De unde mai ai de bagat citate: - gg loc Aca: p. 80 - gg kur: p. 103 - gg truth as an experience (psychologism): p/ 148 - gg mathematical angels: p. 161 - gg his uncritical confidence in logic: p. 107 - "suntem pe drumu cel bun": p. 92 si normativism
By "Platonism" I mean the thesis, or the doctrine centered on the thesis, that some non-empirical terms designate entities (numbers, laws of logic, universal concepts, properties) that have an existence of their own; that this existence is objective and independent of our access to them: independent, therefore, of our psychological faculties or of our language. The existence of these entities is different from the existence of empirical data or objects of common-sense, since these entities cannot be perceived or sensed - at least not in a trivial way. Platonism is thus an ontological thesis, more precisely a generous ontological thesis: it defends the objective existence of entities that other philosophical attitudes try to dispense with. Secondarily, Platonism raises epistemological problems - and difficulties - insofar as it needs to defend the possibility of our knowledge of the abstract entities it admits. To address this difficulty, Platonism may claim that knowledge of empirical items is based on the knowledge of abstract entities; in other forms, it may claim that knowledge of empirical items is altogether different from knowledge of abstract entities; finally, Platonism may claim that our knowledge of abstract entities is based, in a form or another, on our knowledge of empirical entities. Lastly, Platonism is a realist doctrine: it differentiates between how things are and how things seem to us: I think I am not wrong if I define Platonism as "realism about abstract entities".
Husserl's "Logical Investigations" is a long plea for Platonism. Henceforth the insistence that psychological operations are directed to ideal objects, and simultaneously the insistence, over and over again, on differentiating between the ideal objects intended and the intending acts, between the psychological and the ideal, between the act of grasping and what is grasped.
1.1. Platonism about Logic
It is obvious to any reader that the first part of the "Logical Investigations", titled "Prolegomena to Pure Logic" is a reaction against what Husserl considers to be the dominant psychologist and naturalist trends in the philosophy of logic. As such, it defends the objective status of the laws of logic. These laws are valid as such: their validity is not conferred by our knowledge of them. In defending his Platonist view of logic, Husserl brings forward several arguments. Not all of these arguments are directed against the same tendency: Platonism has more than one enemy. For convenience, I shall group these arguments in thre categories:
a) anti-psychologist arguments
b) anti-naturalist arguments
c) anti-normative arguments
a) Anti-psychologist arguments
By "psychologism about logic" I mean the thesis that logical laws are dependent on our knowledge of them. In the Prolegomena to LI, the main representatives of psychologism in the philosophy of logic are Hume and Mill. Husserl's main weapon against psychologism about logic is stressing the distinction between logical laws and our knowledge of them. Psychologism obliterates the distinction between logical laws and our mental acts of entertaining or believing these laws. Thus, the law of contradiction becomes, on a psychologist reading, the description of a mental fact: the fact that it is very difficult, or even impossible, for a human being to entertain two contradictory judgments or - as Mill puts it - "the belief in such a proposition [that violates the law of contradiction] is, in the present constitution of nature, impossible as a mental fact." (quoted in LI, Prolegomena paragraph 25, p. 113). Husserl's reply consists in pointing to:
(1)
the (empirical) observation that laws of logic are not always respected by humans. It is an obvious fact that we can make mistakes, even grave mistakes, in logic as in the "empirical" matters. (This is a theme that I will develop in the section about "logical mistakes" of this essay) .
(2)
the (conceptual) remark that if the psychologist restricts his claim of empirical validity of the laws o logic to "normal" persons, s/he still owes us a definition of normality. This definition cannot be circular (i.e., we cannot define "normal persons" as "persons who accepts the laws of logic") If it were claimed that the sentence "a normal person is accepts the laws of logic" is a priori, this would be itself an anti-psychologist argument, since from a psychologist point of view there are no a priori sentences - all sentences are true because of laws of nature. This is a personal remark that needs perhaps to be developed.
Second: psychologism is not sensitive to the difference between explanation of the psychological origin of a judgement (an act of belief) and the ground (or justification) of a proposition. Psychologism allows of no standards of correctness: it considers logical laws to be causal laws for mental processes, ,thus obliterating their normative character. This confusion between psychological explanation and rational justification makes psychologism self-refuting - since the psychologist theories claim to be correct. If psychologism were true, it would be true about inferences made by psycologists as well; thus we could not expect to see in the books of, e.g., Hume more than chains of sentences correlated among themselves by psychological associations: "One then at once sees the self-evident conflict between the sense of the proposition that the [psychologist] theory seeks to prove and the sense of the deductions that it employs to prove it. The psychological premises of the theory are themselves mediate judgments of fact, and therefore lack all rational justification in the sense of the thesis to be established. In other words: the correctness of the theory presupposes the irrationality of the premisses, the correctness of the premisses the irrationality of the theory (or thesis)" (Prolegomena, Appendix to paragraph 26, p. 117)
Excursus about Kant and Husserl
A target of Husserl's anti-psychologist attacks is, surprisingly or not, Kant. I mention this target, even if Husserl does not devote much space to his criticism of Kant, as his sparse remarks about this philosopher may be of historical interest. Kant is classified by Husserl as "formal idealist" (Prolegomena, paragraph 28, p. 122). I understand Husserl's dissatisfaction with Kant's view of logic this way: for Kant, logic (as well as the forms of intuition like space and time, and the categories of the intellect) are constitutive of the structure of the human knowledge. It is possible that different beings relate themselves to the world in different ways, using a different logic. (I am not aware of Kant's explicitly endorsing this view, but this is at least the view that I understand Husserl attributes to him). For Kant, logic would cease to be valid if all human beings died, or if their minds were substantially altered. For Husserl, logic does not depend in the least on facts about the constitution of the human mind .
Another divergence between Husserl and Kant is that logical and mathematical laws, as well as pure concepts (categories) can be, for Husserl, apprehended as such, in themselves, by a faculty (super-sensuous intuition) that resembles the faculty of grasping sensible objects:
�The old epistemological contrast between sensibility and understanding achieves a much needed clarity throught a distinction between the straightforward or sensous and founded or categorical intuition� (LI-VI-Introduction-p. 671).
For Kant, unlike Husserl, categories (pure concepts of the understanding) are nothing more than a way (as it happens: the way) of structuring our experience. Husserl would not have subsrcribed to Kant�s dictum that �concepts without intuition are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind�. For Husserl, concepts� �emptiness� is not an obstacle to their being accessible and knowable (meant) as such. This contrast between Kant and Husserl is obviously traceable back to the difference between Husserl�s Platonism versus Kant�s �intuitionism� or �species-relativism�.
The question whether Husserl offered a convincing solution to the question concerning the relation between sensibility and understanding is left open by this essay. However, Husserl faced a problem which Kant seems to have omitted: �By what (reflective) faculty can we grasp the categories of understanding?� Perhaps for Kant such a question makes (for good reason) little sense: we think through categories, and not about categories. For Husserl, it should be noted, the situation is different: concepts and categories stand, so to speak, on the same plan.
A further determination of the relation between concepts and intuitions is added by the characterization of concepts as the first stage of the cognitive process that finds fulfillment in intuition:
��we at once encounter �the relation between meaning-intention and meaning-fulfillment , or, to speak traditionally, and in fact ambiguously, the relation between �concept� or �thought�, on the one hand, understood ad mere meaning without intuitive fulfillment, and �corresponding intuition�, on the other� (LI-VI�Introduction-p. 668).
Again as a matter of historical interest: a consequence (or assumption) of Husserl's Platonism about logic is that logic is closer to mathematics than to psychology. (Believing that logic is closer to mathematics than to psychology does not make one automatically a Platonist: a formalist philosopher could entertain the same view about the relation between logic and mathematics, holding that both are purely formal systems). My personal opinion is that Husserl never seriously questioned the Platonic status of mathematical entities and his Platonism about logic is a consequence of his Platonism about mathematics. (Kant could be considered an intuitionist about mathematics and a "transcendentalist" about logic; for Kant both logic and mathematics are both connected, though in different ways, with human thought; in Husserl's Platonism there is nothing special about human thought in logic and mathematics) .
A special place in Husserl's anti-psychologist polemic consists in exposing the relativist consequences of psychologist. (The entire chapter 7 of the Prolegomena is devoted to this theme). Husserl believes relativism is self-refuting. In this context, it is interesting to note that he differentiates in Prolegomena paragraph 32 p. 135 two senses in which a theory can be self-refuting. A theory can violate its very conditions of possibility in an objective respect, when it advances thesis that violates its premises and/or when the terms it used lack a coherent sense; a theory can violate its own conditions of possibility in a subjective sense if it does not addresses a rational person; if it can be understood no better in an irrational than in a rational way; as Husserl puts it, if it "in no way prefers an inwardly evident judgment to a blind one". (p. 136). The subjective conditions of possibility of a theory are noetic - this is, as far as I know, the first time the word "noetic" appears in Husserl's writings. The fact that Husserl felt the need to talk about subjective, noetic conditions of possibility for a theory shows what I will later call his hidden psychologism.
That psychologism leads to relativism (it is a special form of relativism, as Husserl puts it) it is rather trivial: psychologism denies the objective validity of logical laws, claiming that they depend on human mental facts; were these facts different, logic too would be different. To prove that relativism is false, Husserl employs mainly meta-arguments: if truth were dependent on the constitution of human species, then it would not be ultimately true that there is a constitution of the human species; rather, it would be true-for-our-constitution that there is such a thing as our constitution: "Must we then say that there is in reality no such constitution, or that it exists but only for us?" (Prolegomena, paragraph 36, p. 142)
Relativism entails not only the incoherence of the concept of truth (and of itself - since relativism claims to be itself true) but also of cosmic existence. Relativism claims truth to be dependent on facts (biological and psychological facts), but the very existence of these facts depends on other facts - or on themselves.
Another interesting anti-psychologist argument is the very possibility of mistakes in logic: if logical inferences were explainable by psycological laws, then these laws could not explain the mistakes made by people while trying to make logical inferences: "If the logical axioms are psychological laws, and the syllogistic rules follow in a purely deductive matter from these axioms, these syllogistic rules must also count as psychological. It might be thought that each fallacious inference would furnish a decisive counter-example, and that the deduction here in question would provide us with an argument against any psychological interpretation of logical axioms" (Prolegomena, paragraph 30, p. 129). If I understand correctly this paragraph, Husserl means we could never explain logical laws by virtue of psychological laws, since psychological (natural laws) admit of no exception, while logical laws can be broken. However, in my opinion this paragraph should be correlated with the example of the "prefectly logical person" in p. 103: Husserl emphasizes that logical laws would not become natural laws even in the case of a person who could not help but thinking logically, i.e. who would be determined by his constitution to follow logical rules correctly. Husserl's way of thinking seems to be: the possibility of logical mistakes is an argument, or rather a suggestion, for the non-psychological status of logical laws. If logical laws were actually obeyed due to people's psychological constitution, it would be more difficult to realize the distinction between logical and psychological laws - but this distinction would still hold. I am not sure that this argument is correct, but analyzing it would require considerable more space.
b) Anti-naturalist arguments
Naturalism about logic is the thesis that logical laws are natural laws. Husserl does not use the term "naturalism", but I prefer to use it due to its fashionable flavour, which permits me to emphasize the contrast between his views on logic and those dominant in contemporary analytic philosophy). Psychologism about logic is a species of naturalism; however, naturalism is broader than psychologism since it is compatible with an "ontological" status of the laws of logic. Naturalism is consistent with the thesis that logical laws are laws of nature in the same sense as physical or chemical laws are laws of nature; they do not necessarily govern the human mind, but the reality.
Husserl stresses in several places the distinction between logical laws and laws of nature. Laws of nature are an approximation of an ideal. They have, or may have, a provisional value: it is discoverable that any law of nature is false, or does not apply to all the cases it was thought to subsume. On the contrary, logical laws are not mere approximations: "The Law of Contradiction does not tell us that one must surmise that one of two contradctory judgments is true, one false[...]And so generally, and n the field of mathematics as well. Otherwise we should have to treat it as an open possibility that such a surmise would fails to be confirmed by an extension of our ever limited horizon of experience.[...]New gravitational formulae are occasionally tried out[...]Such is the situation in the exact factual sciences, but by no means in logic. We have insight into, not merely the probability, but the truth of logical laws." (Prolegomena, paragraph 21, p. 100). It is unquestionable, from these quotations and from innumerable other places of his work, that Husserl was unconditionally optimistic about our possibility of grasping the true logical laws; that the logical laws we hold true (e.g., Aristotelian syllogistic) are ultimately true.
Secondly: we can always look for an explanation, a fundament of the laws of nature themselves. I quote in support of my interpretation the paragraph 31 of the Prolegomena, where Husserl protests against the analogy between logical laws and chemical laws: we can ask, and hope to discover in the future, why certain combinations of chemical substances, in given quantities, yield another substance in a certain quantity. But we cannot discover why , in syllogistic, certain combinations of premisses validly yield a conclusion while other combinations of premisses don't. "The empiricist thinks that 'we are as yet ignorant' why the combinations of premisses condemned by Logic 'yield no conclusion'. Does he expect to discover more as knowledge widens? One would imagine that here at least we know everything that can be known, for here we see that each possible form of conclusion, i.e. each conclusion falling in the framework of syllogistic combination, will combine with the combinations of premisses in question to yield a false syllogistic law. One would think that, in such a case, even an infinitely perfect intelligence could have nothig more to know" (Prolegomena, paragraph 31, p. 133).
Husserl's fundamental argument against naturalism consists thus in stressing the a priori character of logical laws. His apriorism about logic goes hand in hand with his belief in the adequacy of the faculty of "seeing" the logical and mathematics truths. The a priori status of logic accounts for their "ultimate" status - both in the sense that they are not susceptible to revision, they are not mere approximations of better logical laws, and in the sense that they do not have any other fundament in other, more basic, laws.
Yet, Husserl's anti-naturalist and anti-psychologist arguments are still compatible with a purely normative view of logic, i.e. a view holding that the main difference between logical laws are normative, while natural laws are descriptive. As I will show in the sub-section c) of this essay, this is not what Husserl believed.
c) Anti-normative arguments.
As the second chapter of the Prolegomena makes clear, Husserl's conception of logic is also anti-normativist. By "normativism" I mean the doctrine that separates norms from facts and views logic as an ultimately normative science: an ethics of thought. (Normativism is thus closer to Platonism than to naturalism: naturalism denies the separation between norms and facts, claiming that norms are in a way or another traceable back to facts; normativism is however neutral with respect to the source of the validity of norms).
Husserl's anti-normativist argument consists in arguing that any normative science is founded in a theroretical science. Logic is indeed a normative science: it deals not with how we actually think, but with how we should think. This is not the ultimate definition of logic, though: "Every normative proposition of, e.g., the form "An A should be B", implies the theoretical proposition "Only an A which is B has the properties C", in which 'C' serves to indicate the constitutive content of the standard-setting predicate 'good' (e.g. pleasure, knowledge, whatever, in short, is marked down as good by the valuation fundamental to our given sphere)" (Prolegomena, paragraph II, par. 16, p. 88)
To conceive logic as a normative science is wrong, since this would mean that we should select from the psychological facts those facts that obey the rules of logic. "Thinking as it should be is a special case of thinking as it is". (LI, Prolegomena, par. 19p.92)
The way I understand the difference between logic-as-a-normative-science and logic-as-a-theoretic-science is this: if logic were a normative science, it would still be, or it could be a factual science in disguise: it would depend on the mental abilities of humans. But this would make all logical laws practical norms. A practical norm, unlike a theoretical proposition, depends on its validity on the ability to obey it.
To illustrate the way I understand Husserl's anti-normativism about logic, I will draw an analogy with ethics. (Normativism holds that logic is the ethics of thought, being silent about the source of its validity). I think the analogy between logic and ethics is acceptable for Husserl, since Husserl holds that even ethics is ultimately a theoretical and not merely a normative science. (At least this is what follows from the very few remarks about ethics in LI, mainly from Husserl's thesis that every normative statement has its basis in a theoretical statement). A Platonist view about ethics would be concerned with what should be done by anyone, anytime, no matter if s/he is able or not to do this. A Platonist ethics would be radically realist, insofar as it would claim to discover imperatives and would not be interested in what people believe to be good, nor in people's physiological and technical abilities to do what should be done. A Platonist ethics could accomodate imperatives that humans are unable to fulfil, for example the imperative that every person should fly to the Sun and back twice a year: even if noone is able to obey this imperative, this could still count as "good". On the contrary, on a view of ethics concerned purely with norms, such an imperative would not make sense.
Likewise, the normative view of logic would only deal with logical propositions that human minds are able to grasp and to follow. But this is not Husserl's view, since he insists over and over again that logical laws are independent on our grasping them. His theoretical view of logic could make room for logical laws that we are unable to obey or to understand. As physiological and technical limitations are not relevant for the theoretical view of ethics, so psychological limitations are not relevant for the theoretical view of logic.
The theoretical, as opposed to the normative, view of logic is thus an extremely realist position with respect to norms. It not only holds that norms are independent on whether they are obeyed or not. It holds that norms are independent on whether they can be obeyed or not. The advantage of the theoretical view of logic, as compared with the normative view, is that (at least in Husserl's opinion) it explains where logical laws (and norms in general) derive their validity from. The theoretical view of logic (and ethics) reifies, in a typically Platonist move, the normative properties. The main tenet of the theoretical view of norms is that norms are oriented towards an Ideal of Good (for ethics) , or Validity (in the case of logic). This ideal constitutes the norms as such, and it is not constituted by them. I guess that Husserl would claim that the Ideal of logic gives itself as self-evident and is known a priori, and that he would hold the same view of ethics. Whether the theoretical view of logic is correct or not, it is a matter to be discussed in the further sections of this essay.
1.2. Platonism about meanings
A large part of the LI is concerned with the problem of meaning. The theory is elaborated in the First Investigation and it undergoes several transformations and refinements in the Fifth Investigations. Like logical laws, meanings are objective, ideal entities: see, for example, pag. 285 (I.14): "In this selfsame meaning (of a given statement) of whose identity we are conscious whenever we repeat the statement, nothing at all about judging or about the one who judges is discoverable". The ideal status of meanings is supported by Husserl's distinction between the act of meaning and meaning as such. The act of meaning (that in his later work will become the noesis) is a psychical entity: it does not intervene essentially in the identity of the meaning. On the contrary, the meaning is what is common to several synonymous statements, perhaps utterred by several people, with several different psychical states. Meanings are therefore unchanging, even if the acts of meaning change. ("Actual word-meanings are variable, often changing in a single spell of thought, by their nature mainly adjusted to the occasion. Rightly seen, however, such change in meanings is really a change in the act of meaning. In other words, the subjective acts which confer meaning on expressions are variable[...] But the meanings themselves do not alter" - I. ch. 29, p. 322).
The abstract meaning is an idealization of the meaning-act: "To meanings in specie correspond acts of meaning, the former being nothing but ideally apprehended aspects of the latter" (p. 533). Meanings can be meant in various ways, moreover, the "objective reference" can be accessed through several different meanings: "An act of meaning is the determinate manner in which we refer to our object of the moment, though this mode of significant reference and the meaning itself can change while the objective reference remains fixed" (LI-I-13, p. 289)
Husserl's arguments for Platonism about meaning are somehow similar to his arguments for Platonism about logic. ("Pure logic, wherever it deals with concepts, judgments and syllogisms, is exclusively concerned with the ideal unities that we here call 'meanings' - II, ch. 29, p. 322). This is not at all surprising, since Husserl was convinced that the realm of meanings extends beyond our meaning-acts.According to him, there are unexpressed meanings , and even unexpressible meanings: �There are countless meanings which, in the common, relational sense, are merely possible ones, since they are never expressed, and since they can, owing to the limits of man�s cognitive powers, never be expressed� (LI-I-35, p. 333). The distinctions between expressions and indications and between meaning-fulfilment and meaning-intention will make clearer Husserl�s Platonism about meanings.
Reasons of Husserl�s Platonism about meaning
In this brief section I will point to three reasons that I think motivate Husserl�s Platonism about meaning. They are not fully explicit
The main motivation of Husserl's Platonism about meanings is, in my opinion, what he considered to be the need to account for the possibility of people's understanding each other. Since in the LI there is no trace of epoche or of "solipsism" - I think it is safe to assume that Husserl took for granted what can be called the existence of the "other minds" - the fact that there are several persons connected to the same "reality", with a similar mental life and that these people can really understand each other.(In LI-I-7, Husserl presents an �empathical� theory of mutual understanding: the hearer introjects into the speaker some the acts that impart sense, such as judgments.
Husserl accounted this phenomenon by postulating something identical between a person who speaks and a person who understand the first one: see I-14: "By 'content' we understand the self-identical meaning that the hearer can grasp even if he is not a percipient". (p. 290). Like Frege, Hussserl saw the possibility of communication as unaccountable in the absence of something that is common between the speaker and the hearer; and � like Frege � he could not accept the na�ve empiricist explanation that the same mental image occurs before the speaker and the hearer mind�s eye. The solution of Husserl (and Frege) was the postulation of an ideal realm of thoughts (Gedanken) in the case of Frege, of meanings (in the case of Husserl).
A consequence of Husserl's Platonism is that I do not know what I mean better than other people do. This is an important consequence (it makes Husserl's considerations on language opposed to, say, those of Wittgenstein), although I am not sure Husserl would have endorsed such a consequence. In support of this thesis, I point to the Appendix to the Sixth Investigation, where he explicitly rejects �first-person authority� about reports of psychological states: �For not every perception of the ego, nor every perception of a psychic state referred to the ego, is certainly evident, if by the ego we mean what we all mean by it, and what we all think we perceive in perceiving ourselves, i.e. our empirical personality. It is clear too that most perceptions of psychic states cannot be evident, since these are percepved with a bodily location� (LI-VI-Appendix, p. 859)
In support of his Platonism about meanings, Husserl explicitly invokes the possibility of forging new words. �Wherever a neew concept is formed, we see how a meaning becomes realized that was previously unrealized�. (LI-I-35, p. 333).
An obvious implication of the Platonism about meanings is the polemics against the empiricist picture that equates meanings with the "mental pictures" associated with pronouncing a word. In LI-I-18, Husserl argues that, if understanding consisted in having a mental picture present before "the mind's eye", then it would be impossible to account for understanding that survives after the mental picture fades.
There are thus at least three reasons that motivate Husserl�s Platonism about meanings: 1. intersubjective communication; 2. refusal of the classical empiricist picture; 3. the possibility of legitimate forging of new concepts. (Whether these arguments are valid or not, it is not investigated in these pages; I incline to think they are not valid, and hope to address this issue in the following sections of this essay).
However, Husserl�s Platonism about meanings cannot be fully understood unless we precise the place of �meaning� in LI. This is what I will do in the next three sections.
I do not intend to develop here a detailed presentation of Husserl's theory of meaning; it would require a considerable space and would most probably be irrelevant for the purposes of this paper. I will confine my attention to three aspects of Husserl's theory of meaning:
a) the distinction between indication (Anzeige) and expression (Ausrduck)
b) the distinction between meaning-intention and meaning-fulfillment
c) the distinction between quality and matter of an intentional act
a) Expressions and Indications
Only expressions have meaning ("It is part of a notion of expression to have a meaning: this precisely differentiates an expression from the other signs" LI-I-15-p. 293).
My conjecture is that it is in the light of the difference between expressions and indications that a crucial difference between Husserl's and Frege's account of meaning can be seen. For Frege, indeed, there is no problem of the "intimate" relation between a word (name or general term) and its reference (Bedeutung): the name refers to an individual object via its individual sense (Sinn), while the general term refers to a concept via its general sense (a thought-Gedanke). That's why Husserl would not have accepted Frege's distinction between sense (Sinn) and reference (Bedeutung): Frege treats equally expressions and indications, attributing Sinn to both.
To specify this point in more detail: to the best of my knowledge, Frege is mentioned only once in the LI, namely in LI-I-15, p. 291, where Husserl is dissatisfied that Frege differentiates between Sinn and Bedeutung. (Husserl thus insists that Sinn should be used interchangeably with Bedeutung). Husserl writes: "A further consideration is our ingrained tendency to use the two words [Sinn and Bedeutung] as synonymous, a circumstance which makes a rather dubious step is their meanings are differentiated, and if (as G. Frege has proposed) we use one for meaning in our sense and other for the objects expressed. To this we may add that both terms are exposed to the same equivocations, which we distinguished above in connection with the term 'expression' " An obvious conclusion that can be drawn from this passage is that Husserl's Bedeutung is Frege's Sinn. But this is rather a curious and unexpected consequence, since Husserl's meaning is a much more ramified and "structured" entity than Frege's Sinn. (I would have expected to see Husserl accusing Frege for not differentiating between meaning-intention and meaning-fulfillment).
In the light of the second accusation of Husserl against Frege, I also draw the following conclusion: Frege illegitimately attrributes meaning (Sinn) to indications. An indication can refer, "stand for" some objects, but cannot have a Sinn. It refers "directly", it does not refer to an object by virtue of anything. This shows a light on the famous puzzle of Frege about the Morning Star and the Evening Star. (As known, Frege considers that these two names have the same reference-Bedeutung but different senses-Sinne). The Husserlian solution to Frege's puzzle is: "the Morning Star" is an expression fulfilled in the intuition of the Morning Star, i.e. of the Morning Star as it appears at morning, but not of the Evening Star, i.e. of the star as it appears at evening. "The Morning Star" is rather an indication of the Evening Star.
I do not claim to have answered the question "what is the Husserlian solution to Frege's puzzle?", but I hope that my remark above is correct.
Another reason for Husserl's rejection of Frege's solution is that he could not accept that expressions without reference, such as "the golden mountain", are meaningless (Bedeutunglos). Frege thus considered all signs as expressions, since he attributed to them Sinn.
A "symetrical" accusation is made by Husserl against Stuart Mill, (LI-I-16) who treated names as indications, thus devoid of sense. Mill is thus the opposite of Frege: Mill treats all signs as indications.
There is another important consequence of the distinction between expressions and indications, to which I want to draw the attention. An important part of Husserl's Platonism about meanings is his critique of the traditional empiricist theory of meaning, according to which a word's meaning is a psychological state. This rejection of empricism is predictable in the light of Husserl�s Platonism about meaning. But it is related, in my opinion, to Husserl�s distinction between expressions and indications. An indication is not intrinsically connected with its meaning; an expression is. Indications intimate their meaning, but they do not properly speaking mean it. Thus, the psychological state associated with understanding a word is intimated, but not meant, by that word. Therefore, �there is no intrinsic connection between the ideal unities which in fact operate as meanings and the signs to which they are tied, through which they become real in human mental life" (I-35)
b) the distinction between meaning-intention and meaning-fulfilment
Once the meaning (of an expression) is characterized as an ideal unity, the problem of the (mental or linguistic) access to it can legitimately be raised. Husserl attempts to explain it by distinguishing between two components of meaning: meaning intention and meaning-fulfillment.
The meaning-intention is the act that makes an expression into an expression; it is the act that lends meaning to it. On the other hand, meaning-fulfilment is the intuitive realization of the meaning-intention. "To mean" is thus not a relation between a word and an object; it is rather a relation between two different acts: the act that confers meaning (the intention) and the act that realizes intuitively the first act (meaning-fulfilment). It is important to note that both the meaning-intention and the meaning-fulfillment are acts, so that it is somehow misleading to speak of "meaning fulfilment" as being the objective pole of meaning and of meaning intention as the "subjective pole"). Meaning-intention is thus essential to an expression (p. 281).
It is important to note that meaning-intention, though psychological, does not coincide with the "mental images" one has before one's mind's eye when understanding a word. Perhaps it is here that we realize another consequence of the distinction between indications and expressions: if a mental image were consistently associated with a word, then the word could be an indication, but not an expression of it: "The fact that two presented objects A and B are so linked by some secret psychological coordination that the presentation of A regularly arouses the presentation of B, and that interest is thereby shifted from A to B - such a fact does not make A the expression of B" (LI-I-10, p. 282)
An additional thesis advanced by Husserl is that in the case of fulfilment, meaning-intention coincides with meaning-fulfilment:
"we shall have ..acts, not essential to the expression as such, which stand to it in the logically basic relation of fulfilling (confirming, illustrating) it more or less adequately, and so actualizing its relation to its object. These acts, which become fused with the meaning-conferring acts in the unity of knowledge or fulfilment, we call the meaning-fulfilling acts" (LI-I-9-p. 281)
This point can be understood, in my opinion, if we consider the meaning intention as �unsaturated� entity (to use Frege;s terminology), a mere pointing to the object intended, while the meaning-fulfillment is the saturation of this pointing. For example, when I utter an expression and intend a certain object by it, the object is as yet not given fully; I have only the minimal information about that object, the preconditions of its being identified as such, as identical with itself. Meaning-fulfillement, as I understand this term, is a gradual �saturation� of the meaning-intention. The coincidence of meaning-intention with meaning-fulfillment in the case of fulfilled intuitions means that there is nothing more to intend than what is already present. This coincidence, this �fusing� between meaning intention and meaning-fulfillement reminds previous formulations where Husserl speaks of a �merging� into one another of the subjective and the objective thesis he advances in characterizing expressions: (See, e.g. LI-I-10, p. 282: "To be an expression is a descriptive aspect of the experienced unity of sign and thing signified.). I pointed above that it is not entirely correct to consider the meaning intention as a subjective entity and the meaning fulfillment as an objective one; I suggested that the meaning-intention should be rather conceived as the beginning of the process of fulfillment that ends in self-evidence. However, if we relate Husserl�s remarks about the �fusion� between the sign and the signified in the case of expressions, we may advance the conjecture that the objective is precisely the end of the process of �saturating� the subjectivity.
What is the importance of the meaning-fulfillment in the analysis of meaning? Meaning-fulfilment is the intuitive act that corresponds to an intention. However, an intuition is most often an imperfect and incomplete guide to the object: "Fulfilment is often imperfect ... and expressions often go with remotely relevant, only partial illustrative intuitions" (LI-I-15, p. 295). Frege considered the Sinn as an entity that assures access to the reference (objects) of a word; he took for granted that the sense, as understood by him, does this job of referring to the object. Husserl raised the additional problem: how can a Sinn relate to its object? His answer lies in seeing the fulfilling sense as a process, rather than as an entity: fulfilment tends towards the goal of completely characterizing the intended object and thus admits of degrees, as it will become clear in the Sixth Investigation: "The fulfilling act has a superiority which the mere intention lacks: it imparts to the synthesis the fulness of 'self', at least leads it more directly to the thing itself. The relativity of this 'directness', this 'self', points further to the fact that the relation of fulfilment is of a sort that admits of degrees" (LI-VI-16, p. 720).
An ambiguity concerning the meaning-fulfilment can arise from the fact that Husserl speaks about meaning-fulfilment as intuition and concept . If my conjecture above (that meaning-fulfillment is a process rather than an entity(is right, then we can understand this ambiguity. An expression is conferred meaning by its intention. This intention is correlated with the possibility of intuitive presentation of its object. But the intuitive presentation shows only an aspect, a part of the object: to this extent, it provides access not to the object itself, but to its individual essence. A partial fulfilment is an individual essence that stands in need of completed by other intuitions: it is as such a concept, which presents the object's possibilities of being the same. Meaning-fulfillment should better be understood as a process rather than as an entity. It is the process of synthesis of several intuitions into an object. The culmination of this process is self-evidence: it is the grasping of the essential relations between objects. "We recall that all self-evidence of judgment (all realized knowledge in the strong sense of the word) presupposes meaning that are intuitively fulfilled". (LI-I-21-p. 307). Later, in the Sixth Investigation, Husserl brings several clarifications of this issue. He distinguishes between simple identification and fulfilment, characterizing fulfillment as "knowledge", as the situation in which intuitions converge. Fulfillment - the completed process of fulfillment - is defined as the total identification of an object. "In fulfillment our experience is represented by the words 'This is the thing itself' " (LI-VI-16, p. 720). Identification is a partial fulfilment of the meaning intention; it is a mere stage in the process of fulfillment. Complete fulfillment is the end of the process which includes intuitive identifications as its stages.
All this has a new bearing on the topic �Husserl versus Frege�, which was only sketched in this essay. Husserl�s Platonism implies his conviction that we can access the things in themselves, objects as such. (This can happen at the end of a process, as I shall point in the next section). This makes Husserl, despite his objections to Mill and unlike Frege, an unexpected adept of the �direct reference theory� of proper names: After writing that the meaning of demonstrative words (occasional expressions such as �this� and �that�) does not cinsist in the percepts associated with them, Husserl writes:
�a proper also names an object �directly�. It refers to it, not attributively, as the bearer of these or those properties, but without such a �conceptual� mediation, as what it itself is, just as perception might set it before our eyes. The meaning of a proper name lies accordingly in a direct reference-to-this object, a reference that perception only fulfills, as imagination does provisionally and illustratively , but which is not identical with these intuitive objects� (LI-VI-5-p. 684).
The (conjectural) way I interpret this passage is this: the intention �picks out� an object without the mediation of any percept, without any conceptual mediation. The intuitive fulfillment confirms or disconfirms the existence of the intended object but it cannot (dis)confirm the fact that it is precisely this object that was meant.
However, one may (naively) ask whether the words that designte properties (The Red, the Divisible-by-Four) or definite descriptions (�The man who drinks coffee�) need any further conceptual mediation, i.e. further definite descriptions associated with them. In other words, Husserl seems to derive a rejection of the descriptional view of reference from a rejection of na�ve psychologism about meaning (and reference). It is not obvious, however, that psychologism has anything to do with the descriptional view of reference.
c) the distinction between quality and matter of the meaning intention
The distinction between quality and matter is formulated in the Fourth Investigation and developed in the Fifth Investigation. The quality of an act is the genus differentiated into species such as "judging, wishing, hoping". The matter is defined as "that element in an act which first gives it reference to an object, and reference so wholly definite that it not merely fixes the object meant in a general way, but also the precise way in which the object is meant" (LI-V-par. 20, p. 589). One and a same object can be intended through different matters. On the other hand, one and same matter cannot correspond to different objects.
The distinction between quality and matter appears in the context of Husserl's generalizing his analysis from expressions (linguistic acts) to intentional acts in general.(As I will point below, it would be wrong, however, to conceive of the quality/matter distinction as a generalization of the intention/fulfilment distinction to The quality of an act is the genus differentiated into species such as "judging, wishing, hoping". The matter is defined as "that element in an act which first gives it reference to an object, and reference so wholly definite that it not merely fixes the object meant in a general way, but also the precise way in which the object is meant" (LI-V-par. 20, p. 589). One and a same object can be intended through different matters. On the other hand, one and same matter cannot correspond to different objects.
The distinction between Quality and Matter apprears in the context of Husserl's generalizing his analysis from expressions (linguistic acts) to intentional acts in general.(As I will point below, it would be wrong, however, to conceive of the quality/matter distinction as a generalization of the intention/fulfilment distinction to intentional acts in general). This distinction depends on the emphasis that Husserl gives to presentations, which are the elementary acts that build any intentional act. (Presentation thus becomes another term of art for Frege's Sinn). In the case of a presentation, the Quality is identical with the Matter: I would translate this in Fregeean terminology by saying that a Sinn can no longer have other Sinne. A consequence of Husserl's thesis that the quality and the matter of a presentation are identical is that Husserl - unlike Frege � would not have accepted that different psychological types (feeling and hoping something) may leave the "manner of presentation" unaltered. In this sense, Husserl's view about words' reference to objects via meanings is more elaborate than Frege's.
It would be tempting to consider the distinction between quality and matter as a terminological substitute for the already known distinction between meaning-intention and meaning-fulfilment. Yet this is not true - both quality and matter belong to the intentional essence, as we can read:
"Insofar as quality and matter now count for us as the qholly essential, and so never to be dispensed with, constituents of an act, it would be suitable to call the union of both, forming one part of the complete act, the act's intentional essence" (V-21-p.590).
What is the importance of the distinction between quality and matter of an intentional act in our context? The fact that an act's "matter", defined as the fact that an object appears to us in a certain way, is allotted to the meaning-intention, i.e. to the "subjective" pole of an intentional act, serves to construct Husserl's proof of the "external world". The transcendent object is obviously "exterior" to the intentional pole of the act. But, so to speak, all there is to know about it belongs to the subjective pole.
This distinction is related to another move made by Husserl. Meaning-fulfilment, the old "objective pole" of the intentional act, is defined as an intuitive presentation of the intention's objective reference. Another technical term, "semantic essence", is introduced by Husserl (p. 592-593) as the meaning-fulfilment of an expression. The relation between Quality and Matter is, we are told, the same as the relation between Colour and Extension: i.e., colour cannot be conceived without extension .
As a parenthetical remark: Husserl�s Platonism about meanings goes hand in hand with his conviction that language is but an imperfect guide to expressions� meanings. (This is obvious especially in his discussion about the universal grammar in the Fourth Investigation; I will criticize this aspect of his thought in the third, critical section of this essay). Husserl was not affected by the �linguistic turn� in philosophy and � despite his interest in language � he cannot be considered as an antecessor of it. He did not consider philosophical problems as being necessarily couched in linguistic terms. For him, actual human languages are in principle dispensable. If Husserl paid attention to language in the First (and Fourth) Investigation, it is because he thought the structure of knowledge in general to be - albeit imperfectly � instantiated in the structure of language. Therefore, the structure of language is to be generalized to the structure of knowledge. This is , in my opinion, a correct (although sketchy) way of characterizing the transition from the First to the Sixth Investigation.
1.3. Platonism about universals
Husserl's Platonism about universals is probably easy to understand in the light of the above exposition of his platonism about logic and about meanings. There is an analogical link between objective meanings and universals: The relation between the act of meaning and the meaning as an ideal entity is an instance-instantiated relation: "The relation between the meaning and the signitive experience is the same as the relation between the Species Red and a red object in immediate experience, or the moment of red that appears in this object" (Introduction, LI-II). This analogy between objective meanings and universals may suggest that objective meanings are always universal meanings, while acts of meanings are directed to individual objects. Such a suggestion is, at least, partly correct: Husserl indeed writes about names of individual objects as implying states of affairs, and that generality is implied even in the identification of individual objects.
Husserl�s strategy of arguing for the objective and Platonic status of universals is reification of resemblances. His argument is that in the absence of such a reification, the very idea of resemblance would be
i)inconsistent, since any object belongs to several "resemblance-circles". Therefore universals are not obtained by induction.
ii) leading to an infinite regress - since some resemblances could resemble - or not- other resemblances. (In my opinion, this is a rather poor argument, since the same accusation of infinite regress can be brought against a Platonic view of universals as well - we need no more than to remind of the third man argument in Plato' Parmenides).
Husserl�s reification of universals as platonic entities leads to an extensive criticism of psychological reification of Universals (Locke): This is understandable, since Husserl's Platonism about universals is directed both against the thesis that there are no universals (extreme nominalism: Spencer - there are no identical attributes) and against the psychological reification of universals (Locke, Mill). Husserl thus polemizes
i) against the extreme nominalism :see above (regressio ad infinitum;
ii) against the psychological reification of universals. The main accusation against Locke is that he (Locke) makes universals dependent on ordinary language. Moreover, Locke confuses the Species with its presentation. The weapon Husserl uses against psychologism is, like in the case of logical laws and ideal meanings, the difference between the objective target of psychological operations and these operations themselves.
The psychological existence of universals would, moreover, be self-contradictory, since mental existence is nothing but a species of real existence. (p. 319). If I understand this argument correctly, Husserl wants to say that it would be unintelligible how a concrete real individual could be an instance of a universal If the universal were itself a mental individual; i.e., the mental existence of universals would deprive them of their universality.A version of this argument appears in ????????????
(To be effective, such an argument needs to prove that there is a point in invoking objective universals. As we saw, Husserl's argument for the objectivity of logical laws mainly dealt with the a priori character; his argument for the objectivity of meaning was, in my opinion, the possibility of intersubjective communication; his argument for the objectivity of universals is twofold: 1. universals are somewhere; 2. universals cannot be psychological).
1. PSYCHOLOGISM IN �LOGICAL INVESTIGATIONS�
There is a general tendency in the LI to subjectivize the relation of our access to the objectivity. I.e., to account for the objective relations and properties in terms of relations between acts and properties of acts. Thus, there is a pre-established harmony between objective and the psychological. Self-evidence, �the crown of knowledge� is an objective relation: the task of phenomenology is, however, to search for its counterpart in the subjective realm. Thus, phenomenologically speaking, everything that is objective corresponds to something in the mental act. Truth, originally undersdood as agreement between the subjective and the objective, becomes an agreement between several subjective acts . Truth thus can be defined as �epistemic essence interpreted as the ideal essence of the empirically contingent act of self-evidence, the Idea of absolute adequation as such� (LI-VI-39, p. 766)
The passage where Husserl�s psychologism is the most obvious is, in my opinion, LI-VI-5. There, Husserl rejects (in an already familiar manner) the na�ve empiricist account of meaning (according to which meaning consists in the mental pictures associated with hearing and/or understanding words): Husserl writes that any percept associated with the act of meaning may vanish, yet the expression retain its meaning. This is true even for judgements that express a perceptual experience. Far from drawing a Wittgensteinian conclusion, that �meaning is use�, Husserl embraces a psychologist, or super-psychologist solution: If percepts do not lend meaning to expressions, then it must be that another, mysterious type of acts, is responsible for instilling �life� to the otherwise �dead� signs:
�We must accordingly say: �This expression of a percept � more objectively phrased, of a perceived thing as such � is no affair of the sound of words, but of certain expressive acts� This means, at the same time, that between the percept and sound of words another act (or pattern of acts) is intercalated. I call it an act, since the expressive experience, whether or not it is accompanied by a percept, always has an intentional direction to something objective. This mediating act must be the true giver of meaning, must pertain to the significantly functioning expression as its essential constituent and must determine its possession of an ideal sense�. (LI-VI-4-p. 680) .
Moreover, Husserl writes time and again that there is to be something in psychological acts, or in the structure of these acts, that corresponds to objectivity in general. The subjective is a mirror of the objective: but in order to realize its mirroring aspect we are committed to idealizing and essentializing the subjectivity. My conjecture is that the super-psychological acts needed in order to fully identify objects and grasp universals are the essences of ordinary psychological acts . MAI BAGA NISTE FRAZE CA NU AI TERMINAT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1
2. HUSSERL�S SOLUTION: PRE-ESTABLISHED HARMONY AND SUPER-PSYCHOLOGY
Why super-psychology
One of Husserl�s purposes in postulating the super-psychological faculty is obvious: to explain how objectivity is accessible to persons �bound� by their subjective constitution.
Another, not so-obvious, purpose is to make explicit the possibility of intersubjective communication. Indeed, the super-faculty is an �essentialization� , an idealization of ordinary psychology in that it makes it apparent what psychological states are shared by several persons: (Unless later, analytic philosophers Husserl was sure that several persons may share the same psychological state):
�If someone expresses the self-evidence of A, it is self-evident that no second person can experience the absurdity of this same A, for, that A is self-evident, means that A is not merely meant, but also genuinely given, and given as precisely what is thought to be. In the strict sense it is itself present� (LI-VI-,38, p. 769)
Husserl suggests that this is so because of the intrinsic character of A. The best example are, I think, laws of logic: they are such that it is impossible to read them and not to realize their truth. Husserl would have said about logic (and necessary relations) what Socrates said about the Good: it is impossible to know it and not to do it�.
Another, more obscure reason, becomes apparent in the Sixth Investigation. This reason is the parallelism between language and thought. In particular, Husserl was interested in accounting for the meaning of syncategorematic expressions, i.e. �logical terms� such as �all�, �or�, �and� , �some� . Husserl was aware that it is not the case that the meaning of any expression can be fulfilled in an intuition. LI-VI-40 makes this clear: Husserl answers negatively to the question �Are there parts and forms of perception corresponding to all parts and forms of meaning?� (p. 774), yet is still interested in the issue, since he writes �We have but to ask, further, what corresponds in perception to the difference between the two expressions, �this white paper� and �this paper is white�, which are both realized on the same perceptual basis; we have but to ask what side of perception is really brought out by this difference? � (p. 775). His answer is the postulation of some special acts, that he calls �perceptually founded acts� and will later become �categorical intuition�.
This categorical intuition is what explains not only our understanding of the syncategoremata, but also our knowledge of the universals. This is a topic of utomost importance for Husserl, since he believes that generality is implied even in the knowledge of the particular. The distinction between universals and individuals is thus somehow blurred, since
(i) we cannot do away with universals, even in the (complete) identification of an individual;
(ii) the universals , like the individuals, are given in intuition � although a different sort of intuition:
�Even in the general realm, as in the realm of individuals, our talk has a relation to intuitively founded acts of thought. Should intuition fall wholly away, our judgment would cease to know anything�(p. 777, VI-41). The super-psychological faculty is responsible for identification of an object �as the same�, for the synthesis or �coagulation� of the part-percepts into the unity of an identical object: �Only when we use the perceptual series to found anovel act, only when we articulate our individual percepts and relate their objects to each other, does the unity of continuity holding among these individual percepts - the unity of fusion through their coinciding intentions � provide a point d`appui for a consciousness of identity� (LI-VI-47, p. 791)
3. CRITICISM OF HUSSERL�S PLATONISM:
This section of my essay will be critical towards Husserl�s Platonism. MY aim is to prove that the version of Platonism that he explicitly endorses is wrong, and that it is inconsistent with a psychologist tendency in his work.
My main accusation against Husserl points to his uncritical assumption that we have insight into the laws of logic and mathematics; in his claim that it is this insight that justifies our belief in objectivity in general. He writes, for example:
�Mathematical angels may no doubt use other methods of calculation than ours; does this mean they may have different axioms and theorems?� (p. 163 PARAGRAFUL?) Husserl commits, in my view, the fallacy of trying to be both inside the psychological realm and outside it, in the presence of objectivities. He tries to explain how our subjectivity can gain access to the objective realm, but assumes that it can gain such an access and, moreover, that it can gain it in the cases where common-sense takes it for granted that it does.
I assume that. Husserl would answer my accusation by pointing to the progressive character of our psychological acts: they are intentions that �tend� or �converge� towards a fulfillment. Everything that is subjective tends towards an ideal. This processual character of the subjectivity allows us, as psychologically-bound persons, to grasp, so to speak, one pole of the relation between the subjective and the objective (namely, the subjective pole) AND its relation to the objective. This permits us to �deduce� or �infer� the existence of the objective pole and its nature. Objectivity, in Husserl, is nothing but the ideal culmination of subjective acts. (We saw this �process towards an ideal� in the account of meaning-fulfillment, i.e. the identification of an object as being the same).
My thesis is that Husserl considered the same progressive process towards an ideal to occur in the case of psychological acts in general. The faculty by means of which we grasp logical truths as different from psychological laws is the same as the faculty by means of which an identical object is constituted out of the �part-perceptions� of it. This faculty is a super-psychological faculty, an idealization of ordinary psychology, and it provides �self-evidence�, �insight� and �categorical intuition�.
This answer, although original, is yet open to criticism: My main cricitism say this: even if psychological acts are indeed �processes towards an ideal�, this does not guarantee that the ideal towards which they tend is the same as the Platonic objectivity. But Husserl believed in a Platonic realm of objectivities. Therefore, he still owes us an explanation of whether, and how, subjectivity � even ideally fulfilled � coincides with Platonic objectivity.
In more detail:
I.
It is consistent with Husserl�s Platonism not to give examples of �self-evidnt truths�. Yet, Husserl does give examples. He gives the example of the laws of logic as being necessary and a priori, without noticing that he thus makes a confusion between
(i) the �actual� laws of logic, i.e. the laws of logic as we believe them to be, what appears in textbooks of logic under the heading �laws of logic�; and
(ii) the ideal laws of logic, i.e. the laws of logic as they are, no matter whether we understand them or not.
If Husserl were consistent in separating the act of grasping the laws of logic and the laws of logic themselves, he should subsequently separate between the results of the acts of grasping � whatever these results are � and the laws of logic themselves. (Likewise for meaning versus act of meaning). Indeed, what makes the �acts of grasping logical laws� into �acts of grasping logical laws� is not anything psychological contained in these acts. It is possible that these acts miss their target. There is nothing in their �immanent� constitution, so to speak, that guarantess their hitting their target.
In other words, Husserl should have made room for the possibility that laws of logic are wholly different from what we believe and have believed them to be.
Indeed, Platonism in logic and in mathematics is consistent with the possibility that we all are and have been wrong when making and formalizing logical and mathematical inferences. What excludes the possibility that our defective psychology, of the physiological condition of our brains, prevents us from gaining access to the truth as it is? A consistent Platonist can do no better than answer: Nothing.
Moreover, Husserl�s confidence in our infallible access to the logical laws is not justified by his distinction between exact and empirical laws of nature. UNDE??? He writes that we have direct �insight� into the definitive logical laws, but not into the definitive empirical laws. The evidence he provides for this is the a priori character of logical laws. However, the mere a priori possibility of testing a statement is not the same as the necessity of that statement. A Platonist should carefully distinguish between a priori and necessary: indeed, for a Platonist there is no reason why necessary truths are grasped in a particular way (a priori rather than a posteriori). Husserl is sometimes aware of the distinction between necessary and a priori, since he believes that the laws of natural science are themselves necessary (although they are not a priori). However, he does not follow consistently this distinction � had he followed it, he should have envisaged the possibility that what we take to be laws of logic are contingent and a priori.
Therefore, Husserl does not have any reason for claiming that mathematical angels may not have different axioms and theorems than ours (p. 163). In my opinion, Husserl should have answered: �we cannot discover mathematical truths accessible to mathematical angels but not to us, or mathematical truths that take a millennium of individual thinking to discover. We should keep silent about them: we don�t know even if the discovery of such mathematical truths will, or will not, lead to any revisions in the mathematical truths we currently accept�.
Husserl�s fallacy is even more obvious since he extends his confidence in our actually knowing truths to non-logical but analytical statements (�contents of judgment�, as he calls them), such as those stating the difference between Colours and Tones. (p. 165). Husserl insists to distinguish between contents of judgments and acts of judgments, the content of judgment being objective, platonic, nevertheless accessible to us:
�[Truth and Falsity] pertain to such contents even if noone recognizes their presence. Colours, Tones, Triangles etc�always have the essential properties of Colours, Tones, Triangles etc.,, whether anyone in the world knows such a fact or not�. (p. 165) � in other passages Husserl claims that not even God could know that Colours are in fact tones, or that the mathematical theorems we discovered are not true.
I.1. Excursus on Husserl and "logical inertia"
As a parenthetical remark: Husserl's confusion between "laws of logic" and "what we take to be the laws of logic" obviously favours a static conception of logic, according to which logic � unlike natural sciences � is not open to progress, cannot make any further steps. (It is known this was Kant's view of logic: Kant believed Aristotelian logic is complete and eternal). Any philosophical system that grants humans an a priori faculty of grasping logical truths is committed to such a static view about logic.
In fairness to Husserl, I should point to the fact that his attitude was more refined: in Prolegomena-chapter II, par. 13, p. 79, he writes that
:"It is plainly wrong to set logic bounds as narrow as those of Aristotelian logic, since 'pure' logic certainly goes beyond these. "
Husserl uses the non-confinement of logic to Aristotelian logic as an argument against the normativist view of logic, (see my section about "Anti-normativist arguments" above): indeed, if we define logic as Aristotle did, as the art (or technique) of gaining verbal disputes, logic becomes a technology and "it is obvious that , as in the case of technologies in general, it is not the mutual connectedness of matters but our guiding aim which serves to bind and unite logical truths into a 'discipline'." (Prolegomena, par. 13, p. 79)
However, my opinion is that Husserl is inconsistent in that he admits that Aristotelian logic is not the end of the matter in logic, yet he cannot admit that Aristotelian logic could have been partly wrong. . It is not clear what Husserl's attitude to the contemporary (to him) developments in logic would have been, since he makes little (if any) mention of them. Perhaps he accepted that logic can "develop" in that additions to its "theorems" are possible. but not in that already "discovered" theorems" of logic could prove false (not-valid). This � cumulated with his belief in the "Self-evidence" with which logical laws present themselves to us � resulted in a conservative position about logic, implicitly opposed to progress in logic. (Frege had a totally different attitude).
II.. The processual-towards-an-ideal character of our psychological acts is an empirical matter and does not prove that the ideal meant is objective or valid �in itself�.
I apply this criticism to Husserl�s conception of fulfilling in intuition an object that is given through several partial presentations.
As I pointed in the section about �meaning-intention and meaning-fulfillment� of this essay, the �process-towards-an-ideal� is not merely a strategy designed to unify, to �structure� the partial presentations towards fulfilling of an object. It is also a strategy towards unifying the presentations that several persons have of the same object.
But � if Huserl were consistently Platonistic � he should accept the possibility that all my presentations of one and the same object only seem to converge into fulfillment of an object; perhaps they do not converge at all, or they converge into a wrong direction. Perhaps objects in themselves are wholly different from what we take to be objects. Perhaps the world-as-it-is is wholly liquid, or gaseuous, and there are no solid objects at all; indeed, in such a situation it is not clear that there would be any objects to be identified at all. An anti-realist would not be disturbed by such a possibility, since for him(her) what it is necessarily coincides, at least to a large extent, to what it seems to be. This possibility is however a serious challenge for a realist.
Husserl rules out this possibility by what is, in my opinion, a �principle of charity�: it is unreasonable to suppose that I was always wrong, that everybody was wrong, when taking an object to be the same. He takes for granted the fact that, when identifying , in my meaning-intention, an object, it is precisely that object that I am partially identifying.
However, such a principle of charity is unintelligible on Platonist premissess. In fact, there are good reasons for a realist (and Platonism is a form of realism, extended to abstract objects) to reject any form of principle of charity. I think that Husserl would continue to believe in the laws of contradiction and of syllogism even if everyone except him became psychotic and deny such laws.
Thus, I can put in fewer words my criticism against Husserl:
Husserl adopts a principle of charity to the extent that he believes that the successive part-percepts directed to an object actually converge in the fulfillment of that object in intuition.
(Husserl�s �progressive process towards an ideal� assures him that, if we did not reach objectivity, we at at least on the right path to it; at least we move in a good direction. But this is circular: we need to know what objectivity is in order to be assured that we are on the right path towards it).
III. Even if this principle of charity were justified, it would point to laws-of-logic in an ideal sense, not to the laws of logic as we actually take them to be ???????????????????????????????????????????????? My thesis is that the same "principle of charity" that Husserl uses in his account of fulfillment of an object in intuition is anticipated in his discussion of logic. As we saw, Husserl finds no problem with the idea that Logic made (and can make) progress since Aristotle on, but he could not accept that what is already considered as belonging to Logic can prove false. Thus, the history of logic is � in Husserl's view �is the progressive fulfillment of our knowledge of the ideal logical laws. That is, Husserl could not have come to terms with the notion of radical, "revolutionary" revisions in logic. But this view of his is false. It is not only the case that, as a matter of historical fact, Aristotelian logic ceased to be considered valid as a result of Frege's work in a manner not wholly different from the manner in which Aristotelian physics ceased to appear valid as a result of Newton's work. Let's assume that the history of logic is lineary progressive, unlike the history of natural sciences. Even if all the developments that were made in logic, as a matter of history, do converge towards a sense, it does not follow that this convergence is a gradual attaining of the ideal logical laws as such, as they are independent of human psychological facts. At most, it could be claimed that the "progressive convergence" of the history of logic points to the fact that there is a logic, whose laws are eternal and objectively valid. But the progressive convergence is a matter of empirical fact: perhaps logical laws as they are objectively valid have nothing to do with what we take to be the laws of logic. Platonism about logic is obliged to consider the possibility of difference between "what there is in itself" and "what there seems to us to be" (be it objects, meanings, universals or logical laws). The mere evidence of constant or historical agreement about what is "progress in logic" is an empirical (psychological or historical fact). It cannot, as such, prove that the process is going in the "Right" direction, i.e. that we are approaching the adequate knowledge of the identity of an object; or of logical laws.
IV. The postulation of the super-psychological faculty is a deus ex machina, since
(i) it is not clear how to separate it from ordinary psychological facts;
(ii) there is no reason why this faculty should be infallible (unless we define it to be such).
If we define the super-psychological faculty as �the faculty of grasping concepts, universals and logical-mathematical laws and entities�, then such a faculty is obviously faillible � mistakes are made in logic and mathematics as often as they are made in empirical matters.
V. To the extent that he admits a principle of charity, Husserl relies on ordinary language, although he (platonistically) rejects ordinary language as a reliable guide to objectivity. For example, as I wrote in the section about �Platonism about universals�, he condemns Locke for his psychological reification of universals and his reliance on ordinary language.
VI. Husserl�s Platonism about logic is an extreme version of Platonism. By this, I mean that Husserl claims that logical laws are valid not only if noone actually discovers them, but even if noone is able to discover them.
This is again apparent in his Platonism about meanings: there are meanings yet undiscovered, there are, moreover, meanings undiscoverable due to our psychological limitations. I define �extreme Platonism� as the thesis that Objectivity is independent not only of our access to it, but of our possibility of grasping it.
In my opinion, this extreme Platonism is both false and inconsistent with the principle of charity that I showed Husserl endorses.
This extreme Platonism is false because it is self-refuting in at least three sense:
a. its consequence is that Husserl should have doubted whether his (or his readers�) mind is actually able to grasp the truth of the logical laws he talks about; or the objective meanings he presents.
b. Extreme Platonism leaves open the question whether there are any logical laws and meanings at all that can be communicated. Thus, extreme Platonism is self-refuting since it raises this question: if it is possible that people in general are denied access to objectivity (to objective logical laws and to objective meanings), then why should they have access to the self-evidence of the truth that �There are objective logical laws and objective meanings�?
c. Extreme Platonism is false (self-refuting) because it is consistent with skepticism about the meaning of our words; with skepticism about the adequacy of language to extra-linguistic reality in general; with skepticism about our following logical rules in general. It is common to associate realism with certitude (or at least with the hopeful search for certitude) and relativism with skepticism. (Husserl undeniably thought in the terms of this equation). However, my point is that extreme realism itself leads to skepticism.
In other words: Husserl did not realize that extreme Platonism , that postulates a realm of objective entities and laws detached from anything mental, indeed from anything pertaining to the possibility of human access to it, leads ultimately to skepticism. Extreme Platonism leads to skepticism since it entails that it is possible that we are wrong even in the moments and cases where are the most confident of attaining knowledge.
Ultimately, extreme Platonism is even more gravely self-refuting since it allows for the possibility that human beings are wrong even when they believe there is objectivity at all: if we can be wrong about what is objective, why cannot we be wrong even in believing there is anything objective to be discovered?
Husserl�s extreme Platonism (that makes objectivity independent of any possible mental fact) is incompatible with the principle of charity in psychology that we saw he endorses. It is also inconsistent with his project of universal grammar UNDE? that should express the necessary relations that hold between meanings in all languages. Husserl wants a universal grammar that should be �archimedic�, presuppositionless. , yet takes for granted that the grammatical categories expressed in European languages are to be found in all languages. (One version of his principle of charity is the need he felt to account for the mutual understanding between people ; as I noted in the section �Platonism about meanings�, he believes such an understanding is possible via something common between the persons who understand each other). Yet, Platonism does not justify universal grammar in Husserl�s sense. It is compatible with Platonism that only one language (for example German, or Greek) can express theobjective meanings and the relations between them, and that all other languages are not able to do so. (It is equally consistent with Platonism that only one person in the world, in only one moment of time, grasps objective meanings, as it is possible that universals cannot be adequately represented by the �general words� of ordinary language; it is consistent with extreme Platonism that only one person � or noone, for that matter � can grasp the objective relations between meanings).
Criticism of Husserl's anti-normativism: In the light of the above distinction between extreme Platonism and moderate Platonism, I will formulate in this section a criticism of Husserl's opposition to the status of logic as a normative science, as I presented them in the section "Anti-normativist arguments" above. Husserl's anti-normativism rests on a wrong premise, namely that "thinking as it should be is a special kind of thinking as it is". (p. 92). But this premise is plainly wrong. It is possible (and most probably true) that everybody on earth lied, or made a mathematical mistake, at least once in life; yet it is the case that almost everyone on earth thought that we should not lie, and that we should not make mathematical mistakes. This, contrary to Husserl, does not prove that "you should not lie" or "you should not make mathematical mistakes" are more than norms. The roots of Husserl's (wrongly) considering that "thinking as it should be is a special case of thinking as it is" is, in my opinion, his extreme Platonism and the subsequent confusion between moderate Platonism and relativism. Moderate Platonism, as I understand it, claims that norms have an objective value, independent of whether they are followed or not; independent of whether (most) people accept them or not. Moderate Platonism , however, claims that norms are such that they can be understood by people; norms are within the grasp of potential human understanding, potential acceptance and potential obeying. There is an intrinsic relation between norms and the possibility of our understanding of them. Extreme Platonism, on the contrary, denies that there is such an intrinsic relation. On the other hand, relativism (anti-Platonism) holds that norms are created by our understanding, accepting and following them. To sump up my point: it is relativism that holds that "thinking (or living) as it should be is a special case of thinking (or living) as it is". (Most probably, a relativist understands the word "special" in the above slogan as "normal" or "common"). The relativist denies the separation between facts and norms. But relativism is not the only alternative to extreme Platonism: moderate Platonism holds that thinking (and living) as it should be is a special case of thinking (and living) as it can be. Husserl's refusal to acknowledge the difference between "thinking as it is" and "thinking as it can be" is responsible for his implying that there is a gap between thinking as it should be" has no relation to "thinking as it is", that norms are not only independent from facts, but that they are not even norms for facts, relying therefore in an autonomuous realm.
Defense of my criticism
It could be said, against the accusations I formulated in this section against Husserl, that I did not distinguish between
(i) those theses or assumptions of Husserl that are incompatible with his Platonism;
(ii) those theses or assumptions that are not justified (yet are permitted) by his Platonism.
But I think that (i) and (ii) coincide in the case of extreme Platonism. Extreme Platonism is incompatible with any thesis about our access to objectivity: any form of human access to objectivity risks to make objectivity dependent on human access to it.
Extreme Platonism and moderate Platonism:
The main theses that I formulated in this section were that :
a. Husserl endorses an extreme version of Platonism;
b. Extreme Platonism is wrong since it is self-refuting and leads to skepticism
c. Husserl is not consistent in endorsing extreme Platonism
MAI BAGA AICI CEVA CA E INSUFICIENT:
To provide a further illustration of Husserl's extreme Platonis: He writes that
"No logical law implies a "matter of fact", not even the existence of presentations or other phenomena of knowledge. No logical law, properly understood, is a law for the facticities of mental life, and so not a law for presentations (as experiences), not for judgements (experiences of judgement), not for our other mental experiences" (Prolegomena, par. 23, p. 104).
I dare to reply that this is false: If I speak of a logical law, then I imply that I, as a finite , psychologically-conditioned person, have grasped the logical law in question, have grasped it correctly and in such a way that it can be understood by my hearers/readers.
Of course, Husserl would reply to this criticism of mine that any psychological act of grasping a logical law is contingent "from the point of view of logic"; that even his (Husserl's) mental acts of grasping logical truthsd are not implied by logic itself and that he may � as any human being may � make mistakes in and about logic. For an extreme Platonist, psychology (including the psychological component of "knowing", i.e., what makes knowing into a mental act of a special kind) and language are indded a ladder that has to be thrown away: the extreme Platonist is forced to speak and think about objectivity only in order to convince us that objectivity has nothing to do with his speech and thought.
If extreme Platonism were correct, then
(a) all psychological acts, all verbal judgements about objectivity are contingent and dispensable, since objectivity does not presuppose them in any form; objectivity does not presuppose even their possibility;
(b) all philosophical discourse about objectivity is equally contingent and dispensable , since the very existence (and validity) of anything objective is independent of the belief that there is anything objective.
Thus the extreme Platonist is wrong in that he claims his own assertions to be true, rather than nonsensical. Unlike the early Wittgenstein, Husserl does not throw the ladder away, although this is the logical consequence of his views. To justify the correctness of his theses, the extreme Platonist will need to holds � and presumably to argue � that the objectivity somehow informs, as by divine grace, some acts of intuiting and grasping the objectivity. But such a move, althought required by the extreme Platonist's claim to "tell the truth", is incompatible with the thesis (endorsed by Husserl) that "logical laws imply no psychological fact". The Platonist already becomes more moderated if he claims that objectivity is necessarily psychologically graspable and , at least sometimes, it is actually grasped. This moderation of Platonism is required if Platonism is to be true ore merely intelligible.
Were Husserl to object that he does not refer to the act of judgement, but to the ideal content of judgements, I can only reply that he is using judgements (and expects from his readers similar judgements) in order to make his theses about objective contents of judgement intelligible. Husserl is in the position of someone who has no other sense than seeing, presents visible figures to an audience of like people and asks them to look carefully at them in order to prove the existence of the invisible. Conclusion Extreme Platonism is incompatible with granting any psychological act the dignity of grasping the objectivity. Yet, Husserl does not assume this consequence of his Platonism, since he claims that we have "self-evidence" , "insight" or "categorical intuition into the realm of objective truths. Thus, Husserl's claim to erect a presupositionless philosophy is betrayed, in my opinion, by his actual attempt to justify some presuppositions of common sense (of ordinary language and of ordinary psychology) about attaining objectivity. Fraza de incheiere: Husserl�s talk of objectivity is thus vitiated by his attempt to explain the commonsense beliefs in objectivity. ASTA DOAR DACA NU AI CE FACE: Criticism of Husserl's theory of the ego: How does Husserl know that our experiences are systematically organized, that it does not only seem to us that they are so? Presumably, a madman (to quote Husserl's example from the rejection of the thesis "logic is how normal people think") does not have experiences organized in a systematic way; or if he does have them so organized, he may not realize their organization. Does it follow that madmen do not have pure egos? After all, it is nothing more than an empirical fact that most people are not mad� (An anti-realist would say that the concept of "madness" does not have any objective meaning, but that it is stands for any kind of thinking very, very different from what generally accepted kinds of thinking; but a realist cannot give such an answer).
3.1. Husserl tacit reliance on ordinary language
3.2. Husserl offers no reason why the super-psychological faculty is infallible, and why we cannot be mistaking in identifying it
3.3. Husserl does not offer a clear solution to the problem of logical mistakes
3.4. Husserl needs to distinguish between the necessary and the a priori, but in fact he does not.
REFERENCES:
Husserl � Logical Investigations, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London and Henley, 1970
Maurice Merleau Ponty � Signes, esp Sur la phenomenologie du langage �
REFERENCES:
Husserl – Logical Investigations, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London and Henley, 1970
Maurice Merleau Ponty – Signes, esp Sur la phenomenologie du langage …
NOTE:
"May there not have been people, and may there not still be people who, deceived by fallacies, contrive at times to believe contradictories together? Has the occurrence of contradictions, even quite obvious ones, been scientifically investigated in the case of the insane? what happens in hypnotic states, in delirium tremens etc? Does this law also hold for animals?" (Prolegomena, paragraph 26, p. 114)
"Possibly the empiricist will escape these objections by suitably qualifying his law, e.g. by saying that it only applies to normal individuals of the genus homo, having a normal mental constitution. It is sufficient to raise the insidious question of the exact definition of the concepts "normal individual" and "normal mental constitution", to see how imprecise and complex the content of the law, as stated, has become" (Prolegomena, paragraph 26, p. 114
As we shall see later, Husserl does not consider logical laws to be essentially normative, although they have essentially a normative component.
Even on a Platonist view such as Husserl's human understanding of logic depends, of course, on facts about the human mind, but logic as such is independent on anything psychological. Perhaps here we can notice an inconsistency in Platonism - after all, Husserl claims to understand logic, to be certain of logical laws and of their validity. I will discuss this issue in the next sections of this essay.
"One [who is psychologist] fails to see that these laws [of logic] , naturally understood, presuppose nothing mental, no facts of psychic life, whether in their establishment or their content. They do so no more than the laws of pure mathematics do so" (Prolegomena, paragraph 23, p. 105).
A more refined, but more obscure, anti-relativist argument of Husserl appears in the same page: "The relativity of truth means that what we call truth depends on the constitution of the species homo and the laws which govern this species. Such a dependence will anc can only be thought as causal. The truth that such a constitution and such laws subsist must then have its real explanation in the fact of this subsistence[...] Our constitution would be causa sui a fortiori psychological facts being radically different is unimaginable. For a realist (and a Platonist) there is no problem in imagining radical changes of our mind/of facts in the world.
In contemporary analytic philosophy, it is customary to stress the distinction between the a priori and the necessary: these two concepts are carefully distinguished both as extension and as intension - i.e. they do not mean the same thing and they do not refer to the same things. For example, the statement that "I am here now" is a priori, but contingent (not necessary), while the statement "Light is electromagnetic radiation" is necessary, but not a priori. It is believable that even a classical philosopher would distinguish between the properties of necessary and of a priori, although he would presumably claim that these two properties coincide extensionally, i.e. refer to the same sentences).
For historical accuracy: Husserl is here criticizing Brentano, who hoped to solve the mistery of intentionality by making the intentional object ``contained`` in the intentional act. It is perhaps worthwile to note that Merleau-Ponty extracted this consequence from Husserl: "Nous memes qui parlons ne savons pas necessairement ce que nous exprimons mieux que ceux qui nous ecoutent".(Sur la phenomenologie du langage, in Signes p. 114)
See. for example "Conceptual essences are rather the fulfilling sense which is 'given' when the word-meanings (i.e., the meaning-intentions of the words) terminate in corresponding, directly intuitive presentations" (LI-I-21-p. 307)
As we could say in modern terminology: colour supervenes on extension. If two points or patches differ in colour, they must differ in spatial position. But if two points or patches occupy different spatial positions, they may still share an identical colour.
By the "moment of red", Husserl understands what is today most often called "tropes", i.e. a particular instance of a property, such as the red of this carpet, or the white of this piece of snow".
This subjectivization is not without reminding me of the definition of meaning-fulfillment as an act of intuition, or as the culmination of certain acts of intuitive identification.
It should be noted, however, that Husserl rejects another na�ve version of semantic realism, according to which an expression`s meaning is the real (sensible) object it designates. Or, better to speak: such an account of meaning is not relevant for Husserl`s purposes: indeed, for Husserl the problem is not ``What is the words` (expressions`) meaning?``, but ``what turns an expression into an expression ? Wherein lies the necessary connexion between words and their objective correlate?``
For example:``all thought, and in particular all theoretical thought and knowledge, is carried by way of certain `acts` which occur in a context of expressive discourse ... In these acts lies the source, also, of the pure, universal Ideas connected with such objects, whose `ideally` governed combinations pure logic attempts to set forth`` (Introduction to the Sixth Logical Investigation, p. 667)
See, for example:``Undeniably and importantly, the meaning of expressions must lie in the intentional essence of the relevant acts`` (Li-VI-Introduction, p. 668)
The term suprasensuous concept of perception appears in LI-VI-p. 785, where suprasensuous perception is defined as being "raised above sense or categorical"
This may be an explanation why Husserl gives indeed so few examples.The difficulty of reading any of Husserl`s books is partly due to his style.This "no-examples"style is so radically different from the second (but not the first) Wittgenstein. The difference is not only stylistical: a Platonist should indeed bother very little about examples since all his examples are imperfect and liable to misunderstanding to a higher degree than those passages in his text where he presents his ideas directly, without the aid of examples. For an anti-Platonism (a relativist, for example, although I hesitate whether to consider Wittgenstein a relativist), giving examples is a sine qua non: his theses are nothing beyond his examples.
Again, a relativist can be excused for mixing up the necessary and the a priori. For a relativist, there are no necessary truths over and above our access to them; and what appears to everyone as true is indeed true. As a matter of historical accuracy: modern formal logic of predicates , as developed by Frege inter alia, proved Aristotelian logic to be not merely incomplete, but also partly wrong. I.e., syllogisms of the type BARBARI, where an existential statement is derived from two universal statements, are accepted in Aristotelian logic, but not in modern predicate logic. It is unfortunate that Husserl did not pay attention to this fact.
As an exegetical remark: Husserl defends himself, in par. 13 of the Prolegomena, against "those who object that we are attempting to restore the Aristotelian-scholastic logic, on whose worthlessness history has pronounced judgment". The passage makes clear, however, that Husserl does not refer to modern innovations in logic, such as Frege's; he rather defends the status of logic as a formal discipline against the Renaissance-type attacks, such as Bacon's, who claimed that logic (syllogistics) is sterile since it cannot increase our knowledge. As the text of LI suggests, Husserl had a vague (if any definite) interest in the actual task of improvement of logic (or possibility thereof).
I am providing a trivial illustration of what I say. I once heard someone voicing his misunderstanding of Kant in the following way: "How? Is there a table-in-itself, a chair-in-itself, different from what I see and touch? The Kantian answer is, of course, that it makes no sense to speak of chairs and tables beyond `the way I see and touch them`. The Husserlian answer is, in my opinion, that the table-in-itself and the chair-in-itself are just the ideal limit towards which my (and other other peoples partial perceptions of the table and chairs converge.
This reminds me of one of Wittgenstens attacks against skepticism about other minds: if I doubt that other people are in pain when they display painful behaviour, shouldn�t I doubt whether they have mental states at all?
This reminds me of an argument that atheists often make against theists. If � as the Theist holds,
our minds are infinitely inferior in comparison to God's mind, and it we are not able to know God's plans, why should wetake ourselves to be able to know that God has any plan at all? Husserl's extreme Platonism is, in my opinion, a godless theology.
As a further illustration of my point: Husserl gives the example of the Modus Ponens and writes "These and all similar laws are as little psychological as they are empirical. They were of course set up by traditional logic to serve as norms for our judging activities. But do they implicitly say anything about a single actual judgement?" (Prolegomena, chapter 23, p. 105). Husserl's implicit answer is obviously negative.Yet, I dare to contradict him and say: the laws that Husserl gives as examples of objective truths assert implicitly the existence of at least Husserl's mental judgement about them, and my own (his reader's) judgement.