in his later logic lectures as well as the notion of form of meaning as it features in 'doctrine of the forms of meaning', I present a system of rules that describes all the various forms of meaning that Husserl singles out in his lectures. The paper is accepted for publication in History and Philosophy of Logic.
Revisiting Husserl's Account of Language in Logical Investigations
HORIZON. Studies in Phenomenology. Vol. 7, №2 (2018), 263-272, 2018
The main aim of this paper is to revisit and reassess the account of language at the origins of Husserl’s phenomenology specifically focusing on Logical Investigations. I would like to argue that there is an ambivalence in Husserl’s discussion of language in Logical Investigations: on the one hand, Husserl is concerned with language as one of the most important symbolic systems and a requisite for scientific knowledge, and he emphasizes the role of linguistic discussions as the philosophically indispensable preparations for constructing pure logic; on the other hand, he applies the idea of the fundamental distinction between the realm of ideal and real being to his views of logic, science and language, which finally causes him to interpret the relation between logic, science and language as the inessential one. The paper begins with discussing Husserl’s view of symbolic methods and sign systems in Prolegomena. The second section is focused on the idea of the necessity of linguistic investigations for pure logic presented in the Introduction to the second volume of Logical Investigations. In the final section I make an analysis of the 4th Logical investigation with the special emphasis put on the idea of pure logical grammar.
HUSSERL'S SEMANTICS: MENDING HUSSERL WITH HUSSERL
The paper argues for a way of bringing Husserl's semantics in Logical Investigations up to date by drawing on a variety of critical tools gleaned from his later writings. My argument proceeds in two steps. (1) I offer a summary of the main ingredients of Husserl's theorization of natural language, with an emphasis on his description of linguistic meaning as a Platonic ideal species. (2) The paper gathers a number of concepts from Husserl's later works up to Experience and Judgment for the kind of repair work that could make his semantics once more a competitive candidate in the arena of natural language semantics. I do so by reformulating Husserl's approach in terms of a 'semantics of imaginability'.
Frederick James Crosson Formal logic and formal ontology in Husserl's phenomenology
It is not without reason that it has often been said that formal logic has let itself be led by grammar. . . .provided that instead of being led by grammar. . .is substituted the fact of being directed by the grammatical itself. 1 The development of formal logic as well as the development of linguistics seem to cast doubt on the parallelism which this remark of Edmund Husserl implies. On the one hand, such works as Carnap's Logical Syntax of Language have argued that true statements about logical structure are independent of any historical language (i.e. they are analytically true). On the other hand, modern linguistics appears to have shattered the illusion that "there must exist a definite and unique system of the parts of speech, which is to be regarded as a necessary constituent of rational speech and thought.* 2 Nevertheless, rooted firmly in the foggy no-man's land between these two disciplines is the work of a man whose importance for the meaning of formal logic has not yet been measured, and whose students-men as diverse as Heidegger and Carnap-bear the marks of his decisive influence. It was Husserl who could write, *The disdain with which philosophical logicians love to speak of mathematical theories of deduction does not in the least affect that fact that. . .the mathematical form is the only scientific one, the sole one to offer a systematic closure and completeness, a dominance of all questions and of their possible forms of solutions". But it was also Husserl who wrote, The greatest step our age has to make is to recognize that with the philosophical intuition in the correct sense, the phenomenological grasp of essences, a limitless field of work opens out, a science which, without all the indirect symbolical and mathematical methods, without the apparatus of premises and conclusions, still attains a plenitude of the most rigorous sort of decisive cognitions for all further philosophy.Î propose to examine, first, Husserl's conception of a w pure grammar* and its relevance for the theory of meaning categories (in the Logische
Axiomathes, 2021
This paper accomplishes three goals. First, the essay demonstrates that Edmund Husserl's theory of meaning consciousness from his 1901 Logical Investigations is internally inconsistent and falls apart upon closer inspection. I show that Husserl, in 1901, describes non-intuitive meaning consciousness as a direct parallel or as a 'mirror' of intuitive consciousness. He claims that non-intuitive meaning acts, like intuitions, have substance and represent their objects. I reveal that, by defining meaning acts in this way, Husserl cannot account for our experiences of countersensical, absurd, or impossible meanings. Second, I examine how Husserl came to recognize this 1901 mistake in his 1913/14 Revisions to the Sixth Logical Investigation (Husserliana XX-1/2). I discuss how he accordingly reformulates his understanding of non-intuitive meaning acts from the ground up in those Revisions, where this also allows for him to properly account for the experience of impossible meanings. Instead of describing them as mirrors of intuitions, Husserl takes non-intuitive meaning acts to be modifications of intuitions, where they have no substance and do not represent their objects. Finally, in the conclusion to this essay, I demonstrate how this fundamental change to his understanding of meaning consciousness forced Husserl to revise other central tenets of his philosophy, such that the trajectory of his thought can only be properly understood in light of these revisions to his theory of non-intuitive meaning consciousness.
Husserl's Theory of Language as Calculus Ratiocinator
Synthese, Volume 112, Number 3 (1997), pp. 303-321., 1997
This paper defends an interpretation of Husserl's theory of language, specifically as it appears in the Logical Investigations, as an example of a larger body of theories dubbed 'language as calculus'. Although this particular interpretation has been previously defended by other authors, such as Hintikka and Kusch, this paper proposes to contribute to the discussion by arguing that what makes this interpretation plausible are Husserl's distinction between the notions of meaning-intention and meaning-fulfillment, his view that meaning is instantiated through meaning-intending acts of transcendental consciousness, and his view that the content of meaning-intending acts is ideal meaning simpliciter. As well, the paper argues that the phenomenological method of reduction itself presupposes the notion that reality as such can be reached by subtracting the influence of the language of the natural attitude and its ontological commitments and it, thus, presupposes the conception of language as a reinterpretable calculus.
Studia Phaenomenologica, 2017
This paper accomplishes two goals. First, I elucidate Edmund Husserl’s theory of inauthentic judgments from his 1890, “On the Logic of Signs (Semiotic)”. It will be shown how inauthentic judgments are distinct from other signitive experiences, in such a manner that when Husserl seeks to account for them, he is forced to revise the general structure of his philosophy of meaning and in doing so, is also able to realize novel insights concerning the nature of signification. Second, these conclusions are revealed to be the foundation of Husserl’s pure logical grammar, found in the 1901, “Fourth Logical Investigation”. In his analysis of inauthentic judgments, Husserl already recognized, albeit in a problematic way and for entirely different reasons, many of the central tenets of the 1901 work concerning categoremata and syncategoremata, matter and form, and the isomorphism between them.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 2004
One of the central issues in linguistics is whether or not language should be considered a self-contained, autonomous formal system, essentially reducible to the syntactic algorithms of meaning construction (as Chomskyan grammar would have it), or a holisticfunctional system serving the means of expressing pre-organized intentional contents and thus accessible only with respect to features and structures pertaining to other cognitive subsystems or to human experience as such (as Cognitive Linguistics would have it). The latter claim depends critically on the existence of principles governing the composition of semantic contents. Husserl's fourth Logical Investigation is well known as a genuine precursor for Chomskyan grammar. However, I will establish the heterogeneous character of the Investigation and show that the whole first part of it is devoted to the exposition of a semantic combinatorial system cognate to the one elaborated within cognitive linguistics. I will thus show how theoretical results in linguistics may serve to corroborate and shed light on those parts of Husserl's Fourth Investigation that have traditionally been dismissed as vague or simply ignored.