Journal of the History of Philosophy

NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS 377 present. But the negative criterion is all that is necessary in the present case, and not to accept it is the same as rejecting Descartes' terminology. But Professor Norton surely does not want to do this, at least not for the purposes of the paper under consideration, for then he would not have an argument against Descartes. Thus, his contention that the two claims about hidden faculties are inconsistent is incorrect because the one faculty would perform acts the substance itself can, while the other would have to accomplish something the substance cannot. To the best of my knowledge, Professor Norton has not discovered an essential inconsistency in the Meditations. By way of conclusion, I want to make a suggestion concerning the identity of the hidden faculty to which Descartes alludes in the first hypothesis. Given his statements about faculties and their relations to substance, the very hypothesis that there might be a hidden one should strike one as odd. However, since the first hypothesis concerns the origin of adventitious ideas, the following seems plausible: Even by Meditation III Descartes has not committed himself to the view that he does not have a body. He just does not know that he does. This point is established by my discussion of the central passage from Meditation II. It could quite well be that the hidden faculty to which Descartes alludes is the aspect of the body, particularly the imagination, involved in furnishing men with their ideas of the extended world. This aspect of human nature would be cognitively hidden because Descartes lacks sufficient evidence to justify believing in the existence of bodies. This conjecture is supported, I believe, by Descartes' discussion in the opening paragraphs of Meditation VI of imagination's role in man's perception of the independently existing world. Especially important is Descartes' suggestion that mind is formally involved in the concept of the imagination, though the converse is not true. In alluding to imagination under the guise of a hidden faculty, Descartes might be looking backward to his conclusions concerning mind and body in Meditation II and forward to his full theory of perception in Meditation VI. TED B. HUMPHREY Arizona State University HUSSERL AND FREGE ON MEANING Two recent articles have appeared which explore a paralleI between the views of Frege and Husserl.1 The point of comparison concerns Husserl's distinction between "noemata" and the intentional objects of mental acts and Frege's distinction between the Senses and the references of linguistic expressions. I do not want to raise any questions concerning the appropriateness of such comparisons. But I do want to question what appears to be their intended moral. Two recent commentators on Hussefl's theory of meaning conclude their discussion with the following observation: "To see phenomenology as a theory of intentionality via intensions is, in the final analysis, just to make sense of phenomenology. And that is just to give Frege the credit for lending Sense to Husserl.''2 Husserl's views 1 Daglinn Fr "Husserl's Notion of Noema," The Journal o[ Philosophy, LXVI (Oct. 16, 1969), 680-687; David Woodruff Smith and Ronald MeIntyre, "Intentionality via Intensions," The Journalo[ Philosophy, LXVIII (Sept. 16, 1971),541-561. 2 Smith and McIntyre, p. 561. 378 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY are ultimately intelligible, then, only if his theory of meaning is read in the light of the Fregean Sense/reference distinction. I should like to point out, first of all, that Husserl's view concerning such distinctions appears to have changed in a significant way between the period of the Logical Investigations and that of the ldeas; and, second, that while the change in Husserl's approach was in fact toward a more Fregean position, it was, just on that account, a change for the worse. Though from the point of view of semantic theory alone the development of Hussed's position may have been inconsequential, the ontological issues which it raises are considerable. Both the "earlier" and the "later" Husserl present a distinction which does indeed perform the function of Frege's distinction between Sense and reference. But no such distinctions can be finally accepted apart from some theory as...