I reconstruct the notion of significance [_Sinnhaftigkeit_] in the later Husserl, with attention to his conceptions of judgment and transcendental logic. My analysis is motivated by the idea that an account of significance can help to connect analytic, Anglo-American conceptions of meaning as a precise, law-governed phenomenon investigated via linguistic analysis and Continental European conceptions of meaning in a broader “existential” sense. I argue that Husserl’s later work points to a transcendental-logical conception of a founding level of _significance_ [_Sinnhaftigkeit_] prior (...) to language, and that this conception meets characteristically analytic demands for precision and governance by logical constraints. At the same time, since it is based in descriptions of perceptual intentionality at the level of essential possibility, it leaves room for an account of meaning as a partially undetermined phenomenon of lived experience, and not just of our language and concepts, and thereby meets the characteristically Continental demand to take at face value meaning’s vagueness and indeterminacy in everyday human life. (shrink)

This article is composed of three sections that investigate the epistemological foundations of Husserl’s idea of logic from the Logical Investigations . First, it shows the general structure of this logic. Husserl conceives of logic as a comprehensive, multi-layered theory of possible theories that has its most fundamental level in a doctrine of meaning. This doctrine aims to determine the elementary categories that constitute every possible meaning (meaning-categories). The second section presents the main idea of Husserl’s search for an epistemological (...) foundation for knowledge, science and logic. Their epistemological clarification can only be reached through a detailed analysis of the structure of those intentions that give us what is meant in our intentions. To reveal the intuitive giveness of logical forms is the ultimate aim of Husserl’s epistemology of logic. Logical forms and meaning-categories can only be given in a certain higher-order intuition that Husserl calls categorical intuition. The third section of this article distinguishes different kinds of categorical intuition and shows how the most basic logical categories and concepts are given to us in a categorical abstraction. (shrink)

Husserl’s Logical Investigations has undergone explicitly conceptualist and non-conceptualist interpretations. For Richard Cobb-Stevens, he has extended understanding into the domain of sensuous intuition, leaving no simple perceptions that are actually separated from higher-level understanding. According to Kevin Mulligan, Husserl does in fact sunder nominal and propositional seeing from the simple or straightforward—and yet interpretative—seeing of particulars. To see simply is not to exercise an individual meaning or a general concept. Arguing that Logical Investigations provides evidence for both views, I endeavour (...) to show that the account of perceptual consciousness in Husserl’s subsequent work is far more clear and consistent. It is one of growing beyond the situation portrayed by Mulligan and into the one explicated by Cobb-Stevens. Though they are notionally separable, pre-conceptual syntheses at the passive and noematic levels are inevitably interwoven with conceptual and categorial articulations in a developed consciousness. (shrink)

Historically, when psychology broke away from a philosophical mode of scholarship it strove to become a natural science. This meant that it largely imitated the concepts and practices of the natural sciences which included the use of abstract terms to designate many of its phenomena with the consequence that psychology is often more abstract and generic than it ought to be. Husserl has emphasized the role of the life-world as the ultimate basis of all knowledge and a serious consideration of (...) its role implies that psychology’s manner of labeling its phenomena should be less abstract and closer to the way the phenomena are experienced in the lifeworld. If so, this means that psychology’s primary data should be physiognomies or the expressive characteristics intrinsic to objects and situations. However, the complexities involved in the perception of physiognomies create difficulties for the practice of science. It is suggested that certain Husserlian phenomenological contributions concerning categorial modes of experiencing could be helpful in meeting scientific criteria. (shrink)

This paper accomplishes three goals. First, the essay demonstrates that Edmund Husserl’s theory of meaning consciousness from his 1901 Logical Investigations is internally inconsistent and falls apart upon closer inspection. I show that Husserl, in 1901, describes non-intuitive meaning consciousness as a direct parallel or as a ‘mirror’ of intuitive consciousness. He claims that non-intuitive meaning acts, like intuitions, have substance and represent their objects. I reveal that, by defining meaning acts in this way, Husserl cannot account for our experiences (...) of countersensical, absurd, or impossible meanings. Second, I examine how Husserl came to recognize this 1901 mistake in his 1913/14 Revisions to the Sixth Logical Investigation. I discuss how he accordingly reformulates his understanding of non-intuitive meaning acts from the ground up in those Revisions, where this also allows for him to properly account for the experience of impossible meanings. Instead of describing them as mirrors of intuitions, Husserl takes non-intuitive meaning acts to be modifications of intuitions, where they have no substance and do not represent their objects. Finally, in the conclusion to this essay, I demonstrate how this fundamental change to his understanding of meaning consciousness forced Husserl to revise other central tenets of his philosophy, such that the trajectory of his thought can only be properly understood in light of these revisions to his theory of non-intuitive meaning consciousness. (shrink)

Phenomenology and experimental psychology have been largely interested in the same thing when it comes to attention. By building on the work of Aron Gurwitsch, especially his ideas of attention and restructuration, this paper attempts to articulate common ground in psychology and phenomenology of attention through discussion of a new way to think about multistability in some phenomena. What psychology views as an attentionality-intentionality phenomenon, phenomenology views as an intentionality-attentionality phenomenon. The proposal is that an awareness of this restructuring of (...) attentionality and intentionality can benefit both approaches to attention. After reviewing Husserl’s position on attentionality and intentionality, this paper examines multistable phenomena, redefines the attentional transformation called restructuring, discusses disciplinary perspectives on attention and gives an example using common ground. (shrink)

The recent investigations into knowledge and its elements viz facts, skills and objects have become prominent in various subfields of philosophy and other areas like linguistics, cognitive science, neuroscience and artificial intelligence. These investigations have been mainly on understanding the relation between the intentionality and its referential entities to know how they enrich knowledge with their existence. This article starts with an exploration of the fundamental aspects of judgemental sense from the knowledge origins perspective. To explain the consequences of this, (...) I start with reconstructing the notion of categorial intuitions described in Husserl’s sixth Logical Investigations by relating it to ‘knowledge origination’ as an intuitive fulfilment of signifying acts. This offers a relation of perceptual synthesis, operating implicitly among the signifying intentions upon grasping intended objects, in view of language structures such as copulas. This leads to the synthesis of intuitive aspects mainly from the categorial elements for a judgemental sense or thinking and the attitude from the very sphere of perception. The tension between categorial intuitions is understood as foundational acts and founded acts. Husserl’s sixth Logical Investigation describes the notion of passive synthesis, the genesis of categoriality in every realm of sensibility that allows one to formulate the relational role among the ‘act of knowing’ and phenomenological approaches to the judgemental sense. Thus, the investigation focuses on perceptual judgements and categories, which fulfils the judgemental sense of categorial elements and attitude. (shrink)