Although the semantic insights about natural language produced so far by neuroscientific research have been meagre, (Pulvermüller 2010) they have provided one important empirical finding which lang...

Artykuł referuje poglądy amerykańskiego filozofa Daniela C. Dennetta, dotyczące językowego charakteru świadomości. W pierwszym kroku autor rekonstruuje Dennettowską strategię naturalizacji świadomości, pokazując, jak język umożliwia powstanie świadomości w toku ewolucji ludzi. Naturalizacja ta jest możliwa, wedle Dennetta, jedynie przy behawiorystycznym założeniu, zgodnie z którym świadomość jest ukrytym zachowaniem językowym. Autor pokazuje, jak Dennett przyswaja i przekształca pierwotne pomysły behawiorystów Meada, Skinnera i Jaynesa, wpisując je w ewolucyjny scenariusz. Inskrypcja ta prowadzi do konkretnych problemów, rozważanych w ostatniej części pracy: a) w (...) filozofii Dennetta występują właściwie dwie definicje świadomości: pierwsza głosi, że świadomość jest pewnego rodzaju zachowaniem językowym, druga natomiast, że jest wirtualną maszyną memetyczną; b) Dennett nie wyjaśnia zasady rozstrzygalności, która pokazywałaby, jak dana treść umysłu może zostać uświadomiona, zamiast tego podaje tylko metaforę rywalizacji, w której pewne zdarzenia w mózgu wygrywają z innymi; c) wpisanie możliwego scenariusza rozwoju świadomości w pejzaż ewolucji nie oznacza jeszcze, że teoria może zostać empirycznie sprawdzona. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of occasional expressions, as discussed by Husserl in his First and Sixth Logical Investigation in relation to the problem of gestures. It aims to show that gestures are intimately related to the use of occasional expressions and have an indispensible contribution to their understanding. In doing so, the paper points out an important lack in Husserl’s early theory of signification, which has to do with its exclusion of all aspects related to intersubjective communication. The paper (...) begins with a short presentation of Husserl’s interpretation of occasional expressions in the Logical Investigations. Further on it identifies the main source of Husserl’s difficulties in coming to terms with this issue in his problematic treatment of communication, and shows how the consideration of gestures can help overcome these difficulties. Finally, the paper considers some consequences which derive from such a treatment of the issue for Husserl’s theory of fulfillment (Bedeutungserfüllung). (shrink)

In the present paper I attempt an interpretation of Martin Heidegger’s analysis of animality, developed in winter semester 1929/1930. My general purpose is to examine Heidegger’s analysis in the wider context of formal-indicative phenomenology as such. Thus I show that in order to develop a phenomenology of animality, Heidegger must tacitly renounce the re-enactment of animal experience in which the formal-indicative concepts of his analysis could gain concreteness, and he resorts instead to scientific concepts and concrete experiments in biology or (...) zoology. This is due to the fact that what I call the a-logical bursts into the field of the phenomenological regard when it is oriented toward animality. I therefore argue that the phenomenology of animality presents us with a paradigmatic case of a tension that is at work in any phenomenon, one between logos and a-logos, between hiddenness and unhiddenness—constituting a basic problem of future research in phenomenology and its approach to intersubjectivity and alterity. (shrink)

In the Logical Investigations, Husserl argues that “sign” is an ambiguous word because it refers to two essentially different signitive functions: indication and expression. Indications work in an evidential way, providing information through a direct association of the sign and the presence of an object or state of affairs. Expressions work in a non-evidential way, pointing to possible experiences and displaying that the speaker or someone else has had such experience. In this paper I show that Husserl went back to (...) the distinction between indications and expressions in a much later text, a manuscript from 1931, in order to distinguish between two kinds of communication with different essential features. I call these indicative and expressive communication. My claim is that Husserl’s distinction between these two types of communication is a crucial contribution to the phenomenology of knowledge sharing. In knowledge sharing, we appropriate someone else’s knowledge as someone else’s knowledge. Husserl shows that only expressive communication, and not indicative communication, makes this appropriation possible. Since Husserl argues that only humans use expressive communication, his analysis of indicative and expressive communication is also a contribution to understanding the uniquely human capacity for accumulating knowledge. (shrink)