The Noema Revisited: Hard Cases

Abstract

My beginning will also be my ending. I want to consider two examples of noemata that seem to resist adequate description—so much so that they do not yet have names. And yet, paradoxically, they do: Brian Fawcett and the light on this page. I begin and end with their description. First, the one we intend, in both senses of the word, as we read a story and, then, the one meant as we observe the photon detectors in a test of Bell’s Theorem. Throughout, my goal is to develop an analysis that can enhance a view of the noema as ontologically the same whether the intentional object is a physical object, a cultural object, a process of reflection, an emotion, an hallucination, an abstract property of an irrational number, an author of a book, or a quantum phenomenon. As Husserl developed in Cartesian Meditations,¹ the intentional object plays the role of “transcendental clue” to the multiplicity of conscious processes that bear it within them as the meant object. Through a consideration of my two hard cases I show that these and all objects are intentional ones or noemata, all of which are ontologically similar.