FARA NOTE DE SUBSOL Meaning, Sense and Essence: The Husserlian solution(s) to Frege’s puzzle about identity ìåøéàï ÷øèñ ú.æ. 322039595 úåàø ùðé Introduction 1. The situation in LU: Meaning-intention versus meaning-fulfillment. The Evening Star and The Morning Star have different meaning-intentions, but one and the same meaning-fulfillment 2. The situation after LU: Noemata 3. What remains after the phenomenological reduction? 3.1. Essences, not individuals 3.2. Types, not tokens 3.3. Possiblities, not actualities 4. Arguments for the thesis that Husserl would have seen the Fregean sentence as an a=a identity: 4.1. The actual includes the possible 4.2. Spatio-Temporal position does not matter 4.3. The Evening Star and The Morning Star are two tokens of the same type 4.4. Expressions are necessarily correlated with their meaning 5. Objections to this answer 6. The second Husserlian (and Quinean) solution, and its rejection This essay deals with a problem of counterfactual history: what would Husserl have said about the famous Fregean puzzle about the Morning Star (The Morning Star) and the Evening Star (The Evening Star)? As it is known, Frege was shocked by the identity between these names (or objects?), which is an empirical one, of the form a=b and not a=a. The need to recognize the autonomy of the identity statements of the form a=b, as different from those of the form a=a, is what motivated the well-known distinction between sense (Sinn) and reference (Bedeutung). The reason for choosing this topic is, to put it succinctly, the following: it is well known that Husserl and Frege communicated with and influenced each other, sharing, to a certain point, the basic philosophical preoccupations and even doctrines – I have in mind the resolute rejection of psychologism. Although their works led to the development of two radically different schools of thought – analytical philosophy in the case of Frege and phenomenology in the case of Husserl, these two philosophers’ stances are much closer in nature and Frege’s distinction between sense and reference arose as a solution to the The Evening Star-The Morning Star puzzle; Husserl too discussed a long way (in the first "Logical Investigation" and not only) about questions belonging to what is today called “philosophy of language”. Yet, curiously or not, Husserl does not say a word about the The Evening Star-The Morning Star puzzle, although he ostensibly knew it since the only place in the Logical Investigations (henceforth LU) where he mentions Frege is a brief criticism of this latter’s terminological usage: “ ‘Meaning’ is further used by us as synonymous with ‘sense’…A further consideration is our ingrained tendency to use the two words as synonymous, a circumstance which makes it seem rather dubious if their meanings are differentiated and if (as G. Frege has proposed), we use one for meaning in our sense and the other for the objects expressed” (LU-I-15, p. 292) All that can resut from this short (and apparently arbitrary) note is that Husserl, unlike Frege, did not feel the need for a distinction between sense and reference. Husserl’s “meaning” (Bedeutung) is the same with Frege’s sense (Sinn). Nothing idealist arises from this mention of Frege by Husserl: there is, in the first Logical Investigation, yet no mention of “bracketing”, of epoche and even less of questioning the existence of “real objects”. Husserl is quite consistent in defining his meaning as synonymous with Frege’ sense: “An expression only refers to an object because it means something, it can be rightly said to signify or name the object through its meaning. 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” (LU-I-13, p. 289) It should be noted that the very legitimacy of a discussion about a word’s (in our case, of a name’s) meaning is not to be taken for granted when discussing Husserl’s and Frege’s views. Indeed, both Husserl and Frege believed in different versions of mentalism: the meaning of an utterance is – in a sense that needs to be qualified – dependent on, or derived from, the meaning of a mental act. I take the The Evening Star-The Morning Star puzzle as having an enormous philosophical importance since this puzzle is a special case of the problem: how, and why, do several aspects, occurrences or hypostases of an object converge into one and the same object? It is well known that Husserl was obsessed in all his work with obtaining the possibility of repetition¸ of coming again to one and the same object. In a word of mere sensations, there would be no objects, no types but only tokens; on the contrary, if we want a world of objects (in whatever sense) we need to have a way of recognizing one and the same object as type-identical: “If we imagine a consciousness prior to all experience, it is a possibility that it has the same sensations as we do. But it will see no things, it will perceive no trees and no houses, no flight of birds and no barking of dogs. To such a consciousness the sensations do not mean anything, they are not signs for the properties of an object.” (LU, I, par. 23). Thus, the The Evening Star-The Morning Star puzzle, regarded from a more general standpoint, is an ingredient of the problem of accounting for the constitution of objects from the amorphous flux of experiences. The solution that I will offer to the question “What would Husserl have said about Frege’s puzzle?” is that he would have said it is an analytical and a priori identity of the type a=a. I will also try to draw the broader, ontological implications of such an answer. 1. The situation in LU: Meaning-intention and Meaning-fulfillment The remark about Frege that appears in the LU and the strong affinity between Fregean Sinne and Husserlian meanings invites a simple Husserlian solution to Frege’s puzzle: since the Sinne of “Hespeurs” and of “The Morning Star” are different, so will be the Husserlian meanings and thus the identity ‘Hespeurs is The Morning Star’ will be an identity of the kind a=b. I will discuss this solution in the last section of my essay and consider the arguments that may favour it. Such a solution also fits well with the Platonic view of meaning that LU advocates: indeed, the meanings of “The Evening Star” and of “The Morning Star” are not the objects that correspond to these names, but the ideal entities that would remain unchanged even if The Evening Star and The Morning Star ceased to exist. Meanings, like Husserlian Sinne, are objective and ideal (Platonic) entities. The situation is however not that simple. The ideality of meanings does not imply that the meanings of "The Evening Star" and "The Morning Star" are different. Frege accepted both the ideality and the difference of the Sinne of these two names, but for Husserl the situation is a bit more complicated, as I shall prove to argue. The reason is that Platonism is not the only or the last word about meaning in LU. Indeed, another thread present in the LU account about meaning is a processual one. This account is obvious from Husserl’s distinction between meaning-intention and meaning-fulfillment. The distinction between meaning intention and meaning fulfillment is introduced by Husserl in LU-I-9 as a distinction between two different kinds of acts. Meaning-intention acts are acts that are responsible for turning an expression into an expression, while meaning-fulfilment acts are acts that, so to speak, give the feeling of “satisfaction” of the meaning-intention acts: “We shall, on the one hand, have acts essential to the expression if it is to be an expression at all, ie a verbal sound infused with sense. These acts we shall call the meaning-conferring acts or the meaning-intention. But we shall, on the other hand, have acts, not essential to the expression as such, which stand to it in the logically basic relation of fulfilling (confirming, disconfirming) it, more or less adequately, and so actualizing its relation to its objects” (LU-I-9, p. 281) (Passim: it is not altogether correct to speak, in the context of Husserl’s philosophy, of words or expressions having meaning. Meaning is rather conferred upon them, and made to correspond to them, by a mental act – the meaning-intention). In any case, the distinction between meaning-intention and meaning-fulfillment (that is absent from the work of Frege) complicates the matter, since it is not altogether clear what do we mean when we ask about the meanings of two coextensive names. An attractive idea is that The Evening Star and The Morning Star are two names with different meaning-intentions, but with one and the same meaning-fulfillment. It is this thread that I want to explore in the next lines. The thesis that “The Evening Star and The Morning Star have different meaning-intentions but one and the same meaning-fulfillments should be sharply distinguished from the (trivial) thesis that these two names have different Sinne but one and the same Fregean Bedeutung (reference). To accept that the two names have one and the same Fregean Bedeutung (i.e., “correlated objects”, in Husserl’s terminology) is rather trivial and commonsensical. To accept that the two names are fulfilled in the same act means something like this: the ideal correlate, the Platonic idea which is attained through the meaning intention of “The Evening Star” and of “The Morning Star” is identical because the essence of The Evening Star is identical with the essence of The Morning Star. Indeed, once it is accepted that, from an eidetic point of view, the two are identical, the thesis that the acts that correspond to their meaning-fulfillment are identical follows rather simply. In order to realize this, it is only needed to remember how Husserl understands the concept of meaning-fulfillment: “We have, on the one hand, the object itself, and the object meant in this or in that manner. On the other hand, and more properly, we have the object’s ideal correlate in the acts of meaning-fulfillment which constitute it, the fulfilling sense” (LU-I-14, p. 290) Husserl is explicit that an expression can have its meaning fulfilled even if there is no object corresponding to it: “The ideal conception of the act that confers meaning yields us the Idea of the intending meaning, just as the ideal conception of the correlative essence of the act which fulfils meaning yields us the fulfilling meaning, likewise qua Idea. This is the identical content which, in perception, pertains to the totality of possible acts of perception which intended the same object perceptually, and intend it actually as the same object. This content is thus the ideal correlate of this single object, which may, for the rest, be completely imaginary” (LU-I-14, p. 291) I feel authorized to interpret these passages in the sense that Husserl's meanng-fulfillment is the essence of the actual reference (of the “correlated objects”). The understanding of the meaning-fulfillment as essence is more attractive to me than the understanding of meaning-fulfillment as Fregean Sinn. Husserl, like Frege, was not altogether clear about the distinction between sense and essence: these two concepts should (apart from Quinean scruples that I will discuss in the fifth section of this essay, be sharply distinguished – at least if by “sense” (Fregean Sinn) we understand the mode of presentation of the object, following Frege’s famous analogy between the optical lens and the Sinn. The Fregean Sinn is the mode of presentation of the object, while the essence is the sum of properties that are essential to an object and uniquely characterize it (the “individual concept” that corresponds to the object). Both Sinne and essences are ideal entities, they are Platonic correlates of an object, but whereas several Sinne may correspond to one and the same object, essences are in a biunivocal correspondence to objects. If the distinction between Sinn and essence is kept in mind, there is no reason why an object should be presented to a speaker or to the “mind” by manifesting any of its essential properties; indeed, it is possible to be acquainted (in language or otherwise) with an object while ignoring its essential properties. I may be acquainted with The Evening Star (via its manifesting the property of rising in the evening) while ignoring that it is identical with The Morning Star. This may hold true even if the identity with The Morning Star is (as Kripke holds) part of the essence of The Evening Star. Or: a more convincing argument: I may be acquainted with The Evening Star although I ignore that it is a planet and I believe that it is a fix star. Now, it is very plausible to suppose that any fix star is essentially a fix star and every planet is essentially a planet. This argument shows, in my opinion, that Fregean Sinne should not be identified with essences, insofar as we believe in essences at all. Otherwise, we could not discover that an object.has a certain essence; once we identify it, we would grasp its essence. But this is counter-intuitive. The hermeneutical hypothesis that I advance is that Husserl’s meaning-intention is indeed akin to Frege’s Sinn, while the meaning-fulfillment is rather akin to the essence of the correlated object. (It should be kept in mind, of course, that Frege would not have characterized Sinn as a “mental act”, while Husserl does so. Despite the appearances, this does not commit Husserl to psychologism). Husserl also insists in the First Investigation on the ideal identity between the meaning-intention and meaning-fulfillment: “Wherever the meaning-intention is fulfilled in a corresponding intuition, i.e. wherever the expression actually serves to name a given object, there the object is constituted as one ‘given’ in certain acts and, to the extent that our expression really measures up to the intuitive data, as given in the same manner in which the expression means it” (LU-I-14, p. 290) I can only make sense of this required unity or “fusing” in the following way: when intending an object, it is “required” or “desirable” for me to have in mind all possible ways of intending it. This way, access is gained not only to the object that appears hic-et-nunc, but to all the object’s possible ways of appearing. In this way, the object that actually appears in intuition brings nothing new with respect to the meaning-intention. That’s why the object may well be imaginary, may not exist at all. (This reminds of the question that Socrates asks Plato in Meno: how is it possible to find an object that is looked for? Either we knew what we looked for, and then we have already found it; or we haven’t yet found it, and then we don’t know what we are looking for). The identity between meaning-intention and meaning-fulfillment is tantamount with the requirement that the meaning-intention, that “points” to the object under a certain aspect of it, should anticipate all possible aspects in which an object might appear and be already modeled accordingly. Husserl’s answer is precisely that we should find the objects in such a way that we can dispense with our looking for them. This requirement of nothing new of the meaning-intention as compared with the meaning-fulfillment is what eliminates, for Husserl, the possibility of identity statements that are “informative”, that are “cognitively relevant”. With respect to the The Evening Star-The Morning Star case, the ideal coincidence between the meaning-intention and meaning-fulfillment means that the object intended, i.e. the planet Venus, should be prefigured in intention with all its possible ways of appearing; thus, when The Evening Star is intended, The Morning Star should be intended as well. This “fusing” of the meaning-intention and meaning-fulfillment also explains Husserl’s curious insistence that the relation between an expression and its meaning is internal, i.e. necessary. This of course should not be taken to mean, à la Cratylos, that expressions, qua linguistic signs, are non-arbitrary and that only indications are arbitrary, but rather that an expression is meant in such a way that its being provides the access to the essence of the object that is designated by the expression: “In the realized relation of the word to its objective correlate, the sense-informed expression becomes one with the act of meaning-fulfillment. The sounded word is first made one with the meaning-intention, and this in its turn is then made one (as intentions in general are made one with their their fulfillments) with its corresponding meaning-fulfillment. (LU-I-9, p.281). To sum up: Husserl (unlike Frege) distinguishes between meaning-intention and meaning-fulfillment. Meaning-fulfillment is an ideal entity, that can exist even if the correlated object does not exist. To apply this to the The Evening Star-The Morning Star case: the meaning-fulfillment of these two expressions is identical because the object that they designate (to which they are correlated) has only one essence. The further requirement of Husserl that meaning-intention should be fused with the meaning-fulfillment means, in the context of our puzzle, that whenever The Evening Star is intended, The Morning Star is ideally intended as well. The Morning Star is ideally prefigured in the meaning-intention of "The Evening Star". 2. The situation after LU: If the account of meaning that is present in the LU is Platonist and fits well with realism about the physical world, the phase in Husserl’s thought that began with the Ideen marks a turn towards transcendental subjectivity and the project of phenomenological reduction is explicit in it. It is not here the place to explore in detail the project of phenomenological reduction or to enumerate the several phenomenological reductions that are present in Husserl’s work; the reader may find more information in INSERT THE TITLE OF THAT BOOK A parenthetic note: It should also be pointed that the discussion about the meanings of (or correlated with) two names in the context of Husserl’s philosophy is only partial, since Husserl’s interest – unlike Frege’s – was much broader, in that he discussed the meaning of all mental acts, including non-linguistic ones; indeed his concept of noema introduced in the Ideen is a generalization of the meaning to all mental acts. INSERT QUOTATION!!!! For Frege, the interest was primarily centered on linguistic issues. It could be said that Frege’s disinterest in generalizing the Sinn of linguistical expressions to the meaning of any mental act is due to his conviction that Sinne (and thoughts as Sinne of the sentences) are only graspable through language, thus originating the linguistic turn that is so characteristic of analytical philosophy. This may manifest Frege’s tacit conviction that thought (grasping of thoughts) requires or has a privileged relation to language: In a weak version, this means that all thoughts that are accessible at all are also accessible through language; in a strong version, this means that thinking can only be done in language. Husserl never believed this: see, for example, the Introduction to Formal and Transcendental Logic, where he motivates his interest in language by the (contingent) fact that “human thinking is usually done in language” (p. 19) The Ideen contain even a shocking invitation to equating the noema with Frege's Sinn. Indeed, Husserl suggests that after the phenomenological reduction the words that denote objects should be used between inverted commas: For Husserl, as it were, the phenomenological reduction is a way of putting the entire discourse about things into oratio obliqua. Husserl explicitly thought of this graphical manner of indicating what survives the phenomenological reduction, i.e. the noemata, the Platonic meanings: " 'In' the reduced perception we find, as belonging to its essence indissolubly, the perceived as such, and under such titles as 'material thing','plant, 'blossoming', 'tree', and so forth. The inverted commas are clearly significant: they express that change of signature, the corresponding radical modification of the meaning of the words." (Ideen par. 89, p. 260) Frege also thought exactly of the procedure of putting the indirect discourse into inverted commas in order to make clear that what is referred to in this case are not the usual Bedeutungen of words, but their Sinne. The concept of “noema” introduced by Husserl in Ideen is a generalization of meaning . The distinction between meaning-intention and meaning-fulfillment does no longer appear, but it is correct – in my opinion – to say that noemata are essences (individual concepts) of things. Another feature, less remarked, of the noemata is their status as regulative Kantian ideas: they are the ideal type towards which the object should tend: "Geometrical concepts are ideal concepts, they express something which one cannot 'see', their 'origin' and therefore their content also, is essentially other than that of the descriptive concepts as concepts which express the essential nature of things as drawn directly from simple intuition, and not anything 'ideal'. Exact concepts have their correlate in essences, which have the character of Ideas in the Kantian sense )Ideen par. 75, p. 208( This regulative character of essences reminds of the distinction between meaning-intention and meaning-fulfillment that Husserl drew in the LU. Noemata are, as I understand it, the direct inheritor of the meaning-fulfillment. The famous epoche whereby we lose interest in the actual existence of things and remain with noemata is a process of essentialization of the things. Objects "become" their essences and, as such, they are accessible through a new, a special mental faculty – the intuition of essences: "l'intuition des essences elle aussi est une intuition et l'objet eidetique lui aussi est un objet" (Ideen- 1.1.3) This essentialization is however only one of the aspects of the phenomenological reduction: others are the shift of interest from tokens to types, and from the actual to the possible. These three aspects are logically linked. 3. What remains after the phenomenological reduction? In the context of the post-LU phase of Husserl’s thought, the question concerning the status of the identity between The Evening Star and The Morning Star should be formulated in the terms of “what remains from The Evening Star and The Morning Star after the phenomenological reduction?”. It seems natural to me to take this step, since the noema (that is introduced in LU) is the inheritor of the meaning in LU. Noemata, like meanings, are ideal objective entities. Noemata are what "survive" the phenomenological reduction. The interpretation of the noema as the Husserl counterpart of the Fregean Sinn was held by Follesdal in "Husserl's notion of noema'. According to this interpretation, to one and the same object there may correspond different noemata and different Sinne. Follesdal only quotes in support of this interpretation Ideen, I, p. 321.8 READ AND INSERT THE QUOTATION. In my opinion, noemata are essences and thus it is impossible that to one and the same object there should correspond different noemata. A criticism of Follesdal's interpretation was provided by Banchetti in "Husserl's notion of noema". Banchetii draws attention to the fact that, for Husserl, every mental act implicitly contains within itself a synthesis of possible acts: " The perception of the tree is a partial perception because it is the perception of the tree from only one perspective. It is not possible to perceive every possible perspective of the same tree at the same time. Yet, in each single noema, a synthesis of the hyletic data occurs and the noema intends the tree as an object, rather than this partial tree-perception.".( p. 84) My question is: if any single noema contains a synthesis of possible perceptions, of possible "points of view" on the object, then how could it be equated with Frege's Sinn? Fregean Sinne are perspectives, points of view on objects. It is nonsensical, in the context of Frege's philosophy, to speak of each Sinn containing a synthesis of several points of view. My conclusion, that I will hold throughout this essay, is that Husserl's noema is rather the essence of the object, and not the Sinn. The phenomenological reduction, as I understand it, is a process whereby empirical reality is essentialized, by suspending the interest in the actual existence of objects; Unlike Descartes' methodical doubt, we do not end however by restoring the same empirical reality that we had suspended, and that is next discovered to exist by the grace of God, but we remain with the essential aspects of experience. It is these aspects that interest us as phenomenologists. More seriously, Husserl believed in individual essences¸ such that to each object there is an essence that characterizes it and only it. The esentialization that is required by the phenomenological reduction leaves us, so to speak, with no less entities than we had before operating the reduction: "An individual object is not only something individual, a This-here (ein Dies da), something unique: since it has 'in itself' such-or-such a constitution, it has its specificity (Eigenart), its permanent mode of being (Sein Bestand) consisting in essential predicates that necessarily characterize it, so that other determinations, these latter secondary and relative, may befall on it" (Ideen, I-1-2, p. 17-18) The answer to he question “what remains after the phenomenological reduction” is in my opinion threefold: 3.1. Essences versus individuals Husserl continued to believe, in Ideen, that the meaning –generalized as noema to all mental acts – has an ideal status, akin to that of general ideas: for example, he discusses the case of the perception of a tree: “The tree plain and simple, the thing in nature, is as different as it can be from this perceived tree as such, which as perceptual meaning can belong to the perception, and that inseparably. The tree plain and simple can burn away, resolve itself into its chemical elements, and so forth. But the meaning – the meaning of this perception, something that belongs necessarily to its essence – cannot burn away, it has no chemical elements, no forces, no real properties” (Ideen, par. 89, p. 260-261). What Husserl says in LU and in Ideen about meaning is, again, apparently similar to what Frege said about Sinne and thoughts.(Let’s not forget that for Frege the thought is the Sinn of a sentence). The “meaning” of a perceptual act is akin to the aspect under which the object is presented, to what follows the qua in locutions such as “object a is perceived qua b” (this object here-now is perceived as a maple tree). But the fact should also be noted, that, again, Husserl is not altogether unambiguous on the distinction between meaning (understood as mode of presentation, of “aspect” under which the object is accessed, and essence. See, for example paragraphs such as “We must see with scrupulous minuteness that we do not put into experience anything which is not really included in the essence, and that we 'lay in it' precisely in the way in which it already 'lies' in the essence itself' (Ideen, par. 90, p. 265) All these suggest that the Husserlian solution to Frege's puzzle about the sentence 'The Evening Star is The Morning Star' would have consisted in interpreting it as referring to the essences of the entities designated by the two names, respectively. When it comes to these essences, every detail pertaining to the actual existence of the object designated by the names 'The Evening Star' and 'The Morning Star' is immaterial. In fact, the object in cause (planet Venus) might as well not exist. What matters is how the object is presented (the Fregean Sinn) and the essence of the object. Husserl tacitly assimilates the two: 'In fancy a thing, it may be a centaur, hovers before my eyes. I believe myself to know that it manifests itself under certain "modes of appearance" and in certain sensory variations of the perspective kind, apprehensions and the like. I believe myself to have the essential insight that an object of this kind can be viewed only under modes of appearance of this particular kind, and whatever else it may play a part here' (Ideen, par. 79, p. 226) Thus, the account in Ideen confirms again the solution that I identified in the LU: The Evening Star and The Morning Star have one and the same essence, therefore intending The Evening Star is, ideally, intending The Morning Star. This means that the difference between The Evening Star and The Morning Star – if there be any at all – is irrelevant after the phenomenological reduction. 3.2. Types versus tokens. The distinction between tokens and types as prefigured in the LU: Another trend of thought is that of distinguishing types from tokens. phenomenological reduction is a process whereby all tokens of the same type are coalesced so that the type which they instantiate is manifest. There is an connexion between this trend of thought and the essentialization: indeed, tokens of the same type do not have each one its essence, since they are just occurrences of the same object, differing in their spatio-temporal position. (This is obvious if we notice the quotation from the beginning of the Ideen, where Husserl characterizes each object as being its essence Dans l'experience, les actes de connaissance fondamentaux posent la realite naturelle sous forme individuelle; ils posent une existence spatio-temporelle une chose qui a telle place dans le temps et un statut de realite (Realitaet), mais qui, en vertu de son essence, aurait pu avoir n'importe quelle autre position dans le temps; ces actes posent en outre une chose qui est a tel endroit, sous telle forme physique (ou qui est donnee comme inseparable d'un corps de telle forme), alors que la meme realite consideree dans son essence, pourrait aussi bien exister a n'importe quelle autre place, sous n'importe quelle autre forme, pourrait de meme changer d'un tout autre façon qu'elle ne change pas. (Ideen, I-1-1). " . The distinction between types and tokens is prefigured in the first Logical Investigation where Husserl holds (in my opinion) that expressions mean types, unlike indications who stand for tokens: Indeed, Husserl defines indications as objects or states of affairs that facilitate, or motivate, the belief in the existence of other objects or states of affairs (LU-I-2, p. 270), the interpretation of which requires no insight (LU-I-3, p. 271), which strongly suggest that no ideal meaning correspond to indications (“Insight” is the name that Husserl usually reserves in the LU for the super-psychological faculty that will be called “seeing” in the Idea of Phenomenology and with which, in a typical Platonic fashion, he thinks we grasp ideal entities such as essences or mathematical truths); indications are such that the relation between indication and what it indicates is a merely contingent one (see, for ex, “When one says that the state of affairs A indicates the state of affairs B, that the existence of the one points to that of the other, one may confidently be expecting to find B true, but one’s mode of speech implies no objectively discoverable connections between A and B, nothing into which we could have insight” – LU-I-3, p. 272). The interest in types, conceived as ideal entities, as opposed to tokens, that are merely empirical entities, occurs even in the latest phase of Husserl's thought: see, for example Formal and Transcendental Logic, where he stresses his interest in an idealization (typifcation) of linguistic entities themselves: “for the logician, language is of primary importance solely in its ideality, as the identical lingual world, the identical lingual sentence or complex of sentences, in contrast to the actual or possible reifications: precisely as the aesthetician’s theme is the particular work of art, the particular picture, not as the transient physical complex of sounds or as the physical picture-thing, but as the picture itself, the sonata itself – the properly aesthetic object,” (F. and T. Logic, par 2, p. 21). Thus, the idealization that is brought about by the phenomenological reduction consists in the shifting of interest from tokens to types. It is thus that the phenomenological reduction is a process whereby an object is understood as one and the same, identical with itself, despite the fluctuations in its guise that empirical accidents might cause. 3.3.3. Possibilities versus actualities Already in Ideen, Husserl explicitly introduces the idea of the primacy of the possible over the actual. INSERT QUOTATIONS FROM IDEEN In the Cartesian Meditations, Husserl elaborates the idea that an object “really is” the horizon of possibilities that a perception of it opens. In order to grasp an object as such, we need to grasp more than the actual aspect of the object that is grasped in a particular act of perception. Husserl believed in the method of ‘free variation’ of an object’s possibilities of appearing: in order to grasp the essence of the object, what turns the object into the precise object that it is, we imagine other hypostases, other guises of it. (Of course, an obvious question is: how can we recognize, among the hypostases that we imagine, those that are admissible, i.e. ‘well-formed’ and those that are impossible? Husserl perhaps relied on intuition, the infallible faculty that will guide us in this case). Thus, we are able to understand, with any particular act of perception, more than is given in that particular act: “any cogito, as cogito, is, in a very broad sense, signification of the object that it intends, but this signification outreaches every moment what, in that precise instant, is given as ‘explicitly intended’. That is, it contains a plus that lies beyond. In our example, every phase of the perception was only an aspect of the object ‘as such’, as intended in the perception. This outreaching of the intention in the intention itself, inherent to any act of consciousness, must be considered as an essential moment (Wesensmoment) to that consciousness. “ (MC, par. 20, p. 86) His favourite example is that of a cube of which I perceive only one face, while imagining the other faces. By the epoche, what is lost is the interest in the actual existence of the objects that are perceived; what is gained is, however, grasping the whole array of possibilities of an object’s being that object: “The real existence of a world – therefore that of the cube here present – is bracketed by epoche; but the given cube which appears as one and the same is ‘immanent’ to the flux of consciousness, is descriptively ‘in it’, as it is descriptively the character of being ‘identically the same’. This immanence to the consciousness has a character altogether particular. The cube is not contained in the consciousness as a real element, it is contained ‘ideally’ as an intentional object, as what appears or, in other terms, as its immanent ‘objective sense’ “ (Meditations Cartesiennes, par. 18, p. 79) Thus, the object, as it is seen “from a transcendental point of view”, cannot be identified with the momentary perception to which it is presented. When an object is given through one of its properties, its whole essence is given; all its possible ways of being are given; all its properties are given. Husserl somehow mixes these three (although they are logically independent): “Thus, for example, in any external perception, the sides of the object that are really perceived lead to the sides that are not yet perceived and are only anticipated in our expecting as aspects ‘that are to come’ in a non-intuitive way in the perception…Moreover, the perception possesses horizons that contain other perceptive possibilities, I mean, the possibilities that we could have, if, for example, instead of turning our eyes the way we do, we would turn them otherwise, if we made a step in advance or backwards, and so on….In a memory we find all these variations with a certain modification: thus we are aware that we could have, then, perceived other sides of the object than we actually saw – if we had directed our attention otherwise” (MC, par. 19, p. 83) In the light of these remarks, it seems obvious to me that the phenomenological reduction is nothing but an expansion of the Platonist conception of meaning that is present in the LU. More specifically, the account of meaning as ideal, Platonic entities that is present in LU paves the way for the phenomenological reduction. Therefore, LU meanings are what survive the phenomenological reduction. Conclusion: The purpose of this section was to prove that the phenomenological reduction is a process that has three aspects: identification of possibilities as opposed to actuality, of types as opposed to tokens, of essence as opposed to actual individuals. All these are anticipated in the account of meaning in the First Investigation. There is a logical link between these three aspects of the phenomenological reduction: in order to reach the essence that corresponds to an object, it is required that we identify all its possibilities of appearing (and only them) and to abstract the type that is instantiated by all the tokens of the individual that corresponds to that essence. In the light of these remarks, a first answer to the question "What would Husserl have said about Frege's puzzle?' may be given. 4. The first answer to the question What would Husserl have said about the Fregean sentence? is he would have said it is an identity of the form a=a As I already hinted in the second section of this essay, the answer to the question “What would Husserl have said about Freges puzzle?” is “He would have been interested in the essence of The Evening Star, respectively in the essence of The Morning Star and would have regarded the sentence “The Evening Star is The Morning Star” as a judgement about essences. As such, it is an “analytic” sentence INSERT QUOTATION FROM LU, END OF THE FIRST INVESTIGATION Therefore, pace Frege, he could not have accepted that experience plays a decisive role in settling the truth of the The Evening Star is The Morning Star. (from now on, “The Fregean sentence” . To spell in more detail the arguments for this answer: 4.1The Argument “Expressions, unlike indications, are necessarily (internally) connected with their meaning and they refer to type-entities” The first argument why I believe that Husserl would have considered the Fregean sentence as a priori, may be derived directly from the LU, namely from the distinction between expressions and indications that Husserl draws there and that is totally absent from Frege’s works. Frege, unlike Husserl, did not believe that the Sinn and Bedeutung (reference) of a word are conferred upon it by a mental act in an associationst sense. Frege’s antipsycholgism is indeed more radical than that of Husserl, in that Frege is completely disinterested in the mental acts through which the Sinn (or thought) is grasped. True, Frege mentions Vorstellungen (representations or ideas), that are inhabitants of a “second world” and are thus psychological, but he makes little mention of the role they (or any other psychological operations) play with respect to understanding language. He is even explicit that “The thought, as I understand the word, in no way coincides with a content of my consciousness”. It seems that Frege believed in a simplistic picture, according to it psychological associations are responsible for how we grasp a sense when faced with the word: “[Frege’s] view differs strongly from the view advocated by Husserl, that a word or expression is invested with meaning by a mental act on the speaker’s part conferring meaning upon it. For Frege a word simply has a sense: its bearing that sense in the mouth of a speaker does not depend upon his performing any mental act of endowing it with that sense. On the contrary, even in thinking to himself, he may use the word without adverting to its sense, confident that he can call the sense to his mind when he needs it… This conception is obviously unsatisfactory. For one thing, it leaves unexplained the manner in which the word acts as a receptacle for the sense: when we reach a point at which we do need to advert to the sense of the word, how do we succeed in calling to mind the right sense? The natural manner is that we have in some way established an association between the word and its sense, so that the latter comes, as it were, when it is called” (Dummett, pp. 104-106). In his Origins of Analytical Philosophy, Dummett advances even the idea that, from Frege’ point of view, there would have been nothing weird with grasping Sinne even in the absence of language; I have no textual evidence to verify this claim; the only quotation that Dummett gives from Frege’s work is “it is necessary for us men that a thought of which we are conscious is connected in our consciousness with one or another sentence”. (Erkenntnisquellen, in Posthumuous Writings, p. 269, quoted in Dummett p. 108). If we compare this view with Husserl’s distinction between expressions and indications, it appears plausible to say that Husserl would have deemed Frege’s philosophy of language as dealing only with indications, not with expressions. Indeed, Husserl writes that the relation between an indication and the object indicated by it is “external”, i.e. contingent. Indeed, the passages that I quoted from Dummett strongly remind me of what Husserl says about the associative functioning of indications: “If A summons B into consciousness, we are not merely simultaneously or successively conscious of both A and B, but we usually feel their connection forcing itself upon us, a connection in which the one points to the other and seems to belong to it. “ (LU-I- 4, “Digression on the Associative origin of indications”) The main differences between expressions and indications are that (1) the relation between an expression and its meaning is “internal”, i.e. necessary, while the relation between an indication and the object indicated is “external”, i.e. contingent and relying on mere psychological associations; (2) expressions do, and indications do not, have an objective, ideal meaning as their correlate; (3) expressions are infused with meaning by mental processes, while indications are mere label, etiquettes attached to objects. Bur the difference between expressions and indications that is the most important in this context is, in my opinion, the following: expressions point to types, while indications point to tokens. INSERT QUOTATIONS FROM LU THAT JUSTIFY THIS In the context of the The Evening Star-The Morning Star case, what this means is that the name “The Evening Star”, taken as an indication, only points to that stage of the planet Venus which rises in the evening. The synthetic identity between The Evening Star and The Morning Star is thus an identity between two tokens of the same type. On the contrary, on Husserl’s views, “The Evening Star” and “The Morning Star” may (and perhaps should) be taken as expressions, pointing to types and not to tokens. This supports very well the thesis that the identity between The Evening Star and The Morning Star is, so to speak, already given in the meanings of these names. The names “The Evening Star” and “The Morning Star”, if taken as expressions, have the same meaning, and thus the identity sentence “The Evening Star is Phosporus” is an analytical, a priori one. Husserl’s indications do not have meaning but only reference, they have Fregean Bedeutungen in the sense that they denote tokens; refer to tokens; do not point to essences; do not reflect the object’s possibilities. An indication refers to its reference in virtue of a merely psychological operation (association) that does not survive the phenomenological reduction. Frege’s lack of the distinction between expressions and indications might be discussed here. In LU, Husserl accuses Mill – with his theory of “direct reference”- for obliterating this distinction and turning all signs into mere indications. (Mill is guilty for this crime because he did not ascribe Sinn to names). It could seem as if Frege was – for Husserl’s standards – guilty of the opposite crime, that of turning all signs – including indications – into expressions. Indeed, Frege did believe that all signs refer to their Bedeutung via a Sinn. What I do hold is, however shocking as it may seem, that Frege – like Mill – would (or should) have been accused by Husserl for turning all signs into indications. The reason is that from Frege’s account of meaning the whole idea of a process that tends towards its fulfillment; of ideal correlates of signs is altogether absent. Therefore, in the light of Husserl's distinction between expressions and indications, and if we consider the names “The Evening Star” and “The Morning Star” as being expressions rather than indications, the consequence is that both these expressions point to a tpe-object. And since the type-object that is denoted by “The Evening Star” and “The Morning Star” is identical, the identity statement “The Evening Star is The Morning Star” is a disguised identity of the form a=a. In order to realize this, we only need to realize that the two names are expressions; not indications and – as I have already hinted in section 1 – their meanings begins with different meaning-intentions but ends with the same meaning-fulfillment. On the contrary, if we regard these two names as indications, they will point to different tokens, and the question of the type-identity of these tokens remains altogether mysterious: for – if “The Evening Star” and “The Morning Star” are indications, it can well be supposed that each of these names refers to a particular occurrence (or series of occurrences) of the object: “The Evening Star” will refer to the evening-occurrences of planet Venus and The Morning Star will refer to its morning-occurrences. If so, then the type-identity between these two series of occurrences (the fact that they are reunited under the same type-object) remains unexplainable; it cannot be “read off” from the sentence itself, from the way the names that belong to this sentence are meant. This was Frege’s view, that makes “The Evening Star is The Morning Star” a synthetic identity, of the form a=b. It is very intuitive, in my opinion, to believe that The Evening Star and The Morning Star are two tokens of the same type. They stand with each other in the same relation as the first occurrence of the letter e and the second occurrence of the letter e (One could conveniently name The Evening Star and The Morning Star respectively as “the evening occurrence of Venus” and “The morning occurrence of Venus”. Therefore, the Fregean sentence “The Evening Star is The Morning Star” is a purely analytical, a priori and necessary sentence, on a par with mathematical truths and with identities of the sort “a=a”. In order to realize that identities like a=a and mathematical truths are true, Husserl believed, in a typical realist (Platonist) fashion, that we need a special mental faculty that he callls in LU “insight” or Categorial intuition” and in “The Idea of phenomenology” he calls “seeing”. Likewise: in order to realize the a priori truth of the Fregean sentence, we need a mental effort that is achieved through the phenomenological reduction INSERT QUOTATIONS FROM IDEA OF PHENOMENOLOGY. This effort requires us to concentrate not on the hic-et-nunc individual (The Evening Star, or The Morning Star) but on its individual essence: it requires us, so to speak, to eliminate the empirical and psychological dirt. And the difference between The Evening Star and The Morning Star is entirely ascribable to empirical and psychological dirt, that is, to the empirical situation that the planet Venus appears only in the morning as The Morning Star and only in the evening as The Evening Star; and to our psychological limits (of our empirical minds) that prevent us from seeing the planet Venus simultaneously as The Evening Star and as The Morning Star. But this impossibility is on a par with the impossibility of seeing simultaneously all the 6 faces of a cube. From the birds’ eye view of the transcendental ego (or of God, as an ideal epistemological construct) The Evening Star would indeed be seen as The Morning Star. The-planet-Venus-as-The Evening Star-and-simultaneously-as-The Morning Star, that is the essence of The Evening Star and of The Morning Star, is an ideal entity (or construct – depending on how subjectivist our reading of Husserl is) similar with the diagrams that, in geometry books, present all six faces of a cube. This idea re-occurs in the posthumuously published Erfahrung und Urteil (Experience and Judgement): “The factual world of experiece is experienced as typified….What is apprehended according to type also has an horizon of possible experiences with corresponding prescriptions of familiarity and has, therefore, types or attributes not yet experienced be expected. When we see a dog, we immediately anticipate its additional modes of behaviour: its typical ways of eating, playing, jumping and so on. We do not actually see its teeth, but we know how in advance how its teeth will look like – not in their individual determination but according to type”. (Experience and Judgement, p. 331, quoted in Dummett, p. 118). Likewise, we may say that when we perceive or refer to the planet Venus as The Evening Star, we also anticipate its being the same with The Morning Star. 4.2. The Argument “The Actual Includes the Possible” As we saw, another way of regarding the relation between The Evening Star and The Morning Star is to see them as two instances, two different faces of the same individual, which exemplify the same (individual) essence. Each of these instances is a way the other instance could have been. And since they have exemplify one and the same object, both these possibilities will be necessarily included in its essence. So to speak, The Evening Star and The Morning Star are two possible tokens of the same essence. The situation is exactly similar to that of the front face (i.e., the face that is presented to the eye) and the hidden faces of a cube. In support of this argument, I quote the evidence from Cartesian Meditations that I have already presented in section 3.3.3. of this essay. Husserl holds three theses: when a determinate act of perception of an object-here-and-now-as-having-a-certain-property takes place, (a) the unperceived spatio-temporal stages of the object perceived are implicitly presented; (b) the properties that are not manifest are implicitly presented; (c) the possibilities of that object’s being are implicitly presented Accordingly, I hold that The Evening Star and The Morning Star may be regarded as two names that point to different spatio-temporal (overlapping) stages of the same actual object; to different properties of the same object (more exactly: to the object “the planet Venus” as presented as manifesting the property “rising in the evening” and “rising in the morning” respectively); to two possibilities of appearing of the same object. (It is important for the latter argument that it is immaterial whether the planet Venus really rises when it rises; what interests us is that it could rise in the evening or in the morning. That’s why – from this point of view – we could have the same puzzle even if we used the imaginary name “Medisperus” to denote a star that rises exactly at midnight and is later discovered to be identical with The Evening Star and The Morning Star, i.e. with planet Venus. Frege does not discuss such a case). In support of (c), I hold that Husserl in MC is committed to the thesis that the perception of an object under a particular guise includes the perception of the guises in which it could appear or have appeared: “Thus the cube – seen from one side – does not say ‘anything’ about the concrete determinations of its invisibles sides; nevertheless it is in advance grasped as cube, then as colored, solid etc, - each of these determinations always leaving other particularities in indetermination.” (MC, par. 19, p. 84) “the phenomenological explication elucidates what is ‘implied’ by the sense of the cogitatum, without being intuitively given (for example, the reverse of an object), by representing the potential perceptions that would turn the invisible into visible” (MC par. 20, p. 86) What moral can we extract from here if we substitute the planet Venus for Husserl’s favourite cube? The Evening Star and The Morning Star are two possibilities of actualizing one and the same object. They are incompatible in that the object that is actualized may not be actualized simulataneously as The Evening Star and as The Morning Star, but they are not incompatible in that the object that is actualized as The Evening Star may not be actualized, at other times, as The Morning Star. On the contrary, The Evening Star and The Morning Star as two possibilities of actualizing the same object are necessarily and a priori linked in that the object that is at some times actualized as The Evening Star MUST be actualized at other times as The Morning Star. The situation is similar to that between “The first Emperor of France” and “The first non-royal monarch of France” (I have purposely chosen this example because I am not sure whether the sentence “The first emperor of France was the first non-royal monarch of France” is necessary and a priori or not; indeed, it seems to me plausible to hold that it is not necessary – at least under the assumption that the first non-royal monarch of France could not have been a sultan, or a shah – i.e., under the assumption that the only non-royal monarchs of an European country like France could have been emperors. Any intentional act directed to planet Venus as it appears in the evening (The Evening Star) contains implicitly the possibility of that object appearing in the morning (The Morning Star). Even if planet Venus did not rise in the morning, the guise under which it would appear in the morning would still be anticipated in its perception as the evening star. Since I have all reasons to assume that acts of referring to an object are intentional acts, it follows that the correct understanding of the name ‘The Evening Star’ involves the understanding of the name ‘The Morning Star’: the identity between The Evening Star and The Morning Star is already given in the understanding of any of these names. The reason is that The Evening Star and The Morning Star are but two different potential guises of one and the same object: it is essential for that object being “one and the same” that it should include both these guises. 4.3. The Argument "The Spatio-Temporal position does not matter” As we have seen in section 3.2, Husserl wrote in Ideen that science should not be interested in the spatio-temporal position of objects. I can only understand this insistence in the sene that spatio-temporal coordinates are “cut” after the phenomenological reduction: I obviously ask myself: if acts of experience are such that they are directed to contingent objects, whose essence is such that they could have been in other places and at other times (parenthetically: - this is a gratuitous assumption; why not accept that there are objects which count among their essential properties "to happen at a certain time and/or place"?), then what accounts for the fact that "these objects" (as Husserl calls them - in fact these are events) do happen when and where they happen? Well, we have no choice but to skip this question since it is obvious that Husserl considers the time and the place of an objects occurring as inessential to it and therefore as being "removed" after the phenomenological reduction. This has an application for the The Evening Star-The Morning Star puzzle: if we look for the essence of the object denoted by The Evening Star and The Morning Star, we should lose sight of all the spatio-temporal determinations. This may be correlated with the observation that The Evening Star (The Evening Star) and The Morning Star (The Morning Star) may be conceived as two different spatio-temporal overlapping parts of one and the same object. Corollary: since the only difference between The Evening Star and The Morning Star is a spatio-temporal one, then the statement "The Evening Star is The Morning Star" as interpreted as referring to the essences correlated to the two names is an identity of the kind a=a. I believe this argument is valid, although it is rather a consequence and instance of the argument “The Evening Star and The Morning Star are two tokens of the same type” 5. Defence of the thesis of the analytical identity between The Evening Star and The Morning Star I anticipate that the main objection to this answer would be: “Well, but it is very intuitive that, anything one may say, the Fregean sentence is a sentence that can only be ascertained by experience. Anyone who would deny this basic intuition would utter mere nonsense and, moreover, would contradict Frege’s basic tenet that the Fregean sentence is an identiy-statement of the form a=b and not a=a; and that there is a huge – we could say, ontological – diference between a=a and a=b. Therefore, if you want to offer a plausible Husserlian answer to Frege’s puzzle, you should preserve this difference and account for it!” I am going to examine below an alternative, though even more implausible answer. But before, let’s examine how a defense of the analiticity of the Fregean sentence could look like. First: the analiticity of the Fregean sentence was obtained after the phenomenological reduction. And it should be kept in mind that the project of phenomenological reduction is absent from Frege's work. As I presented the issue, the way to the phenomenological reduction is paved by the Platonic account of meaning in LU. (Phenomenological reduction displaces, so to speak, Platonism about meaning): the point of Platonism about meaning was that the meaning of expressions should not be confounded with Frege’s Bedeutung, i.e. with actual, empirical objects and the point of the phenomenological reduction is that the transcendental ego should not be interested in actual empirical objects but rather in their essences. To this, I answer that I am not particularly committed to analiticity of the Fregean Second: along Quinean lines, it could be held that there is no sharp difference between analytic and synthetic truths and that a=a and a=b could be held as equally analytic (or synthetic). After all, how do we know that a=a is an analytic statement? The simple answer is: “Because we have two tokens of the same type-sign, whereas in a=b we have two different types”. But this answer is not satisfactory, first- for it could be further asked “And how do you know that in a=a we have two tokens of the same type? How different is the second a afforded to be from the first a for the sentence to be analytic, i.e. true regardless of experience? Moreover, how can you exclude the possibility that even an instance of a=b could be in the future discovered as a sentence displaying two tokens of the same type-sign? What is wrong with saying that, as a matter of fact, the empirical discovery that The Evening Star is The Morning Star was the discovery that ‘The Evening Star’ and ‘The Morning Star’ were and are different occurrences of the same sign?” And third: what about quasi-Fregean sentences such as “Londres is London” or “Yerushalayim is El-quds”? It seems plausible to regard such sentences as analytical although they state an identity between two different type-signs. Therefore, mere difference of notation does not necessarily preclude analiticity. To this it can be only answered: “Well, we have analiticity when the signs that are correlated by the sign of equality are not only coreferential, but also ‘consensual’, i.e. they express the same Sinn, i.e. they are synonymous. But such an answer (that I believe Frege would have offered) is disappointing, since – as we know from Quine – we don’t seem to be able to individuate Fregean Sinne besides saying that they are what is common to two synonymous expressions. It is, after all, interesting that Husserl only discussed examples such as “the winner at Austerlitz is the loser at Waterloo” and he did not discuss examples such as “Londres is London” or “Prussland is Prussia” or “Paris as pronounced in French [pari:] is Paris as pronounced in English [paeris].” The last three examples in the above list present – at least according to my intuition – a gradation from a=b towards a=a; indeed, I am not sure whether the last example should be classified as an a=a or an a=b. Frege’s obvious intention was to present the issue such that difference in notation coincides with difference between Sinne But things cannot be that simple, on pain of transforming any slight difference in the pronounciation as the mark of a difference in Sinne – in which cas his thesis about the difference between a=a and a=b would be a metalinguistic thesis and, more seriously, would allow us to dispense of Sinne altogether in favour of different notations. This would be unacceptable since it is an empirical matter (i.e. the job of the lexicographer) to determine whether two token-notations are token-notations of the same type. INSERT ARGUMENTS "WHY THE IDENTITY THE EVENING STAR=THE MORNING STAR IS NOT A METALINGUISTIC STATEMENT"? If the previous section did not demonstrate that a=a is different from a=b, at least it demonstrated (I hope) that it is not clear which examples of identity statements should be classified as a-a and which as a=b. The truth is that if faithfulness to Frege’s intention that a=a be different from a=b and to his naive belief that it is always clear who is a=a and who is a=b are to be preserved, then the Fregean sentence must indeed be classified, as Frege thought, as a typical case of a=b, i.e. one whose truth can only be settled via empirical investigation and cannot be settled a priori. If so, then the Husserlian solution that I presented above should be rejected. 7. The second answer to the question what would Husserl have said about Freges sentence? is it is not an identity statement at all The question now arises: what relevance could Husserl’s Platonic account of meaning in LU and from the phenomenological reduction that is presented in the next period have for the The Evening Star-The Morning Star puzzle? The only plausible answer is, in my opinion, to say that insofar as their essences are concerned, The Evening Star is a different object from The Morning Star. The most obvious argument for this answer is textual evidence in the LU. Indeed, when considering Fregean examples of co-referential expressions that are different in Sinn, Husserl draws the (Fregean) conclusions that such expressions refer to the same object but different meanings: 'Two names can differ in meaning but can have the same object, e.g. "the victor at Jena", "the vanquished at Waterloo". The meaning expressed in our pair of names is plainly different, though the same object is meant in each case' (LU-I- 12, p. 288) In the first section of this essay, I have advanced the idea that Husserl could have regarded such Fregean cases as involving difference in meaning-intention and identity in meaning-fulfillment - so the interpretation that the identity between The Evening Star and The Morning Star is an identity of the kind a=a can still be preserved. In order to realize how this intuition could be made plausible, one only needs to concentrate on the account of possibilities that Husserl presents in the MC PERHAPS ALSO SI IN IDEEN, VERIFY. The coincidence between The Evening Star and The Morning Star is an empirical and contingent matter; the two exemplify however two different essences. The meaning of “The Evening Star” is “whatever star appears in such-and-such a place in the evening” and the meaning of “The Morning Star” is “whatever star appears in such-and-such a place in the morning”. If this thesis is granted, then it appears very intuitive that after the phenomenological reduction The Evening Star can no longer be identical with The Morning Star. What supports this intuition is the Quinean dictum that essences cannot be individuated apart from Fregean senses (Sinne). INSERT QUOTATION FROM "TWO DOGMAS". Indeed, if it is assumed that "The Evening Star" and "The Morning Star" have different Sinne, it follows that they have different essences. (The essence of The Evening Star is, or contains, rising in the evening, while the essence of The Morning Star is, or contains, rising in the morning). Once the distinction between Sinn and essence is blurred, there is no way to reduce identities of the form a=b to identities of the form a=a and - if we are interested in what remains from a and from b after the phenomenological reduction - there is no way to preserve identities of the form a=b; all such identities would become statements asserting the difference between a and b. The (Quinean) reasoning would be the following: the names "The Evening Star" and "Phosphors" have different Sinne. But essences are Sinne. Therefore, they have different essences. But the phenomenological reduction leaves us only with the essence. Therefore, the phenomenological reduction leaves us only with the Sinne. Therefore, from a phenomenological point of view, The Evening Star is a different object than The Morning Star (it is a different noema). I believe however that this solution is not correct. Husserl nowhere speaks of two one object having the same essence. If this solution could be accepted, then we would have to forget everything that Husserl says about the idealization of types from tokens. On the other hand, it is very intuitive that The Evening Star and The Morning Star are two tokens of the same type. That's why I am committed to the non-Quinean position, that of distinguishing the Sinn from the essence. I claim that Husserl's work offers substantial support for this distinction, in that (a) the diference between meaning-intention and meaning-fufillment can be interpreted as a difference between Sinn and essence; and (b) the phenomenological reduction is to be interpreted as reducing the objects to their essence, rather than to their Sinne. 8. Conclusion The main thread of this essay was this reasoning: the Husserlian treatment of the Fregean sentence should be viewed in light of his essentialist conception of meaning. The LU (at least the first Investigation) endorses a fully-fledged Platonist conception of meaning while the post-LU phase is more clearly oriented towards transcendental subjectivity. On the LU account, the Fregean sentence should be understood as a relation between ideal meanings. On the post-LU account, it should be understood as a relation between "what remains" from The Evening Star and Phosophorus after the phenomenological reduction. References: Husserl - Logical Investigations -Ideas for a pure phenomenology - Meditations cartesiennes, Paris, Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, 1986 (I translated the French quotations into English) - Formal and Transcendental Logic - Dummmett - - Origins of Analytical philosophy - Dagfinn Follesdal - Husserl's notion of noema (Journal of philosophy, vol. 66, no. 18/1, 1969) - MP Banchetti - Follesdal on the notion of the noema. A critique (Husserl studies, vol. 10, no. 2, 1993-94) :