RESUMO 31 | COMUNICAÇÕES

On the relation between the concepts of operation, judgement and meaning in the first section of Husserl’s “Formal and Transcendental Logic”

NAKANO, Marcos | PUC-SP, Brasil

Both Husserl’s theory of meaning in the Logical Investigations, as species of matter of meaning acts, and his theory of meaning that firstly came in to light in 1908 in his Lectures on the doctrine of meaning, with the distinction between noetic and noematic meaning, are well known. On both cases, meaning is considered as being indifferent relative to the positional quality of meaning acts, i.e., independently of judgement in general.

We face, in Formal and transcendental Logic, and contrary to this aspect of Husserl’s theories of meaning we have just referred to, the affirmation that meaning accessibility depends upon operation, as well as on judgment. This shift affects both what Husserl called Pure Logical Grammar and Logical theory of validity in the Logical Investigations.

On the case of Pure Grammar, the set of laws of meaning were supposed to separate sense and non-sense through the establishment of the possible connections between kinds of meaning, and this would be done through a process of variation of these kinds, such that certain kinds of formation give rise to wholes that are themselves meaningful, and others not. These laws were supposed to be purely objective, and to be about the very possibility of combinations of species of meaning acts, without any reference to the subjects who, on specific occasions, form the various kinds of meaningful wholes through his thought-activities. In Formal and Transcendental Logic, on the other hand, Husserl considers that the concept of operation as the “key” concept through which the investigation of these laws is to be undertaken. The very formation of the laws of Pure Logical Grammar, he states, depends upon an “exposition of the fundamental operations and its laws”, which refer, in its turn, to laws of iteration. These laws are supposed to be laws that pertain to judgement, in the sense that meanings refer to thought-activities that make them emerge. Instead of considering them as purely objective, as “being there independently of subjects”, these laws refer, rather, to the possible kinds of their activities and the byproducts of such activities.

On the second case, the thesis exposed in the Logical Investigations was such that the laws determining the difference between valid and invalid consequences and purely logical principles are founded upon an set of semantical procedures, such that the fact that subjects derive certain propositions from other propositions, and accept certain principles as evident, has nothing to do with the determination of logical laws, which are purely objective, relating to the truth or falsity of ideal meanings. Here again, Husserl does not accept this thesis in Formal and Transcendental Logic, as he describes laws of logical consequences and logical principles in general as pertaining to relations of compatibility, incompatibility and necessity between judgements, independently of truth values. It is astonishing to see his approximation with analyses such as that of G. Heymans, J. S. Mill and other psychologists criticized in the Logical Investigations. Here again, the condition of possibility of access to meaning is the reference to certain kinds of subjective activity, particularly, those containing the intentional quality of positionality.

We will, then, to conclude, try to show how Husserl attempts to dodge certain undesired consequences of his descriptions, particularly the fact that, given that positing a proposition becomes a condition for meaning access, the account of the cases where we grasp meaning without believing in them becomes problematic.