Smith_mcintyre_husserl's Identification of Meaning and Noema

7/30/2019 Smith_mcintyre_husserl's Identification of Meaning and Noema

1/18

HUSSERL'S IDENTIFICATION OF MEANING AND NOEMA*1. N oema as Meaning

This essay is a study of Edmund Husserl's conception of meaning. Inthis first section we indicate its importance for his conception of phenomenology. In Section 2 we see that Husserl's conception of linguistic meaning,of its nature as "ideal" and its role in mediating reference, is almost exactlythat of his contemporary Gottlob Frege. In Sections 3 and 4 we furtherargue that, for Husserl, linguistic meaning and noematic Sinn are one andthe same. For, according to Husserl, every linguistic meaning is a noematicSinn expressed, and every noematic Sinn is in principle expressible andtherefore a linguistic meaning. Section 3 argues the former; Section 4, thelatter.Phenomenology as Husserl conceives it is the study of various modesof intentionality.1 The intentionality of an act, its "directedness" toward anobject, consists in its having a particular "noema". The noema of an act -specifically, that component of the noema called the "noematic Sinn"-determines which object is intended and thereby mediates the intentionalityof the act.2 Husser! says: "Every intentional experience [Erlebnis] has anoema and therein a Sinn, through which it is related to the object" (Ideas,

~ 1 3 5 , p. 329). Phenomological analysis of intentional phenomena concentrates on noemata: transcendental-phenomenological reduction consists inturning one's attention away from the object intended in an act of consciousness and toward the noematic structures in virtue of which the object isintended-specifically, toward the noematic Sinn of one's act, or, as Husserloften calls this component of the noema, "the intended as such". Husserl says:

What "lies" evidently in the whole "reduced" phenomenon? Now inperception there also lies this, that it has its noematic Sinn, its "perceivedas such". [Ideas, 90, p. 226.JIn memory we find after the reduction the remembered as such; in expec-tation, the expected as such; in imaginative fantasy, the fantasied as such.[Ideas, 91, p. 226.]* The material in this essay will appear in somewhat different form in Chapter 3of our forthcoming book, Intentionality and Intensions: Husserl's Phenomenology andthe Semantics of Modalities (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co.).


2/18

116 RONALD Me INTYRE AND DAVID WOODRUFF SMITH[In describing] the "intended [Vermeinte] as such", . . . it was reallynoematic structures that were thereby described. [Ideas, 128, p. 315.]Given this central place of noemata and noematic Sinne in phenomenology,we should want to know all we can about these entities.Husserl conceives of noematic entities as "meanings". As we have noted,he calls the object-determining component of a noema a noematic "Sinn".

He sometimes also calls the whole noema a "Sinn" in a broader sense (cf.Ideas, 90, p. 223); indeed, he conceives of the noema as "a generalizationof the notion of Sinn to the field of all acts." 3 And 'Sinn' is ordinary Germanfor


3/18

HUSSERL'S EQUATION OF MEANING AND NOEMA 117Frege's, and Husserl believes in addition that reference itself as it wereembodies an intention whose noematic Sinn serves as the linguistic meaningexpressed and whose object is the object of reference. This latter view ofHusserl's indicates the importance of intentionality theory for our understanding of linguistic meaning and reference. Indeed, given Husserl's identificationof linguistic meaning and act-meaning, theory of intentionality and theoryof meaning and reference shed considerable light on one another.

2. Husserl's Conception of Lingtlistic MeaningIn the first of his Logical Investigations5 Husserl explicitly discusseslinguistic, or semantic, meaning-which he calls "Bede"tung". 6 Husserl'stheory of meaning and reference is almost exactly Frege's and appears, infact, to have arisen from his own reading of Frege.Husserl (like Frege) begins by distinguishing the meaning of a linguisticexpression from the object to which the expression refers. "The distinctionbetween meaning [Bedeuttmg] and object [Gegenstand]," he says, is "wellestablished" (LI, I, 13, p. 289). Now this distinction is important becauseit marks a break with attempts to accowlt for problems of meaning and

reference by appeal to the objects of reference alone. The distinction is notbetween subjective contents or processes, occurring in the minds of languageusers, and objective entities, existing independently of consciousness. Rather,Husserl supports a threefold distinction between subjective mental contents(what Frege called "ideas" or "images"); the objective entities, includingconcrete physical things, to which words customarily refer; and the equallyobjective, but abstract, entities that words express as their meanings (cf. LI,I, 6, p. 276).In distinguishing meanings from psychological entities Husserl is opposing a view which in logical or semantic theory he calls "psychologism".It is a view he himself had adopted earlier in his PhiloJOphie der Arithimetik(1891). In that earlier work Husserl had tried to explicate arithmetical concepts and logical principles in terms of a psychological analysis of theirorigin and use. But Frege had already published work in the foundationsof logic and mathematics based on a repudiation of psychologism, and hetook opposition to Hussed's use of the view. Reviewing Hussed's Philosophieder A rithm etik, Frege criticized Husserl for "a blurring of the distinctionbetween image and concept, between imagination and thought." 7 Subjectiveideas, Frege argued, are peculiar to particular thinkers or speakers; as such,psychological "contents" are distinct from the objective "contents" of thought


4/18

118 RONALD Me INTYRE AND DAVID WOODRUFF SMITHor speech (senses or meanings) which can be common to many. In hisreview of Husserl he thus said:

A man never has somebody else's mental image, but only his own..I t is quite otherwise for thoughts [Gedanken; propositions]; one and thesame thought can be grasped by many men. The constituents of the thought... must be distinguished from the images that accompany in some mindthe act of grasping the thought-images that each man forms of things.s

These arguments led Husserlto appreciate the works of the early nineteenthcentury logician Bernard Bolzano, who even before Frege had made muchof a distinction between "subjective ideas" and "objective ideas" in semantictheory.9 Husser! came to recognize, as he says in the foreword to LogicalInvestigations, that psychologism cannot account for the objectivity, i.e., theintersubjectivity, of logic and mathematics or of knowledge in general. Hethus rejects psychologism in Logical Investigatioi1f and in all his subsequentwritings and begins to seek a better account of "the relationship . . . . betweenthe subjectivity of knowing and the objectivity of the content known" (LI,p.42).HusserI's own account of the objective nature of linguistic meanings,in the first of the Logical Investigations, is thus largely an exposition of aBolzano-Frege line. Meanings must be intersubjective entities, he argues,because successful linguistic communication requires that different peopleexpress and under:;tand the same meanings-strictly, numerically, the same.The meaning of an expression is thus "shared" by different speakers whoutter an expression and by various hearers who understand it. Husserl says:

I f we or others repeat the same sentence [Satz] with like intention [Inten-tion], each of us has his own pbenomena, his own words and his owninstances of understanding [Verstalldnismomente]. Over against this un-bounded multiplicity of individual experiences, is an identical elementexpressed in them all; it is the same in the very strictest sense of the word.Multiplication of persons and acts does not multiply sentence-meaning[Satzbedeutung]; the judgment in the ideal, logical sense remains single.[LJ, I, 31, p. 329*.]

I f meanings are intersubjective, "shareable" entities then, as Frege hadnoted, the meaning of an expression must be quite different from the subjective experience going on in the mind of a speaker or a hearer; for suchexperiences are private and particular to each person. Linguistic meaningsare thus not events of consciousness. But the meaningfulness of linguisticexpressions, Husserl believes, is nonetheless integrally related to intentional


5/18

HUSSERL'S EQUATION OF MEANING AND NOEMA 119experiences. The use of sounds or marks to express meaning is dependentupon conscious activity. Still, the meanings expressed by linguistic utterancesor inscriptions are not literally a part of any conscious activities. In contrastwith the "real" events that actually occur as temporal constituents of astream of consciousness, meanings are "ideal" entities. This "ideality" isHusserl's version of the objectivity Frege and Bolzano had sought for meanings. It is the heart of Husserl's antipsychologism and sets his objectivemeaning entities (ideal "contents") apart from the subjective mental events(psychological contents) invoked by the psychologists of his day. Thus:

The essence of meaning [Bedeutttng] is seen by us, not in the meaningconferring experience, but in its "content", the one identical intentionalunity set over against the ... multiplicity of ... experiences of speakersand thinkers. The "content" of a meaning-experience, in this ideal [idealen]sense, is not at all what psychology means by a content, i.e. any real [realer]part or side of an experience. I f we understand a name . . . [or] a statement... the meaning ... is nothing which could, in a real sense, count as partof our act of understanding. [LI, I, 30, p. 327*.]The contrast Husserl is drawing here, between the "real" components

of conscious experiences and the "ideal" meaning entities associated withthem, marks meanings as abstract entities. Husserl uses two different termsthat might translate as 'real', both of which carry implications of temporality.lO 'Reell', which he uses to characterize events in the stream of consciousness, seems to mean "occurring in internal, or phenomenological, time". Hisother term 'real', he says, "keeps the notion of thinglike transcendence whichthe reduction to reel! immanence in experience is meant to exclude"(LI, V,16, p. 577, n. 2*): it thus seems to mean "occurring in external, or objective, time". Yet a third te rm- 'wirklich'- i s used (not quite consistently)by Husserl to characterize physical individuals occurring in both externaltime and external space.l l To say that meanings are "ideal" is just to saythat they are not "real" in any of these senses; and this characterization isalso all that is meant by 'abstract' 12Husserl's characterization of meanings as "ideal" entities thus indicatesthat they are neither physical objects occurring in external space and externaltime nor mental events occurring in internal time. And neither are they insome way the products of conscious activities: they are onto logically independent of consciousness. Hussed says explicitly:

What I mean [meineJ by [aJ sentence . . . or (when I hear it) grasp as itsmeaning [Bedeuttmg], is the same thing, whether I think and exist or not,and whether or not there are any thinking persons and acts. The same holds


6/18

120 RONALD Me INTYRE AND DAVID WOODRUFF SMITHof all types of meanings [Bedeutltngen] , subject-meanings, predicatemeanings, relational and combinatory meanings, etc. [Ll, I, 31, pp_ 329-30.]

It is thus clear that Husserl supports the view that Frege in "The Thought"puts as follows:Thoughts [Gedanken; propositions] are neither things of the outer worldnor ideas.A third realm must be recognized. What belongs to this corresponds withideas, in that it cannot be perceived by the senses, but with things, in thatit needs no bearer to the contents of whose consciousness to belong. Thusthe thought, for example, which we expressed in the Pythagorean theoremis timelessly true, true independently of whether anyone takes it to be true.It needs no bearer. I t is not true for the first time when it is discovered,but is like a planet which, already before anyone has seen it, has been ininteraction with other planets.13Husser! considers different kinds of entities to be ideal: in particular,meanings, "species", and numbers. "Species", so-called in Logical Investi-gations, are a kind of universals; in Ideas and his later writings Husser! calls

them (along with numbers and perhaps other sorts of abstract entities)"essences". The recognition of meanings as ideal entities thus does not precisely determine their ontological category.Husser!'s own views changed about what category meanings belong

to-though, after Philosophie der Arithmetik, the question was for himalways what sort of ideal entities they are. In the first edition of LogicalInvestigations (1900/1901), Husser! emphasized the "shared" characterof meanings: the acts of consciousness underlying a speaker's utterance anda hearer's understanding seem to involve a commoll entity as' meaning.Husser! thus assumed meanings to be a kind of "species", or "universalobjects", which are instantiated by such particular acts but which-in keepingwith their ideality-exist independently of their instantiations (cf. LI, I,31, p. 330). On this view, meanings are properties shared by speakers'and hearers' acts of intending the same object or the same type of object,properties characterizing them as directed to these entities. Even at this pointHusser! was careful to distinguish meanings, taken as universals instantiatedby acts, both from the objects of those acts and from related essences orproperties of objects. The property of being red, for example, is an essenceof all red objects; but the meaning "red", on this view, is a property ofacts directed to red things.14


7/18

HUSSERL'S EQUATION OF MEANING AND NOEMA 121By the time of Ideas (1913), when Husserl had developed a moregeneral notion of act-meaning (Sinn), the view that meanings are act-essences, properties literally instantiated by acts, had been abandoned. Therehe adopted instead the view that meanings are abstract entities correlatedwith acts and expressible by words but in no sense properties or parts ofacts. Apparently he came to think of them as sui generis, perhaps as a specialsort of abstract particulars.15Since Rudolf Carnap, meaning entities have come to be called "intensions" or "intensional entities". Though various philosophers in the Fregeantradition (e.g., Husserl, Carnap, Alonzo Church) have chosen various

entities to play the role of meanings, Husserls Fregean view of meaningsas abstract, "ideal" entities provides good reason for our saying that heconsidered them to be "intensions". The term 'intensional entity' is alsosuggestive of one of Husserl's own uses of the term 'intentional object'.Husserl admits to using the word 'intentional' in two quite different senses(vide LI, I, ~ 3 0 , p. 327, n. 1). Sometimes he uses it so that 'intentionalobject' means the intended object, i.e., the object of an act or the referentof an expression. At other times he uses it so that 'intentional object' meansa meaning entity, specifically the noema or the noematic Sinn of an act orthe meaning of an expression. By the time of Ideas "intentional objects" areoften (though not consistently) meaning entities, specifically noematic Sinne(cf. Ideas, ~ ~ 8 8 - 9 0 ) . The term 'intensional entity' has the advantage ofavoiding the ambiguity of 'intentional object'; its meaning seems to be justthat of 'intentional object' as Husser! applies it to meanings and to noematicSinne.Husserl's "intentional objects", taken in the sense of 'intensions', arelike Frege's meanings not only in that they are abstract entities; Husserl'sview of their role in mediating the reference of expressions is also Fregean.Indeed, although there are other differences, Husser! shares with Frege thefollowing key theses concerning the relation of linguistic meaning to referent. (1) The meaning of an expression determines which entity (if any)the expression refers to (LI, I ~ 13, p. 289). (2) The meaning of an ex-pression is always distinct from its referent (LI, I ~ 1 2 , p. 287). (3) Anexpression can have a meaning, and thus be a meaningful expression, eventhough there is no entity to which it refers (LI, I, ~ 1 5 , pp. 292-93). (4)Different meanings can determine the same referent; expressions withdifferent meanings can thus refer to the same entity (LI, I, 12, p. 287).

Husserl's conception of linguistic meanings as ideal and of their relationto objects of reference turns out also to characterize "intentional objects"


8/18

122 RONALD Me INTYRE AND DAVID WOODRUFF SMITHgenerally (noematic Sinne) and their relation to intended objects. For, aswe shall now see, linguistic meanings (Bedeutungen) are further characterized by Husserl as themselves being the meanings (noematic Sinne) ofacts underlying linguistic use of expressions.3. Every Lingttistic Meaning is a Noematic Sil111

Linguistic meanings, as intensional entities, are onto logically independentof consciousness. Yet, Husserl maintains, they stand in a close relation toconsciousness, for language is used to make public what is in our minds.Husserl says:

All expressions in communicative speech function as indications. Theyserve the hearer as signs of the "thoughts" of the speaker, i.e., of hismeaning-giving [sinngebenden] mental processes [psychischen Erlebnisse].[LI, I, 7, p. 277*.]

These "thoughts" or "meaning-giving" acts of the speaker are, Husserlsays, "intimated" (klmdgibt) or- in ordinary language-"expressed" bythe speaker's utterance of the expressions (Ll, 7, p. 277). We shall arguethat for Husserl the meanings (Bedeutungen) expressed by words are thenoematic Sinne of the "meaning-giving" acts of consciousness underlyingand intimated by the utterings of the words. So, on Hussed's view linguisticmeanings are themselves act-meanings. 16Linguistic behavior is complicated business. To express a meaning inwords is to perform an "action", a bit of bodily behavior related to underlying intentional processes of consciousness. The bodily aspect of a "speechact" (a term that Hussed does not use) consists of producing an expression,i.e., a sound pattern or written inscription (LI, V, 19, p. 583). But ameaningful utterance of an expression also has its intentional aspect. Hussedsays:

The meaning-animated [sinnbelebten] expression breaks up, on the onehand, into the physical phenomenon forming the physical side of theexpression, and, on the other hand, into the acts which give it meaning[Bedeutung] . .. . [LI, I, 9, p. 280*. Cf. also Ideas, 124, pp. 303-304.]

Linguistic behavior may be initiated by various volitions, depending onjust what the speaker hopes to bring about by means of the behavior. Butin any case (except soliloquy), the speaker aims to achieve his end by conveying a certain meaning to the hearer by uttering certain words. In everyspeech act (even soliloquy), Hussed says, the speaker must be acting with


9/18

HUSSERL'S EQUATION OF MEANING AND NOEMA 123the purpose of expressing a meaning by uttering the appropriate words.Otherwise, he will merely be making sounds without really saying anything.The articulated sound-complex (the written sign, etc.) first becomes aspoken word or communicative bit of speech when the speaker producesit with the purpose [Absieht] of "expressing himself about something"by its means, in other words, when in certain mental acts he lends [verleiht]

it a meaning [Simi] which he wants to communicate with the hearers.[LI, I, 7, pp. 276-77*.]The passage just cited also tells us what it is for a person purposefullyto "express himself about something": certain of his acts of consciousness"confer on" or "lend" (t'erleiht) his words their meaning (Sinn). Theseacts Husser! variously calls meaning-giving acts (sinngebenden Akte; Akte

welche Bedeutung geben) or meaning-lending (sinnverleibenden, bedeutungverleihenden) acts (cf. LI, I, 7, 9.). "In virtue of such acts," hesays, "the expression is more than a merely sounded word. I t means [meint]something ... (LI, I, 9, p. 280).Husserl's metaphor of "giving meaning" is to be taken quite literally:the meaning "given" the uttered expression in a speech act is just thenoematic Sinn of the "meaning-giving" act that "underlies" the speechact. In that underlying act-as in acts of consciousness generally-we intenda certain object or state of affairs, and we intend it via the act's noematicSinnY This intended object is what receives our primary attention in thespeech act:

When we normally execute an expressing as such, we do not live in theacts which constitute the expression as a physical object, our "interest" doesnot belong to this object; rather, we live in the meaning-giving [sinngebenden] acts, we are exclusively tumed toward the objective [Gegenstlmdhehell] that appears in them, we aim at it, we mean [meiJlen; intend] itin the special, preglltlll! sense [i.e., attentively] [LI, V, 19, p. 584*.]

I f we succeed in communicating with our hearer, we will convey to him ameaning whereby he will come to intend this same object. Indeed, he willintend it through the same noematic Sinn we do (barring, we might caution,adjustments for demonstrative pronouns such as 'this', 'here', etc.). For,according to Husser!, the meaning expressed as the Bedeutung of the wordsis the meaning, the noematic Sinn, of the tlnderlying act. This meaning iswhat is communicated from speaker to hearer. And so the underlying actquite literally "gives" or "lends" its meaning to the expression uttered inthe speech act.


10/18

124 RONALD Me INTYRE AND DAVID WOODRUFF SMITHIn Logical Investigations Hussed seems usually to presuppose rather

than explicitly to state this key point, that a Bedeutung expressed in language;s the noematic Sinn of an underlying, meaning-conferring act.1S But opening his later (1929) Formal and Transcendental Logic he is both explicitand clear. In ~ 3 , on "Language as an Expression of 'Thinking'," Hussedsays:

In speaking we are continuously performing an internal act of meaning[act of meaning = Meinen], which fuses with the words and, as it were,animates them. The effect of this animation is that the words and the entirelocution, as it were, embody in themselves a meaning [Meinung] , and bearit embodied in them as their sense [Sinn]. [Husserl here footnotes LI, 1.][In] this act of meaning [Meinen] ... there is constituted . . . the meaning[Meimmg ]-that is, the Bedeutung, the Sinn--expressed in the locution.For example, if we utter a judgment, we have effected, in union with thewords of our assertive statement, a unity of judging, of inwardly "thinking"asserting. No matter what other psychic producings may also be effected,. . . we shall pay attention only to what is fused on, namely the acts ofjudging that function as meaning-giving [sillngebende] acts, i.e., thatbear in themselves the judicial meaning or opinion [Urteilsmeinung] thatfinds its expression i17 the assertoric se171e11(e.19So, Hussed says, the meaning expressed in an assertively uttered sentence

is the meaning (the noematic Sinn) of the speaker's underlying act of judging; and it is this expressed meaning that the speaker communicates to hishearer. Suppose, for example, that Holmes has just completed a bit ofbrilliant "deduction", thus coming to believe that the murderer is in thisvery room. This judgment is an act of consciousness: its object, on Hussed'sview, is a state of affairs-the murderer's being in this very room-and itsnoema includes a Sinn, in virtue of which Holmes's judgment is directedto this state of affairs. Now let us suppose that Holmes wishes to share thisbit of information with Watson: he turns to Watson and says, "The murderer is in this very room." It is part of Holmes's purpose in uttering thesewords to express the noematic Sinn of his act of judgment, so that: Watsoncan also intend the same state of affairs through that same Sinn. Holmessucceeds in commtmicating with Watson, in "sharing" that Sinn, only because the meaning (Bedeutung) expressed by his words iJ the noematicSinn of his judgment and becomes the noematic Sinn of Watson's intention.

The simple kind of assertion represented by this example is a specialcase of what Hussed takes as a more general account of the relation of expressed meaning to acts. The acts whose meanings are expressed will be


11/18

HUSSERL'S EQUATION OF MEANING AND NOEMA 125different for different kinds of speech acts. And the acts whose Sinne areexpressed in any case need not be actually occurrent: an assertion, for example, may be accompanied, not by an occurrent act of judging, but by thedisposition so to judge, i.e., by a belief. Husserl's general view is that wordsused in speech acts, of whatever kind, express as their meanings the noematicSinne of acts of consciousness: the meanings (Bedeutungen) expressed inwords are themselves the meanings of acts, i.e., noematic Sinne. This view,which pervades Logical Investigations (especially the sixth), is explicitlyrecapitulated in Formal and Transcendental Logic:

What we have learned from the -example of the assertive statement holdsgood universally.... T hinkitlg includes . . . every mental process [Erlebnis]in which the Sinn that is to become expressed becomes constituted in themanner peculiar to consciousness-the Sinn that, if it does become expressed,is called the Bedeutung of the expression, particularly of the locution asused on the particular occasion. The process is called thinking, whetherit is a judging, a willing, an asking, or an uncertain presuming.2oWe need not go further here into a discussion of the phenomenology oflanguage. What is central to our concerns is the connection between lin

guistic meaning and noematic Sinn. As we see that linguistic meanings arethemselves noematic Sinne expressed, we begin to see that Husser! takesthe noematic Sinne of acts and the linguistic meanings expressed in languageto be the very same entities. But the main argument for identifying noematicSinne with linguistic meanings lies with the thesis that the noematic Sinnof any act is in principle expressible in language. So let us turn now to thatthesis.4. Every Noematic Sinn is a Linguistic Meaning

Husserl, we have argued, sees linguistic meanings as the meanings, thenoematic Sinne, of acts. Linguistic expressions serve to express in publiclyobservable behavior the Sinne of intentional acts of consciousness. In thisway language serves to make our intendings known to others. In this sectionwe consider Husserl's thesis that every noematic Sinn is in principle expressible in language. This thesis is the basis of our claim that noemata andtheir components are "intensional entities".In assertion we express the noematic Sinn of, say, a judgment. Thismeaning, in virtue of its being expressed, is called a "linguistic" meaning or

"Bedeutung". But Husserl believes that acts and their meanings are notintrinsically linguistic. One may judge about something without saying any-


12/18

126 RONALD Me INTYRE AND DAVID WOODRUFF SMITHthing at all. Indeed, every act, "publicized" or not, has a meaning, the samemeaning it would have if it were put to language. I t is this general notionof meaning, expressed or not and pertinent to all acts, that Husser! calls'Sinn'. He says:

Originally these words ['Bedeuten' and 'Bedeutung'] relate only to thesphere of speech, of "expression". But it is almost inevitable and at thesame time an important advance for knowledge to extend and suitably tomodify the meaning of these words so that in a certain way they apply to... all acts, whether these involve expressive acts or not.... We use theword 'Sinn' ... in its wider application. [Ideas, 124, p. 304.]Sinn is thus conceived as an extension of Bedeutung, so that meaning

as Sinn is no longer exclusively, intrinsically, or even primarily a linguisticnotion. (Strictly speaking, 'Sinn' refers to the component of an act's noemathat accounts for the act's directedness to its object. But the whole noema,Husser! suggests, may also be thought of as a Sinn in a less specific use ofthe term: cf Ideas, 90, p. 223). Acts such as hoping, remembering, imagin-ing, and perceiving have meanings in the general sense of Sinne. And al-though there is nothing intrinsically linguistic about these acts and theirmeanings, their Sinne are intensional entities of a kind with the meaningsexpressed in language. We might not commonly think of a person "hopingaloud", "imagining aloud", or (especially) "perceiving aloud"; yet theSinne of all these acts are expressible in language.Indeed, any Sinn, the noematic Sinn of any (actual or possible) act what-soever, is in principle expressible through language. And when the Sinn ofan act is expressed, we saw in Section 3, it is the Bedeutung of the wordsthat express it. \'7hether a Sinn actually is expressed or not, Husser! believes,there is or in principle could be developed some linguistic expression whoseBedeutung is that Sinn. This we may call the expressibility thesis. Husser!asserts it explicitly in Ideas:

Whatever is "meant [Gemeinte] as such", every meaning [Meinllng] inthe noematic Sinn ... of any act whatsoever is expressible through "lin-guistic meanings" [durch f / Bedeuttmgen"] . ... "Expression" is a remark-able form, which allows itself to be adapted to all "Sinne" ... and raisesthem to the realm of "Logos". [124, p. 305.]The expressibility of noematic Sinne finally makes good the claim thatthey are intensions. Where we first saw that every Bedeutung is a Sinnexpressed, we now see that every Sinn is expressible and hence (at leastpotentially) a Bedeutung. In short, we have here just one class of meaning


13/18

HUSSERL'S EQUATION OF MEANING AND NOEMA 127entities-noematic Sinne-that play a role both in language and in acts ofconsciousness generally. The intensional entities that get expressed in language and the noematic entities that mediate the intentionality of acts arethe very same entities. With this identification of noematic Sinn and linguisticmeaning, the antipsychologism we noted in Hussed generalizes from a thesisabout logic and semantics to a thesis about phenomenology and theory ofintentionality generally: noematic Sinne are nonpsychological intensionalentities.

The expressibility thesis is important for understanding Husserl. Butlet us take care that we not misconstrue the claim it makes. In the first place,the thesis does not claim that every Sinn has actually been expressed. Nordoes it claim that actually existing natural languages--or even humanlypossible languages-are rich enough to express every Sinn. Hussed says inLogical l111Jestigations:

There is . . . no intrinsic connection between the ideal unities which infact operate as meanings [Bedeutungen], and the signs to which they aretied. . . . We cannot therefore say that alI ideal unities of this sort areexpressed meanings. Wherever a new concept is formed, we see how ameaning becomes realized that was previously unrealized. As numbersin the ideal sense that arithmetic presupposes-neither spring forth norvanish with the act of enumeration, ... so it is with ... meanings ...to which being thought or being expressed are alike contingent. There aretherefore countless meanings which . . . are merely possible ones, sincethey are never expressed, and since they can, owing to the limits of man'scognitive powers, never be expressed. [I, 35, p. 333.]A second point warranting care is that the thesis as formulated appliesspecifically to the noematic Sinn of any act. But, in addition to its expressibleSinn, the noema of an act includes other components, correlated with whatHussed calls the "Gegebenheitsweise", or "way of given ness" of the act

(Ideas, ~ ~ 91, 92, 99, 132, 133). These components relate to the degree ofclarity with which the object of an act is intended, the features of the objectthat are singled out for attention, the "intuitional fullness" (if any) of theact, and the act's "thetic character". Husser! argues that when an act isbrought to expression these further components are not part of the Bedeutungexpressed.The reason seems largely to be that the meanings we share when wecommunicate in language are-and are intended to be-invariant with respectto the more particular aspects of their presence in particular acts. "Talk ofsameness of sense, of sameness of understanding of words and sentences,"


14/18

128 RONALD Me INTIRE AND DAVID WOODRUFF SMITHHusser! says in Logical Investigations, "points to something which does notvary in the varied acts thus brought to expression" (V, ~ 3 0 , p. 617). And,because of the "generality" of expression, he says in Ideas, "never can allthe particularities of the expressed be reflected in the expression" ( ~ 1 2 6 ,p. 310). Husserl specifically cites clarity and attentiveness as such particularfeatures of acts, features whose noematic correlates are too idiosyncratic,apparently, to be expressed.For roughly the same reason, any "intuitional" element in an act's noemais not expressed when the act is brought to expression. The noema of anintuitive act, such as visually perceiving an object, and the noema of a nonintuitive presentation of the same object (merely thinking of it, for example)may have the very same Sinn (Ideas, ~ 9 1 , Ll, V, ~ 2 0 ) . But merely to thinkof an object is far from actually seeing, "intuiting" it. In the intuitive act theobject is sensuously given, experienced with what Hussed calls "intuitionalfullness" (cf. Ll, VI, esp. 21-29). This "fullness" is reflected in theact's noema, as a noematic correlate distinct from the act's noematic Sinn.But when a perceptual act is brought to expression, Hussed says, the expressed "content" is "the identical meaning [Bedeutung] that the hearercan grasp even if he is not a perceiver" (Ll, I, ~ 1 4 , p. 209*). Since thenoema of a nonperceptual act has no "fullness" -component, the Sinn, butnot the fullness-component, of a perceptual noema is what is expressed asa Bedeutung when expression is founded on an underlying perception.Another component of an act, also reflected in the act's noema, is whatHusserl calls the act's "thetic character", the kind or species of the act, marking it as an act of perception, or memory, or whatever (Ideas, 91, 92,99). In Logical Investigations, VI, 2, Hussed effectively maintains that,when an act is brought to expression, the noematic component correlatedwith its thetic character is not part of the meaning expressed. HusserI'spoint there has nothing to do with "generality". Rather, it is simply that,for instance, in expressing his judgment that the murderer is in this veryroom, what Holmes expresses is the Bedeutung "The murderer is in thisvery room"; he does not express the Bedeutung "I judge that the murderer isin this very room". (The latter would be the Sinn of a different act, Holmes'sact of reflecting on his original judgment and judging that he had so judged.)

So, for Husserl only the Sinn of the act underlying an expressive utteranceis expressed. Nonetheless, Hussed's discussion of different senses of "expressing" an act in Logical Investigations (VI, ~ 2 - 3 ) suggests that furthernoema components are expressible in a more indirect way. When I judgethat p and I say "p", I express the Sinn but not the thetic component of the


15/18

HUSSERL'S EQUATION OF MEANING AND NOEMA 129noema of my judgment. When I say "I judge that p", though, I express theSinn of another judgment about my first judgment (cf. LI, VI, ~ 2 ; Ideas,

~ 1 2 7 , p. 313). Now, although Hussed does not explicitly say so, this secondSinn includes both the Sinn and the thetic component of the noema of myfirst judgment. In HusserI's primary sense of "expressing" an act, my firstutterance expresses my first judgment: it is this judgment that lends itsSinn to the uttered words. And my second utterance expresses, in that sense,my second judgment. But in Hussed's second sense of "expressing" an act,my second utterance "expresses" my first judgment: both Sinn and theticcomponents of my first judgment's noema appear in the Bedeutung of theuttered words; for both are included in my second judgment's more com-plicated Sinn, the Sinn that serves as that Bedeutung. In this way the theticcomponent of my first judgment's noema is "expressed" as a Bedeutungin my second utterance. Intuitiveness, and also clarity and attentiveness,probably ought also to be expressible in this indirect way. To generalize, itthus seems that all noematic components are capable of serving as com-ponents of some Sinn and are in that sense expressible as linguistic Bedeutungen.This point, though Hussed does not formulate it himself, would assurethat all noematic components are intensional entities. Indeed, there is evi-dence that Hussed did conceive of the noema and all of its componentsand not just of the noematic Sinn-as meanings or intensions. Of theGegebenheitsweise components Husser! says, "As characters of the, so tospeak, 'ideal' ['Ideellen'] they themselves are 'ideal' and not real [reell]"(Ideas, 99, p. 250) . And Husser! sometimes uses the word 'Sinn' to describethe complete noema. When, as is the rule, he reserves 'Sinn' for the objectoriented component of the noema (the "objective Sinn" or "noematic Sinn"),he suggests that the word 'Satz' ('proposition') would appropriately describethe combination of the noema's Sinn component and thetic component(Ideas, 13 3, p. 324). Either terminology reinforces the interpretation ofthe whole noema and its components as intensions.The importance of expressibility, we have seen, is that it is what finallyidentifies noematic Sinn and linguistic meaning. And the importance ofthat identification is twofold.That noematic Sinne are expressible and hence linguistic meaningsshows that noemata as conceived by Hussed are more familiar than wemight have thought. Because noemata and specifically Sinne are the heartof Husser!' s theory of intentionality (and, hence, of his phenomenology),Hussed himself spent an extraordinary amount of effort and ink on describ-


16/18

130 RONALD Me INTYRE AND DAVID WOODRUFF SMITHing how to become acquainted with noemata and noematic Sinne. Themethod he called "epoche" or "transcendental-phenomenological reduction".The result he sought is a direct, reflective acquaintance with noemata--or,more generally, with that which is "transcendental", including noemataand also "noeses", "hyletic data", and the "transcendental ego". The difficulty with phenomenological reflection, though, is not so much whether wecan do it as just how to do it. And Husserl's descriptions of how to do it,in terms of "bracketing" or "suspending" any positing of the existence ofthe object of consciousness, are not terribly helpful. We do, however, alreadyknow and understand a good deal of language. I f Husserl's view of languageis correct, we thus already have a working acquaintance with lots of linguisticmeanings. And since these meanings are themselves noematic Sinne, thatmeans that we already have, by way of our language, a working acquaintancewith lots of noematic Sinne. Even in the absence of a clear description ofhow noemata are grasped, the expressibility of Sinne assures us that theyare familiar and that we do grasp them all the time.Just as Husserl's identification of noematic Sinn and linguistic meaningilluminates his notion of noema, so also it puts the notion of linguisticmeaning itself into a broader perspective. That linguistic meanings arethemselves noematic Sinne emphasizes the fact that referring, asserting, andlinguistic activities generally, are founded on underlying intentional phenomena. Independently of whether he is completely correct on the details ofhow language and intention mesh, Husser!' s valuable insights into the roleof meaning in intentionality generally deserve the closest attention of philosophers of language.RONALD McINTYRE AND DAVID WOODRUFF SMITHCASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE

NOTES1. Edmund Husser!, Ideen, I (Husserliana edition; Haag: Martinus Nijhoff,

1950), 84, pp. 203-4; 146, p. 357. In the following, page references to Ideas areto this edition, and all translations from Ideen, I, are our own. Our references willinclude section numbers to facilitate use of other editions, such as W. R. Boyce Gibson's English translation, Ideas (New York: Humanities Press, 1931).2. See David W. Smith and Ronald McIntyre, "Intentionality via Intensions,"Journal of Philosophy 68, No. 18 (Sept. 1971): 541-6l.3. Husser!, Idem, III (Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952), p. 89.


17/18

HUSSERL'S EQUATION OF MEANING AND NOEMA 1314. Dagfinn Fellesdal, "HusserI's Notion of Noema," Journal of Philosophy 66,No. 20 (Oct. 1969): 680-87; and "An Introduction to Phenomenology for AnalyticPhilosophers," in Contemporary Philosophy in Scandinavia, eds. Raymond E. Olsonand Anthony M. Paul (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972),

pp.417-29.5. Trans. J. N. Findlay (New York: Humanities Press, 1970), from LogischeUntersuchungen (2d ed., Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1913). References toLogical Investigations (abbreviated 'Ll') will be to Findlay's translation. At somepoints we have slightly modified the Findlay translation; all such instances are notedby ,* , following the page reference.6. In this choice of terminology Husserl differs consciously from Frege. In everyday German 'Bedeutung' means "meaning" or "significance", as does 'Sinn' in one of

its senses. Frege, however, uses 'Bedeutung' somewhat unusually for the referent ofan expression, reserving 'Sinn' for meaning or sense. HusserI uses 'Bedeutung' whereFrege uses 'Sinn', for specifically linguistic or expressed meaning. And Husserl uses'Sinn' for what he calls specifically noematic Sinn-the meanings of acts-which hesees as a more general notion than linguistic meaning (d. sec. 4, this paper). InLI, I, 15, Husserl comments on Frege's terminology.7. Parts of Frege's review are included in Peter Geach and Max Black, eds.,Translations from the Philosophical Writings ot Gottlob Frege (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966). The line quoted is from p. 79. A translation is also now available inMind: Gottlob Frege (trans. E. W. Kluge), "Review of Dr. E. HusserI's Philosophy ofArithmetic," "'find 81, No. 323 (July 1972): 321-37.8. Ibid. Cf. Frege, "The Thought: A Logical Inquiry," in Philosophical Logic,ed. P. F. Strawson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967).9. Cf. Bernard Bolzano, Theory of Science, ed. and trans. Rolf George (Berkeleyand Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972), esp. 48, 270, 271. Thisedition is an abridgement of Bolzano's Wissenschaftslehre, first published in 1837.10. Husser! does not define these terms; our hypotheses about their meaningsare based on his extensive and selective use of them. But they are at least coextensivewith the notions we associate with them.11. Husserl sometimes uses 'wirklich' in a broader sense, characterizing anythingwhich may be the object of an act prior to the phenomenological (and, especially,the transcendental) reduction. In this broader sense mathematical entities and naturalessences, though nontemporal and nonspatial, are "wirklich" (but meanings andnoemata are not).12. Cf. Husserl's contrast of the noema as a meaning ("intentional") entitywith entities that are reel, real, and wirklich in Ideas, 87-91, 97-99.13. "The Thought: A LogicalJnquiry," in Philosophical Logic (see note 8 above),

p.29.14. Guido Kung makes this point nicely in "HusserI on Pictures and IntentionalObjects," Review of Metaphysics 26, No.4 (June 1973): 675. Also, d. LI, I, 33.15. Cf. Ideas, 88-89. Kung, "Husserl on Pictures," p. 676. n. 11, has citedtextual evidence that from Logical Investigations to Ideas Husserl's view of meaningsunderwent just this change.


18/18

132 RONALD Me INTYRE AND DAVID WOODRUFF SMITH16. Husserl's development of this view is perhaps the definitive statement of the

classical "idea" idea of language, lately disparaged by W. V. Quine. See, for instance,Quine's Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York and London: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1969), p. 27; Donald Davidson and Jaakko Hintikka, eds., Wordsand Objectio1lS (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1969), p. 304.17. We know this primarily from Ideas, 88-91, 128-31: see Smith and Mc-Intyre (note 2 above). But the essentials are also present in Logical Im1estigatio1lS,esp. V, 20-21, where Husserl speaks of "ideal content" or "matter" rather thanof "noematic Sinn" (d. Husserl's comments on LI, V, 21, in Ideas, 94, pp. 234-35,and 133, p. 324).18. Its most explicit statement in LI is in V, 21, p. 590 (where "semantic es-sence" = "matter" = "Sinn"). The point is well confirmed by Husserl's conceptionof expression in LI, VI, 1-15, as well as in Formal and Tra1lScendental Logic,3, and Ideas, 124 (both of which we discuss in this section).19. Husserl, Formal and Tra1lScendental Logic, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague:Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), pp. 22-23 (our italics). (N.b. We have substituted 'meaninggiving' for 'sense-bestowing' in the Cairns translation and at one point have retainedthe German 'Bedeutung' and 'Sinn' where Cairns has 'signification' and 'sense' respectively. )20. Ibid., pp. 23-24. (Again we have retained 'Bedeutung' and 'Sinn'.)

Documents

Smith_mcintyre_husserl's Identification of Meaning and Noema