Heidegger on Meaning and Practice

Dissertation, Stanford University (1993)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

In Being and Time Heidegger advances a critique of Husserl's theory of intentionality by arguing that human understanding consists more fundamentally in an orientation toward practical activity than in mere cognition, for example deliberate perception or judgment. Heidegger criticizes Husserl for importing normative concepts drawn from logic into what purports to be a pure, presuppositionless description of consciousness. Above all, Heidegger is critical of the idealized conception of meaning that informs Husserlian phenomenology. The critique put forward in Being and Time consequently rests on Heidegger's own view of the nature of meaning, its role in everyday practice, and its constitution in discourse. For Husserl, just as the notion of the "noema" or intentional content amounts to a generalization of the concept of meaning, so too what he calls the "positing" character of intentionality, that is, its inherent validity claim or presumption of actuality, is a generalization of the semantic concept of illocutionary force, more specifically assertoric force. Heidegger's conception of meaning, by contrast, eschews traditional semantic concepts borrowed from logic, and instead draws on Heidegger's claim that things in the world originally figure into our practical activities not as "occurrent" or object-like but as "available" for use. Practice thus lies at the heart of everyday significance, and it is the expressive-communicative dimension of practice, what Heidegger calls "discourse" , that underlies linguistic articulation. Assertion amounts to a derivative mode of discourse, parasitic on pre-predictive forms of expression and communication. The traditional concept of meaning as a discrete occurrent entity rests on an overgeneralization of the logical concept of the truth-valuable content of a proposition or assertion. Heidegger's account of meaning and practice in Being and Time, then, is an attempt to trace the origin of assertions in linguistic practice and to show the impossibility of recapturing the phenomenon of intentionality by appeal to the impoverished concept of meaning drawn from the assertoric paradigm central to the semantic tradition. Finally, I argue that conformism, or what Heidegger calls "inauthenticity" , is an unavoidable artifact of discourse, since the ongoing interpretation and reinterpretation essential to discourse necessarily rests on an indifferent normative background underwritten by the anonymous authority of "the one"

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,616

External links

  • This entry has no external links. Add one.
Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Meaning, categories and subjectivity in the early Heidegger.Leslie MacAvoy - 2005 - Philosophy and Social Criticism 31 (1):21-35.
Heidegger and the source of meaning.Charlotte Knowles - 2013 - South African Journal of Philosophy 32 (4):327-338.
Heidegger and `the concept of time'.Lilian Alweiss - 2002 - History of the Human Sciences 15 (3):117-132.
Heidegger's critique of Husserl's and Brentano's accounts of intentionality.Dermot Moran - 2000 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 43 (1):39-65.
On Heidegger's Being and time.Reiner Schürmann - 2008 - New York: Routledge. Edited by Simon Critchley & Steven Levine.
On being social: A reply to Olafson.Taylor Carman - 1994 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 37 (2):203 – 223.
On Heidegger's Being and time.Simon Critchley - 2008 - New York: Routledge. Edited by Reiner Schürmann & Steven Levine.
On Tugendhat's analysis of Heidegger's concept of truth.Rufus Duits - 2007 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 15 (2):207 – 223.
The Being of the Work of Art in Heidegger.George J. Stack - 1969 - Philosophy Today 13 (3):159-173.
Heidegger's concept of presence.Taylor Carman - 1995 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 38 (4):431 – 453.

Analytics

Added to PP
2015-02-06

Downloads
1 (#1,770,361)

6 months
1 (#1,042,085)

Historical graph of downloads

Sorry, there are not enough data points to plot this chart.
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Taylor Carman
Barnard College

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references