Husserl and Analytic Philosophy
The key differences between the contemporary traditions that have come to be known loosely as analytic philosophy and phenomenology are all related to the central issue of the relationship between predication and perception. Frege's critique of psychologism has led to the conviction within the analytic tradition that philosophy may best defend rationality from relativism by detaching logic and semantics from all dependence on subjective intuitions. Logical analysis must therefore account for the interplay of sense and reference, without having recourse to a description of how we identify particulars through their perceived "looks." Husserl's emphasis on the priority and objective import of perception and on the continuity between predicative articulations and perceptual discriminations has yielded the conviction within the phenomenological tradition that logical analysis must always be complemented by description of pre-predicative intuitions. These methodological differences are related to broader differences in the philosophic projects of analysis and phenomenology. The analytic approach generally endorses the modern preference for calculative rationality, and remains suspicious of pre-modern categories such as formal causality and eidetic intuition. Its goal is to give an account of human intelligence that is compatible with the modern interpretation of nature as an ensemble of quantifiable entities and relations. The phenomenological approach stresses intellectual insight over procedural techniques, and proposes to rehabilitate many of the categories scorned by modern thinkers. In short, the differences between the two traditions are determined by their markedly divergent reactions to the critique of ancient and medieval philosophy initiated by Bacon, Descartes, and Hobbes and at the beginning of the modern era.
This study develops the following theses: 1) the analytic project of defending rationality by detaching logic and semantics from pre-predicative intuitions is fundamentally incoherent; 2) by contrast, the phenomenological method permits an accurate description of the continuity between predication and perception and therefore yields a coherent account of the objectivity of our knowledge; 3) the reason for the failure of the analytic project is its unwavering commitment to the modern account of intuition; 4) Husserl's theory of categorial intuition successfully revitalizes Aristotle's account of the genesis of sortal predicates. These are strong claims, which are not founded on nostalgia for pre-modern certitudes but on the conviction that modern philosophy in general and the analytic tradition in particular have introduced inappropriate criteria for certitude and objectivity. An effort has been made throughout this study, however, to stress the positive achievements of the analytic tradition and to suggest ways in which they may be coordinated with the often complementary achievements of phenomenology. There is no reason why rigorous logical analysis cannot be combined with rigorous description of shared cognitive intuitions.
Frege's critique of psychologism is the founding document of the analytic tradition. Chapter I calls attention to his failure to address the empiricist premises of psychologism. His occasional and vague references to Kantian and Platonic themes do not provide a convincing corrective to the empiricist reduction of intuition to the having of sensory impressions. Moreover, his radical separation of "being-true" from "being-taken-to-be-true" tacitly entails the postulate of a detached investigator who is somehow not subject to the ordinary human predicament of having to discern the senses of things and the conditions of their truth. There is, however, a hint of a more promising approach to psychologism in Frege's description of the functional role of senses as "modes of givenness." His discussion of this notion testifies to a residual commitment to something like the Greek notion that the intuited forms of things are the principles of their intelligibility.
Chapter II is devoted to an appraisal of subsequent attempts within the analytic tradition to account for our access to senses and to their truth-conditions without calling into question Frege's suppression of cognitive intuition. Influenced by the later Wittgenstein, many contemporary philosophers attach senses more closely than would Frege to contingent signifiers. Evoking Wittgenstein's dictum that the meaning of a word is not some real or ideal object that it designates but a rule guiding its use, they contend that to grasp the sense of a sentence is simply to know "how to" use it appropriately in some language-game currently operative in one's linguistic community. On this reading, there is no need to locate propositions in some other-worldly realm, because their objectivity is sufficiently guaranteed by their being expressed within the common language. The point of Wittgenstein's rejection of the visual metaphors of "picturing" and "mapping" in favor of the more pragmatic metaphors of "use" and "game" was to counter the notion of a screen of concepts functioning as mediators between words and world. Unfortunately, he never adequately distinguished between intelligent praxis and routinized habit. His position has therefore encouraged behavioristic interpretations of linguistic usage. Moreover, his language-game semantics remains implicitly committed to a nominalism that rejects any link between linguistic senses and the "looks" of things. What is needed is a description of how the forms of things are available to cognitive intuitions, and of how speech acts consciously deploy a repertory of senses derived from such intuitions. The method of logical analysis does not, and cannot address these issues.
Chapters III and IV consider how Frege's argument-function model for predication and his quantifier-variable notation for expressing generality transformed both logic and ontology. His brilliant interpretation of concepts as functions called attention to the unity and asymmetry of naming and predicating, and accentuated the difference between the incomplete being of concepts and the complete being of objects. His invention of the quantifier-variable notation made it possible for logic to sort out ambiguities of scope in sentences containing multiple and overlapping indicators of generality. Unfortunately, however, Frege's penchant for mathematical models and notational systems inclined him finally to opt for an extensional logic which defines the interplay of sense and reference exclusively in terms of procedures involving substitutions. Having thus detached predication from pre-predicative intuitions, Frege's logic rejects the primacy given by Aristotle to the presentational function of species-looks. These decisions had the effect of minimizing the ontological difference between concepts and objects, by making it impossible to regard concepts as senses, i.e., as modes of presentation. Frege's criticism of the traditional theory of predication is in fact based on a misunderstanding of the Aristotelian categories of substance and essence, as filtered through subsequent interpretations by Locke and Leibniz. A sketch of the transformation of these categories during the modern era sets the stage for an appraisal of Frege's claim that traditional logic reifies concepts and thus generates the pseudo-problem of the existence of universals. Finally, there is a link between Frege's decision to rely on a substitutional account of reference, and the general impoverishment of ontology within the subsequent analytic tradition. The extensional approach to logic obscures all ontological difference between objects and modes of presentation, and ultimately reduces objects to possibles, and existence to instantiation.
Contemporary theories of speech acts construe judgment as a stance taken with regard to a propositional content. Chapter V traces this position to the theory of judgment first proposed by Descartes and later endorsed by Brentano and Frege. Aristotle had thought that judgment is an assertive articulation of the relationship between things and their features. According to Descartes, however, it cannot simply be assumed that the intellect grasps the forms of things through intellectual intuition. Hence, it is impossible to regard judgments as directed upon things and their features. We must therefore distinguish within judgment between the presentation of a predicative combination of ideas and the assertive attitude towards the content of that predication. Although Brentano reasserted the traditional notion of intentional directedness, he nevertheless subscribed to the modern rejection of intellectual intuition. He concluded therefore that judgments are positive or negative positions taken with regard to propositional contents. Frege regards negation as part of the judged content, and hence construes all acts of judgmental commitment as affirmative. However, he agrees that we must distinguish between the act of grasping a propositional content and the further act of judging it to be true. Strawson and Searle appropriately stress the role of context in contributing to the full specification of a proposition's truth-conditions. Such is power of the modern suspicion of intellectual intuition, however, that they consider the contribution of context in an exclusively linguistic manner as the tacit possession by interlocutors of relevant presupposed propositional contents. Since Husserl makes a detailed criticism of Brentano's theory of judgment, consideration of this topic sets the stage for an appraisal of his reaffirmation of Aristotle's view that judgment is directed primarily upon things and their features and not upon propositions as such.
Chapter VI is devoted to an exposition of Husserl's radical break with the modern interpretation of mind. There is no evidence that he was particularly conversant with ancient or medieval metaphors for the intellect's transcending mode of being. Yet even his earliest works seem to have as their goal a revival of the pre-modern view that our perceptions and predications deal with real things and situations rather than with mental substitutes. Against phenomenalism, he argues that our minds have direct contact with things. Against the British empiricists, he contends that we have an unmediated grasp of essences. Against Kant, he claims that the operations of mind are accessible to immanent reflection. His description of eidetic intuition is decidedly more Aristotelian than Platonic. We first grasp essences not as ideal objects, but as features shared by particular things. Such features are what we know when we know particulars. We grasp such features both as forms whose surplus sense exceeds the particularity of particular instances, and as conditions for the manifestation of particulars as such. Husserl thus describes particular and categorial intuition as having a reciprocal founding-founded relationship. Intuition of particulars is a condition for the discernment of forms, and intuition of the forms of things is a condition for their identification as particulars. This position amounts to a restatement of Aristotle's account of the relationship between first and second substance. Like Aristotle, Husserl also describes how the thematic discernment of essences requires the use of complex sorting procedures and the imaginative consideration of limit-cases.
Chapter VII begins with a discussion of Husserl's criticism of the philosophic pretensions of extensional logic. He calls attention to the naturalistic ideology governing the the tendency of logicians to conflate mechanically reiterative computing procedures and authentic deductions, and even to think that the algorithms of the logical calculus somehow constitute a theory of logic. The method of phenomenological reduction is designed to counter naturalism's forgetfulness of the accomplishments of the human spirit. A comparison with Kant stresses the broader scope of Husserl's transcendental critique of reason which rejects Kant's limitation of the sphere of knowledge to the objects cognized by mathematics and physics and brings to intuitive givenness the conditions for the possibility of pre-scientific knowledge. Husserl's description of how phenomenological reflection highlights the relationship between objects and their modes of presentatation is the key to understanding his view that judgments directly articulate facts and that propositions emerge only in reflection. Propositions are facts considered as supposed. Hence there is no mediating conceptual stratum in between linguistic articulations and facts. The intellect is free of mediating structures, for its mode of being is to "become somehow" the forms of all things.