Meaning and Propositional Acts

Abstract

One of the persistently recurring suspicions in the secondary literature is that Husserl has given us a semantics at the expense of syntax or that his syntax is reducible to rules combining nominal presentations and not in any way transforming them or their constituents. What we want to study in this chapter is the very subtle and delicate way in which Husserl balances the claim that propositional acts and nominal acts are essentially different with the claim that they are essentially interconnected. We will attempt this by continuing our consideration of the developments in Husserl’s theory of meaning which take place between the first edition of the Investigations (1900/01) and Ideas I (1913).