A Semiotic Reading of Aron Gurwitsch's Transcendental Phenomenology (original) (raw)
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The Problem of Self-Awareness in Aron Gurwitsch’s Phenomenology
2013
This article analyses Aron Gurwitsch’s conception of consciousness without the ego. Gurwitsch criticism of the pure ego reveals that a phenomenological reduction should be understood in a different way – the aim of reduction is not to reveal transcendental ego as the undeniable foundation, but rather to reveal the field of consciousness. On the one hand, when a phenomenological reduction is performed the act of consciousness should be understood only as a correlation between noema and noesis. A third component of the act as a pure ego which in Ideas I is understood as the center or a unifying entity is not allowed. On the other hand, any experience that implies indirect self-experience or thematic activity which is accompanied by a marginal selfawareness should be understood as a consciousness conceiving itself as self-consciousness. Thus marginal consciousness could be understood as a pre-reflective self-experience.First of all, the criticism of the pure ego is analyzed. The import...
The Transcendental Significance of Phenomenology
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There is a well-known line of thought, associated with Donald Davidson, that connects the notion of a perceptual given—of non-linguistic or non-conceptual experience of the world—with skepticism. Against this, I argue that the notion of what is given in perception leads to skepticism only on certain interpretations. I argue, in fact, that there must be perceptual experience such that there is "something it is like" to have it, or that would provide the subject of a phenomenological analysis, if we are to block skepticism in its most radical forms. In particular, I claim that there is a distinctive phenomenology of the experience of agency. These phenomenological claims are conclusions of a transcendental argument according to which our having such experience is a condition of our having a meaningful language. Moreover, the same transcendental argument is sufficient to show the incoherence of radical skepticism about the external world. And I argue that the proper understan...
Although the term 'transcendental consciousness' seems like a rather basic notion in Husserl's philosophy, its precise meaning is in fact one of the principle dividing points among scholars. In this paper I first outline three different views on transcendental consciousness and identify reasons for maintaining them. The most interesting opposition this exposition yields is between the latter two positions. The rest of the paper is then devoted to developing a solution to this interpretative problem which should satisfy intuitions underlying both camps. Particularly novel about this solution is that it (a) understands Husserl's notion of transcendental consciousness as involving a kind of metaphysical commitment, and (b) takes it not as any kind of object or regional ontology, but as encompassing the totality of being considered from a unique transcendental-phenomenological perspective.
The Phenomenological Road to Cognitive Semiotics
Like M. Jordan, who discovered in his old age that he had always been talking prose, I realized a few years ago that I have been doing cognitive semiotics my whole life. In my 1978 dissertation I argued for an «integral linguistics», meaning both that linguistic theory should be conceived within a wider semiotic framework, and that we should abandon the «autonomy postulate», according to which theoretical models must be independent of empirical findings, which dominated both linguistics and semiotics at the time. When you build theory with the help of a phenomenological method, there is a much shorter distance between theory and experience, because phenomenology is empirical attention to consciousness. Much later I became acquainted with Paul Bouissac's description of semiotics as «meta-analysis», which «consists in reading through a large number of specialised scientific publications/…/ in one or several domains of inquiry, and of relating the partial results within a more encompassing model». Cognitive science is for the most part also a kind of meta-analysis. Nevertheless, semiotics has interest in adopting the practice of cognitive science that consists in submitting its own questions to empirical study. The essential difference between cognitive science and semiotics, however, resides elsewhere, in the point of view taken in the construction of the encompassing model. In semiotics, the point of view that determines the construction of the model is meaning in the widest sense of the term. In cognitive science it is cognition, but in a sense itself redefined by the approach, first, during the reign of the computer metaphor, as everything in the mind which may be simulated on a computer, and then, with the later brain model, as everything which can be detected as occurring in the brain. Semiotics, on the other hand, has generated its own reductionist models from within, most notoriously those of Saussure and Peirce. To avoid reductionism, it will be argued, Husserlean phenomenology, rather than the Peircean brand, is a more suitable method to employ in the study of meaning.