Verena Mayer and Christopher Erhard
The fifth logical investigation is the locus classicus of Husserl’s phenomenology of intentionality—the “directedness” of all consciousness to something. Unlike his teacher Franz Brentano, who rather brusquely introduced intentionality as the characteristic feature of psychical phenomena, Husserl took up the task of describing intentional experiences, or acts, in their microstructures.
At the beginning of the fifth investigation (§§1–21) Husserl elucidates the structure of individual acts and defends the thesis that intentional experiences are structured events, which are characterized by three essential aspects: Acts always have an intentional content or sense (matter [Materie]) through which they aim at an object. They possess a quality—they belong to a certain act-type, for example, judgment, perception, enjoyment. And they always involve sensations, that is, they have a phenomenal aspect.
After introducing this threefold structure (material, quality, and sensation) of individual acts, Husserl applied himself to the question of how distinct act-types systematically relate to one another (§§22–45). In doing so, Husserl not only defined intentional matter and its relation to quality but also uncovered the so-called objectifying acts, that is, acts that are related to objects in a privileged manner and which form the basis of all other acts. These acts also stand at the center of the sixth investigation’s theory of knowledge, insofar as they are the intrinsically normative structures that can be fulfilled or disappointed. Thus, §§22–45 play the role of a fulcrum between the fifth and sixth investigations.1
Husserl proceeds by analyzing and reinterpreting, in detail, a theorem from Brentano’s Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874):2
(FB) All mental phenomena are either presentations or they are based upon presentations.3
Husserl progressively modifies this theorem; he first replaces “mental phenomena” with “intentional experiences,”4 then “based upon” with “founded in,” and finally he introduces the concept of objectifying acts. Thus, Husserl’s own version of Brentano’s theorem declares:
(FH) Each intentional experience is either an objectifying act or is founded in one.
The process of this reformulation leads us down a winding path in chapters 3 through 5, which leads from a detailed critique of Brentano’s theory of “mere presentations” (chap. 3) and a systematic analysis of “nominal presentations” (chap. 4) to the classification of objectifying acts (chap. 5).5 Chapter 6 is primarily terminological in nature; Husserl discerns no fewer than thirteen meanings of “presentation,” among which only the first four are relevant for chaps. 3 to 5.
Husserl’s approach in these chapters presents itself as a complex network that consists in phenomenological description just as much as it consists in arguments from the philosophy of language.6
Brentano’s Theorem, Intentional Matter, and “Mere Presentations” (§§22–31)
PRESENTATIONS AS THE BASIS FOR ALL MENTAL ACTS: A HISTORICAL SKETCH
Brentano’s thesis (FB), as he presents it in his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, is only a variant of the already widespread idea that presentations form the basis and essence of all psychical acts. Following Hume, psychologists such as Wundt understood presentations as mental events arising from the fusion of sensations, arising from them but not differing from them. In contrast to this, Brentano (somewhat like Lotze) understands presentations as complex acts, which indeed contain sensations, but acts also, for example, localize, unify, and subordinate sensations under concepts, and—most notably—they relate sensations to objects. Presentation, then, distinguishes itself from a sensation-complex in that it has an intentional relation, through which it lends all other acts not only a content but also an object. Brentano articulates his thesis thus: “Accordingly, we may consider the following definition of mental phenomena as indubitably correct: they are either presentations or they are based upon presentations.”7 The latter—that is, psychical phenomena that are based on presentations, are judgments on the one hand, and feelings and acts of the will on the other hand. Consequently, judgments and feelings do not have their “own” objects; they only relate to objects given in presentation.8
This classification of mental experiences goes right back to Descartes, who likewise distinguished between three types of cogitationes: presentations (ideae), “as when I think of a man, or a chimera, or the sky, or an angel or even of God”; volitional acts or emotions (voluntates sive affectus), as when I desire or fear something; and judgments (iudicia) as when I affirm or deny something.9 The epistemologist is interested above all in the distinction between presentation and judgment. The difference does not primarily lie in the fact that presentations are simple whereas judgments are complex. Rather, presentations are already able to combine ideas of things and properties. Judgments, however, stake a truth claim: they assert that things really are or are not in the way that the presentation merely displays them. Mere presentations are the remainder after the Cartesian doubt experiment: they make no assertion about what is the case, but they nevertheless present objects and, in a certain way, provide the material for all other acts. Husserl observes in §23 that with respect to this traditional concept of mere presentation, the examples provided are: “all cases of mere imagination, where the apparent object has neither being nor non-being asserted of it, and where no further acts concern it, as well as all cases where an expression, e.g., a statement, is well understood without prompting us either to belief or disbelief.”10
Frege also considered the second group of cases in his Begriffschrift. Here he distinguishes between “content” [Inhalt] (later, “thoughts” [Gedanken]) and “judgment” [Urteil]: “−A” designates the mere thought that A; in contrast to this “⊦A” means the judgment that A is true.11 As justification, Frege cites the fact that in proofs, we hypothetically accept thoughts, without already deciding their truth or falsehood; the distinction between thoughts and judgments is thus already a necessity in formal demonstrations. Frege also agrees with Brentano’s thesis insofar as he clearly distinguished thoughts from presentations in the empirical psychological sense (sensation-complexes): thoughts possess an intentional relation and contain concepts. There are, however, differences. Thoughts, for Frege, are not psychical acts but abstract entities that are “grasped” in psychical acts. Furthermore, according to Frege, thoughts are always logically structured: they already have the form of judgments, while presentations for Brentano as well as Descartes can be simple “ideas.” Moreover, Frege advanced the position that thoughts refer to truth-values, which his contemporaries found odd.12 In general, it is already formally clear that the judgment-layer “docks on to” the content-layer, so that judgments are suited to thoughts, in the sense that the latter form a “foundation” for judgments.
In a certain way, the situation seems to be the same for emotive and volitional acts. Such experiences do not appear as true or false but resemble presentations in that they simply and immediately just “are.” Indeed, they require “content” and an “object,” which presentation obviously gives them. One can then, again in Frege’s sense, say that in a specific respect the presentation is “colored” by virtue of feelings or impulses of the will; it receives emotive or volitional qualities. Thus, even these types of acts are intrinsically dependent upon presentations. At any rate, this is how Brentano expresses his dependence-thesis, which he generalizes in the second volume of the Psychology: “We speak of a presentation whenever something appears to us. When we see something, a color is presented; when we hear something, a sound; when we imagine something, a phantasy image. In view of the generality with which we use this term it can be said that it is impossible for conscious activity to refer in any way to something which is not presented.”13 It is this “remarkable” thesis, as Husserl calls it, that Husserl comes phenomenologically and argumentatively to analyze, modify, and reconstruct through the concept of objectifying acts.
THEMATIC ORIENTATION (§§22–23)
Chapter 3 of the fifth investigation concerns the question of how Husserl’s concepts of quality and matter relate to Brentano’s conception of presentation and the theory of psychical phenomena that is bound up with it. What sense does it make to declare that “imaginative-presentations” are the basis of all acts? If Husserl’s analysis is correct, then what are the quality and matter of such acts, and to what extent are these moments—or abstract parts [Momente]—detectable in other acts? Alternatively, one can take this chapter as a critique of the traditional approach to epistemology and as a lesson in phenomenological eidetic analysis, even though Husserl proceeds argumentatively. That is to say, the tradition, and with it contemporary empirical psychology, isolates supposed components of mental acts, which are in truth only theoretical constructs and are not phenomenally present in experiences. By contrast, eidetic analysis does not disassemble individual acts but instead seeks to hold on to constants through series of variations. It also hits upon essential distinctions, and thus enables one to clarify concepts.14 In applying concepts, this process makes already extant (but not yet reflectively clarified) differences accessible, which is why its results are “immediately apparent.” The evidence attained through this method is coextensive or congruent with prereflexive intuition. This method, however, is not free from error as Husserl makes clear in §27. In particular, differences that are evident in intuition lose their power to convince once they are “conceptualized and asserted,” insofar as they are subject to interpretation. The possible scope of interpretations and associated theoretical interests must therefore be made explicit from the outset: hence the somewhat laborious argumentative preamble.
It is important, then, to understand that what marks Husserl’s approach is not just a methodological divergence from the tradition. Rather, one must not postulate anything as an independent object if eidetic analysis has shown it to be a dependent one (in the sense of the third investigation). In general, the data we start from are holistic totalities, namely acts, and as Husserl will later clarify in Ideas I, acts that have a structured relation (in both a temporal and content-bound sense) to specific types of prior and subsequent acts. The fact that eidetic analysis cannot extract mere presentations as providing a basis for two central cases, namely, perception and judgment, shows already that Brentano’s thesis is on these grounds false. This holds, as said above, only once the possible meanings of the thesis have been argumentatively laid out. The talk of presentations is so vague that it first requires a preliminary conceptual clarification. Only when the ambiguities of Brentano’s thesis have been laid bare, can eidetic intuition decide anything.
ARGUMENTS AGAINST BRENTANO (§§24–26)
In chapter 2, Husserl introduces the distinction between matter and quality (§§20–21) which seems to suit Brentano’s thesis nicely: one could regard the presentation, that it is going to rain, as the material of the judgment “it is going to rain” whereas the judging itself is its quality. Husserl, however, draws attention to an important contrast between Brentano’s thesis and his own conception: The matter and quality of acts are dependent parts or “moments” of acts. They cannot emerge “per se” [für sich] but are abstracted from series of acts. Material and quality as such are founded in one another, albeit in somewhat distinct senses: matter is not thinkable without quality and vice versa. Not only the material, then, but also the quality makes up the essential, inner determination of the act; it is not “externally” attached to the act, as though it could be omitted. Against this one could claim, with Brentano, that while indeed no judgment can arise without presentation, the opposite is certainly possible. Now one intuitively wants to agree with Brentano that presentations form an important class of intentional experiences, which seem to be linked with other acts. So there is no wish, which does not contain a presentation of the wished-for, and in an entirely abstract sense, judgments presume some content with some relation to an object or state of affairs. Husserl then sets for himself the task of integrating the basic class of presentations or thoughts into his theory of matter and quality (qua moments) and to thereby join his own description of “psychical contents” to the epistemological tradition.
Next, there follows an initially plausible description of the connection between matter, quality, and presentation. If Brentano’s thesis (FB) is true, then presentations must be divisible into (presentation-)quality and (presentation-)matter, and the composite totalities of these must be the basis of all other acts.15 The matter of an act itself would then contain a qualitative moment, that is the presentation-quality; other qualities, such as the judgment-quality, would be built upon this material. However, since presentations could not arise without the presentation-quality, the distinction between matter and quality would not make any sense here. What Husserl had designated as “intentional essence” in chapter 2—the conjunction of matter and quality—would be a genuine unity here; presentations would be understood as “pure quality” without specific material, and they would then be fundamentally distinct from all other acts.
Can such an exceptional status be justified? Here Husserl sees the following difficulty. Let us accept that “presentation” is a specific type of act—a lowest differentia—just like “judgment” or “recollection.” If there is no separate matter, no “content,” then we would not be able to distinguish between the presentation “pope” and the presentation “emperor.” Or instead let us assume that “presentation” is not a lowest differentia within quality but a quality that permits various differentiations. The presentation “pope” would then be quite different in nature from the presentation “emperor,” and presentations would again be fundamentally distinct, at a deeper level, from all other acts—not because of their content but because of their category. That seems implausible and is not supported by our intuition. Rather, intuition tells us that an identical presentation-quality unifies the representations “pope” and “emperor” and that a distinct “content” separates them. There remains then a third possibility: presentations are also divisible into matter and quality, and so here too, just as in all other acts, the specific content and the intention are given through the matter and the act-character is given through the presentation-quality. In short, adopting the position that presentations enjoy an exceptional status over and against all other acts, in that they are not analyzable into matter and quality, ultimately leads to the opposite position—that matter and quality are distinguishable within presentations as well.
If we accept these results, then Brentano’s thesis loses its plausibility. The word presentation now seems to enclose a twofold meaning: the first part of the thesis—“all psychical phenomena are either presentations”—evidently refers to presentations as independent acts with a content and a presentation-quality. The second part of the thesis—“all psychical phenomena are founded in presentations”—refers to presentation-contents, or matter in Husserl’s sense. Why should we then follow the “gratuitous assumption” that in complex acts yet another presentation-quality must be added to the presentation-content, according to which we, for instance, execute a judgment or perceive something? Evidently, presentation performs the function of lending other acts a “content”; however, this occurs only through the presentation-content, which would then be identical to the content of a corresponding judgment. Yet this is exactly the function that the matter performs. Husserl admits that there can be act-types which are also founded in a presentation-quality, such as expectation, but that this would always be the case, as Brentano’s thesis claims, now seems highly unlikely.
PERCEPTIONS AND JUDGMENTS (§§27–31)
In both of the following examples, Husserl examines the assumption that there is something like “mere presentations” that form the basis of all other acts. These would be “mere” presentations in the sense that they do not assert the existence of the presented thing. One can imagine oneself winning the lottery, without thereby really believing or doubting it. For some philosophers, the thesis (FB) seems to be plausible first and foremost in two classes of acts: perceptions and judgments. In the case of perceptions, it is clear that they at least present something, even if it turns out to be illusory; regarding judgments, one can “leave them open,” in that one can strip away the judgment-quality while preserving a presentation. Husserl leaves his argumentative strategy to one side in his discussion of these two cases, and instead makes use of “inner perception,” or rather, as he calls it in a supplement to the second edition, “ideational phenomenological inspection of essence.”16 The following considerations should therefore be immediately apparent to anyone who reproduces them with the help of intuitive examples. The presentation thesis makes general claims that should provide evidence for the two special cases. In the case of illusory perceptions, whose deceptive nature has not yet been exposed in further perception, one could say that it is an act of presentation that has had a perceptual quality superimposed upon it; if this quality is removed, then there remains a leftover “mere presentation”—a presentation without an existential-judgment [Existenzurteil]. Whoever succumbs to an optical illusion, and has become aware of it, then sees the same thing and has the “mere presentation” of it. The optical illusions that were often scrutinized at the time provide us with a wealth of examples. Husserl discusses the following case: upon visiting a Panopticum Waxworks, someone believes he has come across a woman who is waving but realizes just a moment later that it is in fact a wax-figure.17 Now it would be absurd to suppose that one could explain this perception by reference to a mere presentation to which a perception-quality was first joined and later removed. Rather, one better understands the experience in the waxworks if one grasps it as a succession of two types of perception, the matter of which presents the same waving woman in both cases, albeit with divergent qualities. Both cases have to do with a perceptual apprehension of the same thing, though in one case we perceive the woman as a reality and in the other case as a fiction: the case concerns the same matter with two different act-qualities. Husserl explains this experience as a sort of dynamic process: “Two perceptual interpretations, or two appearances of a thing, interpenetrate, coinciding as it were in part in their perceptual content. And they interpenetrate in conflicting fashion, so that our observation wanders from one to another of the apparent objects each barring the other from existence.”18 Husserl describes here a sort of gestalt switch, where both forms have distinct ontological statuses. It is not just that a “mere presentation” is modified by the arrival of a perceptual judgment, even if “perceiving something as a fiction” comes quite close to a “mere presentation.” Rather, acts that share the same matter but have conflicting qualities alternate with one another.
The second example, judging and understanding, hypothetically assuming or considering a judgment, also comes to the same result. At first, it seems as though judgment consists in a judged presentation (a thought), which arises from a mere understanding or supposing without a judgment-quality. This is the Fregean view of what takes place in mathematical proofs. Indeed, Husserl holds it to be an eidetic law that each judgment has a corresponding presentation-act and this is because one can in fact receive and understand a judgment without thereby evaluating it as correct, and because such an understanding evidently must precede a judgment-decision de jure. This presentation-act, however, is not a part of the judgment itself but is in some way on equal footing with it. This is clear if one takes Brentano’s theory of judgment literally. Brentano says: “By ‘judgment’ we mean, in accordance with common philosophical usage, acceptance (as true) or rejection (as false).”19 Now this accepting or rejecting should contain the whole act of presentation in the sense of an open-ended supposition. This now seems even more absurd than the case of perception: insofar as we accept a content as true, we no longer “leave it open.” It makes no sense, then, to assert that the whole presentation-act is contained in the act of judging. Rather, the quality changes in the transition from merely understanding to judging: both are in turn independent acts with identical matter, which have a dynamic connection with one another instead of one “containing” the other.
Intuition shows the true character of judging, which remained mysterious in Brentano’s theory of judgment. Judgment now appears as a type of answer to a question posed in contemplation, and not as a mere assenting to a presented state of affairs. Phenomenologically, judging means to affirm a hypothesis, or to fulfill an assumption, similar to the way an expectation or a hope would be fulfilled through a specific act. Thus, Husserl dissolves a seemingly formal relation into a dynamic connection. At the same time, the very broad traditional concept of judgment is now delimited to those acts which are founded in experiences of affirming.20 This solution will be fully worked out in the sixth investigation, along with its theory of knowledge, evidence, and truth, and will also receive a systematic backdrop in the later, “genetic” phenomenology.
From all this, it follows that no special phenomenological role can be attributed to presentations. Rather, all acts with the same content have a dependent moment (an abstract part) in common, the matter or apprehension-sense, which provides them with an object. Acts with the same matter can then exhibit contrary qualities, as the example of the waxworks has shown. Thus, perception ascribes being to the object, which the perceiving-as-fictive then dismisses. Similarly, judgment ascribes reality to a state of affairs and, contrary to this, a hypothesis “posits” the state of affairs as fictitious. Brentano’s thesis, in the form that has been discussed up to this point, therefore cannot be maintained. Husserl later extracts the concept of objectifying acts from the idea of contrary positional-qualities.
Brentano’s Principle and Nominal Presentations (§§32–36)
A NEW VERSION OF BRENTANO’S THESIS (§§32–33)
At the start of chapter 4, Husserl summarizes his considerations up to this point and emphasizes the ambiguity of the concept of presentation: presentation can either mean a certain act-quality or the act-matter (intentional content). These result in two incongruent readings of (FB).21 On the first reading, Brentano’s principle is false because not every act contains a “mere presentation,” whereas the second reading is true in that every act has a content or “sense.”
In the rest of the fifth investigation Husserl endeavors to find another concept of presentation qua act-type, such that (FB) would as a consequence be univocally true. In other words: which act-types can be regarded as founding qualities, if they cannot be Brentano’s “mere presentations”? Husserl’s first step in this direction consists in understanding “presentations” to be those acts that are expressible through names; these are the so-called nominal acts. Husserl’s reflections here take on a conspicuous “linguistic-analytical” character insofar as he falls back upon linguistic phenomena such as names or naming to describe this new class of acts. He presents nominal acts thus:
But our proposition at once achieves a new and unobjectionable sense, if a new concept is made to underlie the term “presentation,” one not strange and remote, since talk of names as expressing presentations leads up to it.… But we can employ the term [presentation] to cover acts in which something becomes objective to us in a narrower sense of the word, one borrowed from the manner in which percepts and similar intuitions grasp their objects in a single “snatch,” or in a single “ray of meaning,” or borrowed, likewise, from the one-term subject-acts in categorial statements.22
Phenomenologically, this means that names channel our attention to a (definite) thing and “prepare” us, as it were, for possible predications: names present intentional objects to us in the categorial form of sub-jects [Sub-jekten] or “objects-about-which [Gegenständen-worüber],”23 an object of which something can be asserted.24 By virtue of names, we are “directed” to something in an exceptional manner. In the previous excerpt, the modal and structural features of nominal acts overlap: the type and manner of the act (how such and such an act is executed) and the structure of the act. Concerning the first, nominal acts are directed attentively to the “named”—the subject “lives” in them, as Husserl often writes. Concerning the latter, nominal acts have a “single-rayed” structure. “Living” in them, we grasp one unified intentional object (however complicated the composition of its content may be). Thus, nominal acts are also called monothetic or “single-rayed” acts.25 In short: an experience is a nominal act directed to X precisely on the condition that it is a categorial act that is attentively directed to X in a single ray. Thus, we can reformulate (FB):
(FB*): Each intentional experience is either a nominal act or is (at least) founded in one.26
Characteristic of (FB*) is that, with the second disjunct, it is no longer the case for the nominal concept of presentation that “the presentation underlying an act must also cover all the matter of the act that it underlies.”27 If one judges, say, that the sun is bright, then this judgment, as a consciousness of a state of affairs, contains a nominal act which is directed at the sun, though not the state of affairs as a whole.
For the rest of chapter 4, Husserl defends (FB*) against objections, objections aimed mainly at the concept of naming and Husserl’s fundamental distinction between naming and judging.28 It is important to note that Husserl’s own version of Brentano’s theorem—that is, (FH)—does not negate (FB*) but rather appears to be a derivative of it, a “secondary consequence.”29
THE ESSENCE OF NOMINAL ACTS (§§34–36)
On Names
Husserl strives to show that the categorial “single-rayedness” [Einstrahligkeit] of nominal acts constitutes a criterion demarcating them from all other acts, which are eo ipso “multirayed.” Specifically, one must sharply distinguish nominal acts from propositional acts.
In order to define nominal acts more precisely, Husserl elucidates the concept of names (qua expression of a nominal presentation.)30 By names Husserl not only means proper names (e.g., Napoleon) and descriptions [Kennzeichnungen] (e.g., the victor at Jena): “Here we note that words and word-groupings that are to count as names only express complete acts when they stand for some complete, simple subject of a statement (thereby expressing a complete subject-act), or at least could perform such a simple subject-function in a statement without change in their intentional essence.” As examples of names in this sense Husserl mentions: “ ‘The horse,’ ‘a bunch of flowers,’ ‘a house built of sandstone,’ ‘the opening of the Reichstag,’ also expressions like ‘that the Reichstag has been opened.’ ”31 In §33, we find three further examples: “S is p,” “the being-p of S,” and “the fact that S is p,” where only the latter two function as names, since, according to Husserl, they name states of affairs or facts. In contrast to this, the statement “S is p” gives expression to the performance of a consciousness of a state of affairs, insofar as a “thesis is enacted, and on it a second dependent thesis is based, so that, in this basing of thesis on thesis, the synthetic unity of the state of affairs is intentionally constituted. Such a synthetic consciousness is plainly quite different from setting something before oneself in a single-rayed thesis.”32
Consequently, according to Husserl, a linguistic expression “N” is a name if and only if
(i) “N” functions as the logical subject within an assertion or is able to function as such a subject without altering its meaning.
Equivalent to this syntactic and semantic characterization is the phenomenological (act-theoretical) elucidation: “N” is a name if and only if
(ii) the utterance of “N” intimates a single-rayed (simple), whole (closed, complete) nominal act.
What is striking about the previous examples is that a definite or indefinite article appears which, according to Husserl, plays a central role—whether or not it is indicated by its own word (compare Jones or the Jones; the Latin homo).33 It guides our attention to a (definite) object, which is offered up for a possible predication.34 This is, for instance, not the case with the mere substantive “tree,” which may awaken numerous associations and memories of trees or other things, but not in the way that “the tree”—in a suitable context—enables our mind’s eye to direct itself to a particular tree. The expression “a tree” also achieves this, according to Husserl, in that it allows us to think of the natural type tree.35 This orientation of our attention, by virtue of the nominal act which stands “on its own two feet,” also establishes the “complete” and “closed” character mentioned in (ii). Single-rayedness also means that nominal acts are directed to their object “in a single stroke,” so to speak, without needing to presuppose any other acts. Single-rayed intentionality does not have to be “built up” first—as is typically the case in judgment.36
The categorial nature of names is reflected in the role that nominal acts play in initiating a predication. Although, for example, a person appears to me in the same way (with respect to content) in both nonexpressed and nominally expressed perceptions, the named object is constituted “with a new form (and with, so to say, the characterizing costume of its role) of which the nominal form is the adequate expression.”37 Naming Jones (“Jones!”) on the basis of a visual perception is essentially different from “merely” seeing Jones. Seeing is not naming.38
These paraphrasings make clear why Husserl does not automatically accept plural expressions, such as “Romeo and Juliet,” as names. When one grasps such an expression, one is not directed eo ipso to one attentionally privileged object but two: Romeo, Juliet—so long as one does not understand “Romeo and Juliet” as the proper name of Shakespeare’s play. According to Husserl, such plural terms have a conjunctive synthesis as their basis, which does not grasp both figures in a single “grip.”39 Nominalization is nevertheless possible here; a name can be made from a plural expression, for instance “the couple Romeo and Juliet.” Since the expressions “Romeo and Juliet” and “the couple Romeo and Juliet” are distinct with respect to meaning, the former expression is not a name because of (i) above.
Prima facie Husserl’s concept of names seems to be too liberal. One might think, for instance, of the syncategorematic expression and. Can one not say “and is a particle”? Is “and” thus a name? However, one quickly sees that the sentence offends against (i) since “and” is not being used but rather mentioned; that is, it has undergone a shift of meaning.40 It actually means “The word ‘and’ is a particle.”
Positing versus Nonpositing Names
Husserl observes (and this is central for the following) that a name can express a nominal presentation regardless of whether the designated objectivity appears as existing or nonexisting; thus, he speaks of positing and nonpositing names or nominal acts. If one uses the name “the president of the USA” “in [its] normal sense in genuine discourse,”41 then the interlocutor knows that the person exists; the situation is different for expressions such as “Romeo’s beloved.”42
Regarding the division of names into positing and nonpositing, at the end of §34 Husserl considers the possibility of whether this relation is not describable by analogy with Brentano’s thesis from chapter 3: might it not be the case that positing names are founded in nonpositing ones? Is it not plausible that there are judgments of existence that are based upon nonpositing names?
With this question, Husserl takes the opportunity (in §§35–36) to engage in fundamental reflections upon the relationship between names and judgments. Does the positing performance of a nominal act imply that one judges that the respective objectivity exists? Does it follow from this that positing names can be analyzed as judgments? Husserl denies both of these:
After saying all this, we may maintain generally that there are differences between names and assertions which affect their “semantic essence” or that rest on the essential difference of presentations and judgments.43
An assertion can never function as a name, nor a name as an assertion, without changing its essential nature, i.e., its semantic essence.44
Husserl concludes that there are two qualitatively distinct types of nominal acts, that is, positing and nonpositing.45 Furthermore, Husserl extends this distinction to propositional acts, that is, those acts that are expressed in statements.
Chapter 5 yields the solution to the problem of the qualitative unity of the genus of ultimately founding acts [letztfundierende Akte], where Husserl defines objectifying acts—a definition that is supposed to be sufficiently comprehensive to respect acts that have different positional characters.
But what is Husserl’s argument that there is an essential difference between naming and judging?
Naming versus Asserting
One could suppose, to clarify things, that positing names can always be supplemented by attributions without thereby changing their sense, for example, instead of “the president of the USA” one could say “the president of the USA currently in office” or “the really existing president of the USA.” Yet even then, according to Husserl, it is not asserted that the president of the USA exists: “even here naming differs in sense from saying.” The positing can be achieved merely through “that aspect of the act expressed by the definite article.”46 This description from §34 is essentially complemented by the arguments in §35.
There, Husserl’s argument is aimed at the thesis that reference to individual things through descriptions [Kennzeichnungen47] is always and necessarily accompanied by judgments (determinative predications) which the subject simultaneously performs.48 He begins with the following expressions:
i. “the minister now driving up”
ii. “the minister—he is now driving up”
iii. “the minister who is now driving up”
iv. “the minister”
v. “he—he is a minister”
vi. “he—he exists—he is a minister”
It is clearly not implausible to paraphrase (i) as (ii) or (iii); in this case it is conceivable that determinative predicates, expressed through parentheses or a relative clause, “can in a certain sense really function as logical subjects.” Yet even then the nominal reference is not exhausted in such a predication, since the latter only concerns a “part of the subject-name.”49 If one also wishes to explain away, in like manner, the descriptively simpler designation the minister, one comes up against insuperable difficulties, or, more precisely, a regress. The transition from (iv) to (v) and from (v) to (vi) suggests this: if one were to analyze “he” in (v) any further, then one would have to formulate (vi); but in (vi) the “complete name” he occurs, “and so [we] are involved in an infinite regress.”50
According to Husserl then, it is impossible to comprehend each positing, singular term or name as a name that has been supplemented by “determinative predications.” Names cannot be analyzed away as descriptions à la Russell-Quine.51 If we carry this “grammatical” finding over to the expressed acts, we find that not all positing, intentional experiences are propositional in nature.52
Dependencies between Names and Sentences
How exactly, then, do expressions such as (i), (ii), and (iii) relate to one another according to Husserl? Is it not evident that one can only accomplish a nominal act of the form (i), if one can also accomplish acts of the forms (ii) and (iii) along with the judgments they enclose? Is it not the case that judgments are primary over and against names? Husserl rigorously takes these intuitions into account: “Undoubtedly many names, including all attributive names, have ‘arisen’ directly or indirectly out of judgments.… A certain mediacy therefore enters phenomenologically into the essence of the attributive presentation, which our talk of origination, derivation and also of ‘referring back’ expresses.”53 According to Husserl, these are “ideal, lawful connections,” “essential relationships” that nonetheless have implications for empirical-genetic connections. Thus, definite descriptions such as (i), for example, are dependent upon judgments of the type “the minister is now driving up” for their fulfillment. In other words, when such a judgment is based in current perception, the intention expressed in (i) is fulfilled. It is absurd to assume that one could accomplish (i) without being able, in principle, to make the corresponding judgment. These are connections grounded in the intentional and “genetic” horizons of their respective acts.54
Nevertheless, these dependencies should not be confused with the fact that “attributive names” are neither judgments nor do they necessarily include actual judgings [Urteilsvollzüge]. The source of the validity of such names must not be mixed up with the act of naming itself. This holds a fortiori for simple nominal acts such as proper names or “essentially occasional expressions,” which, according to Husserl, do not include any reference back to confirmatory judgments.55
Nominalization of Sentences
Finally, in §36, Husserl demonstrates that even if assertions are in the subject position of sentences, the difference between the nominal and propositional is not negated. This is because—under certain conditions—assertions can “function as full and complete names.”56 Let us review Husserl’s example:
A. The rain has set in.
B. That the rain has set in is delightful (or: the fact/the circumstance that it is raining is delightful).
C. The rain has set in; it is delightful.
The fact expressed in (A), according to Husserl, can be denoted in various ways, for example, through expressions such as “this” or “this fact,” but also in event propositions, such as “the rain has set in.” Husserl takes this as an indication that assertions such as “it is raining” can function like names by virtue of a semantic operation. Through such an operation, the matter of the act changes from propositional to nominal. Thus in (B), one intentionally relates to the state of affairs “the rain has set in” in a nominal act; if one says only (A) “the rain has set in,” then one relates to the same state of affairs, albeit in a propositional act. While in (A) one accomplishes a judgment through the “combination” of two presentations (rain and its occurrence or its “setting in”), one posits the occurrence of the rain in acts like (B) or (C), but one is no longer judging in the authentic sense.57 In particular, according to Husserl, this should emerge from (C), since the anaphoric “it” temporally follows after the accomplishment of the judgment “rain has set in.”58 The same is true when referring to reported speech, such as when one says: “ ‘The value-added tax is going up,’ Angela Merkel has announced.” As in §35, Husserl only alludes to “ideal, lawful connections”:
The state of affairs comes more “primitively” to consciousness in the judgment: the single-rayed intention [(B), (C)] towards the state of affairs presupposes the many-rayed judgmental intention [(A)], and a reference to the latter is part of its intrinsic sense. But in each many-rayed conscious approach there is rooted, in a priori fashion, an essential, ideal possibility of transformation into the single-rayed approach, in which a state of affairs will, in the pregnant sense, be “objective” or “presented.”59
Summary: Ten Theses
Husserl’s theses concerning names and sentences, or nominal and propositional acts, can be summed up as follows:
1. Nominal acts are categorial acts with logically/conceptually structured matter, which are directed to some object or other.
2. A nominal act is either positing or nonpositing.
3. A subject S can accomplish a nominal act only if S is in the position to also accomplish this as a partial act of a propositional act.
4. S can accomplish a nominal act without simultaneously accomplishing a propositional act.
5. Nominal and propositional acts are distinct acts (with respect to their matter).
6. Nominal acts are included in all propositional acts as partial acts.
7. Nominal acts form a genuine subset of single-rayed acts.
8. Each non-nominal expression (each non-nominal meaning) can be nominalized; with this a semantic modification occurs (a change of the matter).
9. Nominalizations have the exceptional function of contributing to the constitution of higher order objects; only through the nominalization of a propositional meaning do, for instance, states of affairs (facts) as such become explicitly, intentionally accessible.60
10. Nominal acts are indispensable for epistemological contexts, since they provide subjects for (categorial) judgments.
It follows that nominal acts, insofar as they are primary building blocks of intentional experiences, represent constitutive and irreducible partial acts of propositional acts: no sentence without names.61 Nominal acts, however, can only exercise their “power to determine” in connection with propositional acts. It is as though names bear sentences within them, in which they can occur as an “object-about-which”; thus, no names without a possible sentence. We read in the Vorlesungen über Bedeutungslehre:
What if there were a nominal presentation that could not be inserted into a valid, propositional act-of-identification [Identitätsakt]? Could one then still say that this presentation presents something, that it has a presented, named object?
However an object may be constituted beyond its categorial form [sich außerkategorial konstituieren]; within a categorial consciousness it is only an “object-about-which,” presented nominally, and posited nominally in judgment-consciousness.62
In this sense, regarding categorial acts, Husserl introduces a propositional context-principle, according to which names only make sense and realize their nominal intentionality within a judgment.
Nevertheless, thesis (vii) implies that there are single-rayed acts, e.g., thing-perceptions [Dingwahrnehmungen], which possess intentionality completely independently of propositional embeddings. Single- or multirayedness, according to Husserl, is not a language-dependent property of acts, even though he situates his analyses in the linguistic expression of nominal acts as the paradigmatic representatives of single-rayed acts in the fourth and fifth chapters of the fifth investigation. Husserl accords linguistically articulated acts a methodical priority, not an explanatory one.63 This view is unproblematic unless one adopts the questionable view that intentionality is eo ipso dependent upon judgment and language.
Brentano’s Theorem and Objectifying Acts (§§37–43)
A COMMON GENUS FOR POSITING AND NONPOSITING ACTS (§§37–38)
What is the purpose of Husserl’s detailed discussion of names and assertions? It is supposed to show that the property “single-rayed” distinguishes nominal acts from propositional acts. A difference within the matter comes to light here, which applies equally to positing and nonpositing acts.64 Yet Husserl still searches for a unified quality of acts, which would unequivocally meet Brentano’s theorem (FB).
In order to avoid the threat of dividing founding acts into positing and nonpositing acts, Husserl introduces in chapter 5 the concept of objectifying acts, which is meant to denote the sought-after unitary genus. We must therefore show “that there is a qualitative community between nominal and propositional acts; we shall therefore end by demarcating yet another new concept of presentation, wider and more significant than the former, which will give us a new, most important interpretation.”65 But to what extent can positing and nonpositing nominal or propositional acts belong to one and the same genus? According to Husserl, the generic community is based upon the possibility, to be able to assign to each element of the class “objectifying acts” a materially identical yet qualitatively antipodal “counterpart” within that same class.66 To put it otherwise: if e is an act of the genus G of objectifying acts, then there is an act e* within G, which possesses the same matter and the same representing content as e, yet has the opposite positional quality.67 This complex property should allow objectifying acts to be univocally classified.
Let us consider the act of seeing a chair, expressed as “this chair.” The corresponding nominal act is usually a positing one; that is, the chair appears to me as in fact existing. That can change, however, for example, when I discover that the chair’s color and form are constantly changing as I approach it, while everything else remains the same. Perhaps I now begin to carry out the epochē and no longer take a position on the question of the chair’s existence or nonexistence. The positing nominal act has changed; now there is a nonpositing or a neutral act before us, which has the same matter as the unmodified act. Both are so similar to each other that assigning them to one and the same genus seems to be justified, in that I still have a sensory intuition of the chair as being determined in such and such a way. We have similar justifications for the corresponding, modified, propositional acts.
As a counter example, consider joy that the sun is shining, that is, an emotive act.68 Underlying this joy is the conviction that the sun is in fact shining. If this conviction is neutralized or revised by other convictions or perceptions, then this typically has the consequence that the joy disappears69—or at least it would be modified. Unlike perception, there is no genuine qualitative counterpart to joy.70
ACT-MODIFICATIONS (§§39–40)
Before Husserl formulates his definitive version of Brentano’s thesis, he introduces various types of modifications of acts.71 The operation that defines objectifying acts (i.e., being able to assign to each act a qualitative counterpart) is to be distinguished from the possibility of assigning to each act a presentation of a higher order, that is, one that is reflexively directed to this act (§41). In this sense, the complex property that defines objectifying acts (having a “mere presentation” as a counterpart) would be trivially satisfied since to “each possible act … there is a presentation which relates to it, and which can as readily be qualified as positing as non-positing.”72 In contrast to this “presenting objectification,” the qualitative modification concerns solely the quality; it is noniterable and only applicable to experiences—one cannot “neutralize” a chair. Repeating the qualitative modification in this context means something like a “return” to the original act-type (if I negate the “neutralization” of a perception of a chair, then I come back to a positing perception).
Qualitative modifications, together with the “imaginative” modifications, belong to the so-called compliant [konformen] modifications. Both are characterized by the fact that they do not affect an act’s matter.73 While the qualitative modification only results in the conversion from a positing to a nonpositing quality, the imaginative modification changes the representative content of the act (sensations)—as when one closes one’s eyes and presents the chair just seen to oneself. Husserl already established in §21 that quality and matter alone do not completely individuate an act.74 The material modification of (objectifying) acts comprises the conversions from nominal or single-rayed to propositional or multirayed acts.75
HUSSERL’S REINTERPRETATION OF BRENTANO’S THEOREM (§§41–43)
Since Husserl believes he has univocally determined objectifying acts as a qualitatively unitary genus, he finally arrives at the version of (FB) that is valid in his eyes:
(FH) Each act is either an objectifying act or contains such an act as a part of it.76
What consequences does this principle have for the structure of intentional experiences? We can draw a few evident conclusions:
1. Objectifying acts alone are the bearers of the matter of an act: nonobjectifying act-qualities contribute nothing to the intentional content (matter) of the act.
2. The principle (FB*) set out in chapter 4—each act is a nominal presentation or is founded in one—appears as a true, albeit “merely … secondary offshoot” of (FH),77 since each objectifying act is either a single-rayed (nominal) or a multirayed (propositional) act, which is established on the basis of a single-rayed (nominal) act.
The ambiguity of “presentation” in the sense of an act’s matter and quality also characterizes in a certain way the relationship of (FH) and (FB*), as (FH) speaks of the foundation of all qualities in objectification, while (FB*) asserts the foundational role of single-rayed acts, which highlights a material difference.78 However, through his new terminology, Husserl avoids the ambiguity of the unclarified conception of presentation.
1. Each composite act is “eo ipso qualitatively complex” and founded in its partial acts or their matters or qualities;79 to be composite then means to be composed of multiple partial acts, which for their part (can) have diverse qualities.80
2. Each composite act is founded in simple nominal/single-rayed acts.
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF OBJECTIFYING ACTS
What is the significance of Husserl’s objectifying acts? The intentionality of an experience essentially depends upon objectifying acts. For Husserl intentionality is primarily an intrinsic characteristic of objectifying acts. This clarifies the intuition that all other types of acts must first “present” their object, thus giving expression to an asymmetrical dependency. In this way, objectifying acts contribute to guaranteeing the unity of the genus “intentional experiences.” In a functional respect, Husserl’s objectifying acts are equivalent to Brentano’s “mere presentations.” However, in Husserl these elementary acts can be positing just as well as nonpositing; moreover, Husserl sees in basic acts a much greater potential for objectification (i.e., categorial objects) than the nominalist or “reist” Brentano, who only accepts individuals into his ontology.
This, however, does not mean that nonobjectifying qualities, like, for example, feelings, are reduced to the objectifications that underlie them; there are irreducible differences here, as Husserl already emphasized in §15 of the fifth investigation. To be afraid of something, for example, does not mean to execute acts of fearing and presenting which would be loosely bound by association or simultaneity. Rather, there is a distinctive unity of foundation, according to which the fearing presupposes the presenting, although one then “lives” in the fearing and not in the “mere” presenting. Despite the unity of foundation, in Logical Investigations Husserl argues for the thesis that nonobjectifying acts contribute nothing to the constitution of intentional objects. Husserl has no place here for an (objective) property such as “fearsome.” Only in Ideas and Lectures on Ethics and Theory of Values does Husserl arrive at the insight that each intentional experience has (explicitly or implicitly) an objectifying character.81 Thus each act-type corresponds to a specific intentional objectivity, whose existence or nonexistence is posited in the act. Each (veridical) act has its own objectivity. Thus, Husserl defends what one could call a doxical universalism, without thereby succumbing to a doxic reductionism. Each act is explicitly or implicitly a manner of believing and as such is oriented to truth, evidence, justification, and “being”: “Every non-objectifying act allows objectivities to be drawn from itself by means of a shift, a change in attitude. Essentially, therefore, every act is implicitly objectifying at the same time. By essence, it is not only built, as a higher level, upon objectifying acts but is also objectifying itself according to what it adds as something new.”82 All “acts in general—including acts of emotion and acts of willing—are ‘objectifying,’ ‘constituting’ objects originally; they are necessary sources of diverse regions of being and, with this, also sources of the relevant ontologies.”83 A fear, for example, is not itself a belief, but it intrinsically involves the evaluative doxa, that the object is fearsome and is therefore harmful to the subject. The intentional object has an implicit value for the subject.84
Considering the matter historically, Husserl self-consciously ascribes to himself the merit of having for the first time liberated the concept of presentation from all of its confusing ambiguities:85 “The whole of epistemology suffers from the lack of an analysis of the concept ‘presentation’; it lacks the essential delimitation of the genus ‘presentation’ in the sense of objectifying acts.”86 The decisive systematic significance of objectifying acts consists in preparing the ground for the epistemology of the sixth investigation. This is because these acts are constructed in such a way that they can enter into “identifying syntheses.” Such identifications represent a necessary condition for acts of knowing, in that the paradigmatic case of knowledge consists, according to Husserl, in converting a mere opining directed at X into an intuition of X. In this way, objectifying acts show themselves to be acts that can be true (“convincing” [triftig]) or false (“unconvincing” [untriftig]), which Husserl describes as the central normative characteristic of intentionality.87 Husserl’s concept of objectifying acts thus represents the first step toward understanding the truthfulness [Wahrheitsfähigkeit] of intentional phenomena. Objectifying acts ultimately manifest the teleological structure of consciousness, which is intentionally directed to the “evidence,” “being,” and “self-givenness” of its objects. Objectifying acts have an “all-pervasive teleological structure, a pointedness toward ‘reason’ and even a pervasive tendency toward it—that is: toward the discovery of correctness … and toward the cancelling of incorrectness.”88 It appears that the convoluted paths that Husserl pursues over the course of the fifth investigation’s final chapter also offer many points of contact for contemporary (analytic) discussions. Husserl’s critique of Brentano’s principle should not just be regarded as a lesson from the history of philosophy but as a fruitful contribution to the contemporary discussions in philosophy of language and philosophy of mind.
Translated by Patrick Eldridge
NOTES
1. As a rule, §§22–45 are neglected in the secondary literature; exceptions include Q. Smith, “On Husserl’s Theory of Consciousness in the Fifth Logical Investigation,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 37, no. 4 (1977): 482–497; H. Pietersma “Assertion and Predication in Husserl,” Husserl Studies 2 (1985): 75–95; M. S. Stepanians, Frege und Husserl über Denken und Urteilen (Paderborn, Munich, Vienna, and Zurich: Schöningh, 1998); and R. D. Rollinger, “Names, Statements, and their Corresponding Acts in Husserl’s Logical Investigations,” in Husserl’s Logical Investigations Reconsidered, ed. D. Fisette (Dordrecht: Springer, 2003), 133–161. The following commentary will show that this neglect is unacceptable since there are many connections to current debates.
2. Husserl refers to this principle already in the introduction and §10 of the fifth investigation. E. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, Zweiter Band, Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis, ed. Ursula Panzer (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984), 354, 379–384 [translated by J. N. Findlay as Logical Investigations, 2 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), 534, 553–556].
3. Cf. F. Brentano, Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte (Leipzig: Dunker und Humblot, 1874), 111 [translated by A. C. Rancurello, D. B. Terrell, and L. L. McAlister as Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 65].
4. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:391 [562].
5. Verena Mayer will comment on chap. 3, while Christopher Erhard will comment on chaps. 4 and 5.
6. Indeed, Husserl’s arguments always retain the function of disclosing aspects of experiences. This holds generally for Husserl’s phenomenological method, which makes use of deductive-inferential processes only to make the things themselves visible. Cf. E. Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch, Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976) [translated by Daniel O. Dahlstrom as Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2014)], §§71–75. Hereafter referred to as Ideas I.
7. Brentano, Psychologie, 111 [65].
8. Husserl also refers to Brentano’s thesis later in this sense: judgments can also give objects, just like “mere presentations”; cf. U. Melle, “Objektivierende und nichtobjektivierende Akte,” in Husserl-Ausgabe und Husserl-Forschung, ed. S. Ijsseling (Dordrecht, Boston, and London: Springer, 1990), 35–49 [translated by Patrick Eldridge as “Objectifying and Nonobjectifying Acts,” in this volume].
9. R. Descartes, Meditationes de Prima Philosophia, in Œuvres de Descartes, ed. C. Adam and P. Tannery, vol. 7 (Paris: Leopold Cerf, 1904 [1641]), 37 [translated by D. A. Cress in Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 71].
10. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:444 [599].
11. G. Frege, Begriffsschrift, eine der arithmetischen nachgebildete Formelsprache des reinen Denkens (Halle: Verlag von Lous Nebert, 1879 [translated and edited by J. van Heijenoort as “Begriffsschrift,” in Frege and Gödel: Two Fundamental Texts in Mathematical Logic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 2–3].
12. Cf. V. Mayer, “Wahrheitswerte und Wahrheitsbegriff,” in Das Wahre und das Falsche: Studien zu Freges Auffassung von Wahrheit, ed. D. Greimann (Hildesheim: Olms, 2003), 181–202.
13. Brentano, Psychologie, 261 [153].
14. Cf. T. Piazza, A Priori Knowledge: Toward a Phenomenological Explanation (Frankfurt a. M. and Leicester: Ontos, 2007).
15. See Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:444 [599].
16. Husserl, 456 [607].
17. See Husserl, 458 [609].
18. Husserl, 459 [610].
19. Brentano, Psychologie, 262 [153].
20. Whether Husserl really holds to this delimited concept of judgment in the following raises another question, which is beyond the scope of this essay. What is interesting is that even Frege’s conception of judgment, from the beginning, contains such a dynamic. Frege writes in Begriffsschrift (2 [11]) that signs such as “−A,” that is, the combination of the content-line with a content A are meant “to produce in the reader merely the idea [Vorstellung] … in order to derive consequences from it and to test by means of these whether the thought is correct”; thus only then may the judgment ⊦A be executed.
21. See Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:475–476 [621].
22. Husserl, 477; cf. 478 [622; cf. 623].
23. E. Husserl, Vorlesungen über Bedeutungslehre: Sommersemester 1908, ed. U. Panzer (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), 94–99.
24. On this topic, see the distinction between “sense and understanding” in the sixth investigation, where Husserl shows that nominal acts are categorial acts, that is, logical “acts of thought,” the intentional content (material) of which has a logical form. Nominal acts intend “nominals” (cf. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:685–687 [796–797]), which can function as subjects of propositions on their own.
25. In the second edition of Logical Investigations, Husserl subsumed nominal acts under the well-known concept of “single-rayedness” [Einstrahligkeit] from Ideen I (501–502 [639–640]); see also Ideen I, §§118–119).
26. See Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:479 [623].
27. Husserl, 479 [623].
28. See Husserl, 496–499 [636–637].
29. Husserl, 518–519 [651].
30. Husserl already discussed the ambiguity of the phrase “expressing something” in the first (§§5, 6, 11, 12) and fourth investigations (§4). The articulated linguistic expression “A expresses X” can imply three things: (1) X is the reference-object of A; (2) X is the meaning of A; (3) X is a meaning-experience [Bedeutungserlebnis] that intimates A. Here expressing in the sense of intimation is decisive, cf. Husserl, Logical Investigations, 38–41 [276–278].
31. See Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 481 [625].
32. Husserl, 491–492 [632]. Interestingly, Husserl also counts determinate sentence parts of complex sentences among names. Thus the expression “A” in the sentence “B, because A” functions somewhat like a name; hence, according to Husserl, we do not perform the judgment A when we utter this sentence, rather we name the corresponding state of affairs (see 477–478, 494–495 [622, 633–634]).
33. See Husserl, 493 [633].
34. Husserl emphasizes this function of names in his critique of Mill’s conception of proper nouns in the first investigation. See Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 63–65 [296–298]. See also E. Husserl, Logik: Vorlesung 1902/03, ed. E. Schuhmann (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001), 182.
35. Cf. E. Husserl, Vorlesungen über Bedeutungslehre: Sommersemester 1908, 68.
36. Cf. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, inv. 6, §§46–48; cf. E. Husserl, Erfahrung und Urteil: Untersuchungen zur Genealogie der Logik, ed. L. Landgrebre, 4th ed. (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1972) [translated by J. S. Churchill and K. Ameriks as Experience and Judgment: Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973)], 63.
37. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:687 [797].
38. See Husserl, 461–462 [611–612].
39. See Husserl, 481, 501–502 [625, 639], inv. 6, §31; Husserl, Bedeutungslehre, 66–69; E. Husserl, Logik und allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie: Vorlesungen 1917/18, Mit ergänzenden Texten aus der ersten Fassung 1910/11, ed. U. Panzer (The Hague: Kluwer, 1995), §35.
40. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:329–330 [513].
41. Husserl, 482 [625].
42. Husserl’s claim that nominal acts as such can either be positing or nonpositing is sometimes criticized: see Rollinger, “Names, Statements, and their Corresponding Acts”, 140 and E. Tugendhat, Der Wahrheitsbegriff bei Husserl und Heidegger (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1970), 41n47, 96–101. Would it not be more plausible to accept that a propositional act (e.g., the conviction that … exists) takes on this role? A defense of Husserl’s thesis of nonpropositional doxic acts must deal with his idea of pre-predicative perception with its “existence-meaning [Seinsmeinung]” (Urdoxa), which is continually confirmed in concordant passive syntheses of experience. Cf. A. D. Smith, “Perception and Belief,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 62 (2001): part 4.
43. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:488–489 [630].
44. Husserl, 494 [633–634].
45. See Husserl, 483 [626]. One can see that the concept of act-quality is different here in comparison with its introduction in §§20–21 of the fifth investigation; from this point forward, the quality does not primarily designate the type of an act (e.g., perception, judgment, fear, and so on) but rather that moment of an act that he will later call the doxic or thetic character (see Ideen I, §§103–117, 129). See also the schemata in Stepanians, Frege und Husserl, 234; M. Tavuzzi, Existential Judgment and Transcendental Reduction: A Critical Analysis of Edmund Husserl’s “Phänomenologische Fundamentalbetrachtung” (Ideen I, §§27–62) (Milan: Massimo, 1982), 51; J.-S. Heuer, Die Struktur der Wahrheitserlebnisse und die Wahrheitsauffassungen in Edmund Husserls “Logischen Untersuchungen” (Ammersbek bei Hamburg: Verlag an der Lottbek, 1989), 35, 39.
46. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:482 [626].
47. Husserl speaks of “attributive names” and “an attribution which enriches the name” (486–487 [628–629]).
48. This thesis is a weaker form of the above-mentioned supposition, that naming is actually judging.
49. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 486 [628].
50. Husserl, 486 [628].
51. Cf. J. N. Mohanty, Edmund Husserl’s Theory of Meaning (The Hague: Kluwer, 1969), 97–100.
52. Husserl also does not subscribe to the thesis, commonly held today, that each nonpropositional act presupposes a propositional one. Exceptions to this thesis we find in single-rayed perceptions of individual things. Such questions are still hotly contested today; see E. Tugendhat, Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die sprachanalytische Philosophie (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1976), lecture 6; T. Crane, Elements of Mind: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind (Oxford, 2001), chaps. 1 and 4; and M. Montague, “Against Propositionalism,” Noûs 41, no. 3 (2007): 503–551.
53. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:486, 488 [628, 630].
54. Husserl compares these connections to constructions from arithmetic and geometry, like the way that a pentagon “refers back to” a square or the number 5 to the number 1. Husserl deals thoroughly with this theme of “referring back” in a genetic perspective in his late work Erfahrung und Urteil.
55. See Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:552–556 [682–685]. Husserl, however, mentions here certain “point[s] of view of logical validity” (489 [631]) that in some sense compel a rational subject “to be unable to start with the words ‘this S’ without thereby ‘potentially’ conceding that there is an S” (489 [631]). See also 85–92 [313–319].
56. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:490 [631].
57. Therefore, states of affairs are categorial and founded entities, which are constituted through higher level categorial acts. Cf. the first investigation (§12), the fifth (§§17, 28), and the sixth (§§44–48). The plausibility of Husserl’s above considerations also depends upon whether he has good reason to accept states of affairs as a novel ontological category. On states of affairs in Husserl generally, see A. Süßbauer, Intentionalität, Sachverhalt, Noema. Eine Studie zu Edmund Husserl (Freiburg and Munich: Karl Alber, 1995), parts 3 and 4.
58. The anaphoric demonstrative should therefore have an ostensive dimension—Husserl says that it “points a finger to the state of affairs” (see Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:492 [632]).
59. Husserl, 492 [633]; see also Husserl, Bedeutungslehre, §18.
60. Cf. Husserl, Erfahrung und Urteil, esp. §§58–60; Husserl, Ideen I, §119.
61. Cf. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:479 [623–624]. There seems to be a certain “atomistic” tendency in Husserl, since nominal acts can also be accomplished independently of propositional acts. A more precise reading and consideration of later works—for example, Vorlesungen über Bedeutungslehre and E. Husserl, Formale and transzendentale Logik: Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974 [translated by Dorion Cairns as Formal and Transcendental Logic (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969)]—presents a nuanced and more contextualistic picture. It is critical, however, to ask what names are involved in sentences such as “something exists” or “it is raining.” In his lectures Logik und allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie, Husserl refines his view and recognizes explicitly nameless sentences; see Husserl, Logik und allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie, §40. He aligns himself with Frege and analyzes “something exists” as a quantified functional-judgment. An impersonal sentence such as “it is raining” on the contrary is in Husserl’s eyes an Inexistence-proposition [Inexistenzsatz] of the form “rain exists hic et nunc (among other entities).” However, the categorial judgment “S is p” assumes a paradigmatic function as before, which is evident not least in the genetic analyses of Erfahrung und Urteil.
62. Husserl, Bedeutungslehre, 62, 94.
63. In Erfahrung und Urteil, Husserl shows that single-rayed perceptions are the genetic basis for all other act-types. Cf. the distinction between categorial and aesthetic syntheses in E. Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Zweites Buch, Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution, ed. M. Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952) [translated by R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer as Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book, Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989)], §9; see, in particular, 20 [22]: In a single-rayed perception “the thing presents itself persistently as something which is such-and-such, even if no concepts, no judgments in the predicative sense, are mediating.” Hereafter referred to as Ideen II.
64. The two pairs of concepts, positing/nonpositing and nominal/propositional (single rayed/multirayed) allow for four possible combinations (see Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:501 [639]).
65. Husserl, 498 [637].
66. Husserl, 505, 508 [642, 644–645].
67. “Representing contents” are to be understood as sensations in the case of perceptions. Husserl took these to be nonintentional experiences with a phenomenal character, for example, pain and tone sensations, which are intentionally apprehended without being intentional themselves. See the sixth investigation, §§25–28; 53–58.
68. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:401–405 [569–572].
69. Here the details of the revisions certainly play an important role. There is the well-known phenomenon of the cognitive impenetrability of feelings.
70. It is critical to ask here whether or not among joy and other emotions there is also a type of neutralization, which might occur for instance when, after having initially perceived a phenomenon in a positing act, we then have a purely aesthetic perception of it—that is, without existential interest—and rejoice in that.
71. On the meaning of Husserl’s early conception of modification, see Stepanians, Frege und Husserl, chap. 10.
72. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:505 [642].
73. Husserl, 512 [646–647].
74. Husserl, 433–435 [591–593].
75. The qualitative modification in §40 of the fifth investigation is a precursor to the neutrality-modification in Ideen I (cf. §§109–114), which in turn is closely related to Husserl’s epoché; see Pietersma, “Assertion and Predication in Husserl.”
76. This version of (FH) can be regarded as equivalent to the statement of (FH) at the outset of the chapter.
77. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:514 [648].
78. Husserl, 519 [651].
79. Husserl, 515 [649].
80. See also Husserl, 416–419 [580–581].
81. Cf. E. Husserl, Vorlesungen über Ethink und Wertlehre: 1908–1914, ed. U. Melle (The Hague: Kluwer, 1988), 322–325.
82. Husserl, Ideen II, 16 [18].
83. Husserl, Ideen I, 272 [234].
84. The foundation of all acts in objectifying acts of the kind discussed here (judgments, perceptions, etc.), however, does not change. See Ideen I, §§ 37, 95, 116–117; Ideen II, §§4, 7, 11. See also Q. Smith, “On Husserl’s Theory of Consciousness in the Fifth Logical Investigation” and D. Lorca, “Husserl’s Theory of Consciousness in the Fifth Logical Investigation,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 30 (1999): 151–165. Sartre too emphatically defends the thesis that each act-quality contributes to the constitution of an intentional object; see J.-P. Sartre, “Une idée fondamentale de la phénoménologie de Husserl: l’intentionnalité,” Nouvelle Revue Française 52 (1939): 129–132 [translated by Joseph P. Fell as “Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 1, no. 2 (1971): 4–5].
85. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:520–527 [652–657].
86. E. Husserl, Allgemeine Erkenntnistheorie: Vorlesung 1902/03, ed. E. Schuhmann (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001), 150.
87. See Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 2:654–655 [767–768]; see also, for instance, J. McDowell, Mind and World: With a New Introduction by the Author, (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1994), xi–xii: “To make sense of the idea of a mental state’s or episode’s being directed towards the world … we need to put the state or episode in a normative context.”
88. Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik, 168–169 [160].