Abstract
From a purely quantitative point of view, Edmund Husserl has devoted a rather small amount of time and space to the study of language proper. Essentially, his contributions within this domain amount to the description of language use in the First Logical Investigation (Husserl 1901), and the determination of the essential properties of language as such (independent of any specific use) in the Fourth Logical Investigation. Otherwise, language is only sparsely dealt with in Husserl’s writings: the unpublished note “On the Logic of Signs (Semiotics)” (Husserl 1890) anticipates the distinction between “expression” and “index” which constitutes the starting point of the First Logical Investigation; i.e. the difference between a linguistic or any other sign bestowed with intentional meaning and any type of sign which is immediately or physically linked to its meaning: smoke → fire; scar → wound; weathercock → wind, etc.); Formal and Transcendental Logic (Husserl 1929) contains an appendix related to the theory of syntax outlined in the Fourth Logical Investigation; and, finally, a number of passages from Experience and Judgment (Husserl 1939) reexamine the relation between perceptually formed or antepredicatively structured meaning and its linguistic, predicative articulation (as we shall see this issue is also in the heart of the discussions unfolded in the Fourth Logical Investigation).
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Notes
- 1.
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It is, thus a counterpart to Saussure’s synchronic determination of langue as the proper object of the new science he meant to inaugurate. However, in his writings, Roman Jakobson suggests that it has had much more immediate bearings on the development of structural linguistics than Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale (Saussure 1915) since it provided with a principled, positive determination of “structure” in terms of dependence relations. Moreover, the essence of language as such in Husserl is not semiological, its cornerstone is not the sign as it is in Saussure; rather, the heart of language as such is syntactic: its primitive constituent is the syntactic construction (cf. section on The Syntactic A Priori below).
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The expression is from Smith (1987).
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To my knowledge, only Jocelyn Benoist (1999, 2001, 2002) has remarked that Husserl in fact unfolds two different grammatical a priori in the Fourth Logical Investigation, one syntactic - as it is generally acknowledged - and one semantic-mereological. Benoist, however and contrary to what will be claimed here, dismisses the latter as inconsistent (cf. Bundgaard 2004a, b).
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Examples like the above abound in Cognitive Linguistics (cf. section on Language and Conceptual Structure - Evidence from Cognitive Linguistics below). Even though they sometimes appear to be invoked in order to challenge the referential function of language tout court, this sort of infelicitous conceptualism does not follow; a Husserlian intentionalism is all as possible: we use plurivocal words to express univocal thoughts about things.
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It follows, then, that the meaning of each words sign is relative to the part of the global representation (the whole “matter”) it is intended to evoke.
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The German terms have been added because the English translation lends itself to misinterpretation: Sachlage (or ‘situation’) seems here to be used in much the same sense as in Experience and Judgment where it is the objective correlate of any perceptual judgment giving rise to the constitution of a meaning-content (or a Sachverhalt, state of affairs). Thus ‘a is parallel to b’ and ‘b is parallel to a’ express different states of affairs, but name the same Sachlage. Similarly ’matter’ in the English translation should not, on the contrary, be confused with ’matter’ as it is used in the Fifth Logical Investigation.
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The fact that language makes default sense “in the void,” regardless of context, points to the existence of a pure grammatical a priori, which is defined independently of any intentional framework and, thus any mental acts in the above sense: it is the a priori that makes possible (but unspecified) meaning follow from syntactic well-formedness. The grammatical a priori also has a cognitive correlate, namely the level of pure grammatical intuition: the capacity of recognizing physical manifestations (sound patterns or marks) as tokens of possible language use, since formed according to the rules. It is thanks to their grammatical intuition that people find parrots funny even though their acoustic blasts are devoid of meaning proper. The grammatical a priori, in this sense, is what the Fourth Logical Investigation sets out to establish.
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One of the first philosophers to consider the Fourth Logical Investigation as a precursor of modern logic - and incidentally of modern linguistics - was Bar-Hillel, who in his paper from 1957, “Husserl’s Conception of a purely Logical Grammar,” concludes: “[…], we may say that Husserl’s conception of a purely logical grammar has to be regarded, in a very essential and pregnant sense, as a forerunner of Carnap’s conception of a general logical syntax. One has ‘only’ to omit the detour through the realm of meaning, and the reliance upon an apodictic evidence and to add a mastery in modern symbolic logic and its philosophy in order to perform the transition from Husserl to Carnap” (Bar-Hillel 1957: 369). Gardiès (1975) very instructively develops the theoretical affinities between Chomsky and Husserl, and much closer to us, also the French phenomenologist J. Benoist concludes one of his numerous works on the Fourth Logical Investigation with the following remark: “One of the logical consequences of the considerations developed in the present work, particularly as regards the syntactic a priori, would certainly consist in readdressing the issue about the connection between Chomsky and phenomenology and about the possibility of developing a Chomskyan interpretation (minus mentalism) of phenomenology” (Benoist 1999: 268; my translation). And finally, D. Münch critically observes: “If we look at the fourth Logical Investigation we can see that Husserl is a forerunner of Chomsky. In this investigation Husserl applies the basic concepts of formal ontology which he had developed in the third investigation to grammar. Language is conceived as a field which is guided by purely formal rules, which has to be studied by a discipline he calls ‘pure grammar’ […] This grammar has an algorithmic character, too. But Husserl does not only support a computational approach to language. Moreover, it is one of his central claims that our intentions are restricted by the laws of purely logical grammar. Thoughts which are not in accordance with these laws are nonsense, i.e. they cannot be directed towards an intentional object” (Münch 2002: 203).
- 10.
To avoid all possible misunderstandings I stress as such: the concepts used by Husserl in the first nine paragraphs (dependent and independent meanings, relations of foundation, etc.) neither have been ignored nor are they to be considered as essentially incompatible with syntactic analysis as such. As we have already seen, structural linguistics exploits exactly these conceptual tools in its characterization of language as an autonomous, functional system. And as Mulligan (1988) has shown there is nothing intrinsically inconsistent in a mereological approach to syntax: in his Theory of Language, Karl Bühler (1934) indeed exposes the basic tenets of such a syntactic theory (to a large extent developed in the very same terms by the founding father of modern theory of syntax, Lucien Tesnière (1959). My point is simply that no one seems to have further elaborated, even appreciated, Husserl’s sketch of a comprehensive theory of semantic unity in mereological terms.
- 11.
Cf., “The impossibility attaches, to be more precise, not to what is singular in the meanings to be combined, but to the essential kinds, the semantic categories, that they fall under” (Fourth Logical Investigation, 62/318). “Semantic category” translates “Bedeutungskategorie,” but what is meant here is nothing but syntactic category. The fact that the same term, “Bedeutung” is used indistinctly throughout the whole Investigation (yet in two different senses) may have served to blur the essential differences between the two approaches.
- 12.
Findlay’s translation does not faithfully render Husserl’s expressions. In the German version, Husserl says “Gehen wir formalisierend von der gegebenden Bedeutung […] zur entsprechenden Bedeutungsgestalt, zur ‘Satzform’ über, so erhalten wir dies S ist p, eine Formidee, die in ihrem Umfang lauter selbständige Bedeutungen befaßt” (Fourth Logical Investigation (Husserliana Edition: 318-319). Findlay conflates “Bedeutungsgestalt” and “Satzform” into “pure form of meaning” (§10, 62), which contributes to obliterating the fact that whenever expressions such as “meaning” or “semantic (category)” are used in this and the following paragraphs, what is meant is syntactic ‘function’ or syntactic ‘category.’
- 13.
This is why moments, though dependent, are said to be prior to pieces: “Strictly speaking our approach is positive in the case of what is dependent, negative in the case of what is independent” (Third Logical Investigation, §7, 13): moments are by essence structural parts.
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“Presentation” translates Vorstellung (idea, representation).
- 15.
In view of the entirely syntactic analyses, which follow in the Investigation, this statement is indeed astonishing: it is easily seen that Husserl’s mereological foundation of linguistic constituency is not at all applicable to syntax in his sense. Let us consider the syncategorematic expression α as a syntactic category - regardless of any signification - ; we now apply the law according to which it should appear in a (syntactic) whole of a specific sort G(αβ … μ), where β … μ stand for determinate sorts of syntactic categories. Obviously the extension of this law (say, the number of syntactic constructions in which α, e.g., the conjunction ‘but,’ can occur) is indefinitely big, and thus quite indeterminate. Now, compare this to its semantic counterpart, where ‘but’ expresses an “intentional form of combination;” in this case, “but” requires only one sort of context: one in which a relation of contrast, tension, or conflict is intended to hold between two partial representations combined by ‘but.’
- 16.
Notice that this also holds for “and”: when “and” applies to a multiplicity it may very well express that the multiplicity is intended or conceptualized as a group. Thus “disco, Wittgenstein, Fingerspitzgefühl” is a multiplicity, whereas “disco, Wittgenstein, and Fingerspitzgefühl” is (somehow intended as) a group; for example because the second letter in each word is i.
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- 18.
Cf. Talmy (2000, p. 71). Langacker (1991, p. 78 sq.) operates with the same distinction between “summary” and “sequential scanning”. Langacker notices that such differences in perceptual intentionality (what he calls the “construal relation” to the object) can be expressed by the very grammatical/categorical form of the expression. “Sequential scannings” are likely to be expressed by finite verbs, whereas “summary scanning” are likely to be expressed by means of prepositions or nominalizations of verbs. So even though “the apple falls to the ground” and ”the falling apple” share the same reference scene, they express different types of conceptualization by means of different kinds of grammatical categories each of which have semantic import. The idea that grammatical categories do have semantic import is key to cognitive linguistics and indeed also to phenomenological linguistics. Roman Ingarden (1931) made exactly the same point when he established that the difference between verbal and nominal significations/expressions stems from the type of intentionality implied by their categorical contents, i.e. from the kind of “construal relation” to the object they express qua verbal or nominal (cf. Ingarden 1931, p. 76 ff.).
- 19.
If the issue of the Fourth Logical Investigation is language as such and if language is a phenomenon endowed with certain properties and characteristics that make it evidently distinguishable from other objects, then the essential distinctions proper to language should, allegedly, be drawn within the sphere of grammar itself. The essential properties assigned to language should be extracted from language itself, and not from the relation between linguistic forms of meaning composition and intentional forms of combination. Hence the reorientation effectuated by Husserl in the middle of the Fourth Logical Investigation.
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Bundgaard, P.F. (2010). Husserl and Language. In: Schmicking, D., Gallagher, S. (eds) Handbook of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2646-0_21
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