Abstract
Husserl’s Logical Grammar is intended to explain how complex expressions can be constructed out of simple ones so that their meaning turns out to be determined by the meanings of their constituent parts and the way they are put together. Meanings are thus understood as structured contents and classified into formal categories to the effect that the logical properties of expressions reflect their grammatical properties. As long as linguistic meaning reduces to the intentional content of pre-linguistic representations, however, it is not trivial to account for how semantics relates to syntax in this context. In this paper, I analyze Husserl’s Logical Grammar as a system of recursive rules operating on representations and suggest that the syntactic form of representations (both mental and linguistic) contributes to their semantics because it carries information about semantic role. I further discuss Husserl’s syntactic account of the unity of propositions and argue that, on this account, logical form supervenes on syntactic form. In the last section I draw some implications for the phenomenology of thought and conjecture that the structural features it displays are likely to convey the syntactic structures of an underlying language-like representational system.
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Notes
In the following, Husserl’s works are cited according to the Husserliana edition, with the exception of Husserl 1939. The corresponding pages of the English translation are indicated for longer quotations.
The English edition has the German “Stoff” routinely translated with “materials”, which is also used at times for the German “Materie” (e.g. Hua XIX/1-2, p. 328; 1970, vol 2 p. 63). To avoid confusion I constantly translate the first as “stuff” and the second as “matter”.
Husserl’s notion of Modifikation differs from Carnap’s transformation rules, as it does not concern the relation of consequence, while it is consistent with the Chomskian notion of transformation, as it accounts for how the syntactic form displayed by the surface structure of sentences can result from grammatical transformations applied to more elementary syntactic structures—what Husserl calls syntactic stuffs (Edie 1977, pp. 156–159). This reading has been contested on the basis that transformations do not play a fundamental role in Husserl’s pure grammar, as they are not ubiquitous and operate at a “higher level” with respect to the laws affecting the combination of the underlying semantic categories (Cibotaru 2016). Edie’s main point still holds, however, as long as the relevant operations are taken to transform the deep structure into their surface structure (see Drummnond 2007, p. 64).
Bar-Hillel in fact suggests that Husserl confounds meaningfulness and syntactic well-formedness to the effect of basing semantic categorization on syntactical considerations (Bar-Hillel 1967, pp. 352–353; see Leclercq 2011, pp. 151–152). Bar-Hillel’s reading thus takes syntactic form to be set apart from the semantic material it informs in a way that prevents explaining how syntax and semantics may possibly relate (Drummnond 2007, p. 61; see Hanna 1984; Flores 2002). I argue in what follows that Husserl’s logical grammar is explicitly designed to account for the compositionality of meaning and to contend that syntax distinctively contributes to semantics. In this respect, it diverges from the categorial grammars that have been partly inspired by the fourth Logical Investigation, as the latter count syntax and semantics as two separate systems of rules to be connected by a mapping relation (see Morrill 2011, ch. 1).
In the first appendix to Formal and Transcendental Logic, the number of ultimate syntactic stuffs is narrowed to two, as all simple propositions are taken to be ultimately analyzable into a predicative combination of substantive and adjectival stuffs (Hua VII, p. 310). In this text core forms are claimed not to belong to the syntax of propositions (Hua VII, p. 309). It has been suggested in this connection that the basic categories of logical grammar are not purely formal because they are rooted in the semantic material they inform and in particular in the pre-predicative structure of perceptual contents (Drummnond 2007, pp. 63–65). This, however, departs from former texts, where syntactic stuffs are viewed as “syntagmata”, that is as “syntactic formed stuffs”, because “the core form is what forms the pure core into a syntagma of a specific category” (Hua XXX, pp. 107, 112). While it is true that syntactic stuffs are not purely formal in that they include a material element, it seems problematic to claim that the corresponding core forms are non-syntactic. On the one hand, the core matter that makes for the lexical root of words can be subsumed under different core forms, which contrasts with their being intrinsically carved out according to formal semantic categories. On the other hand, core forms are designed to bring about syntactic stuffs that are poised to be realized in full-blown syntactic forms and to enter grammatical laws (Hua VII, pp. 310–311; Drummnond 2007, p. 64). The point is that, however core forms are conceived, syntactic categorization is required in order for the pre-predicative structures of perceptual content to enter the compositional constituent structure of thought and language. In this respect, the former texts look more consistent than the appendix to Formal and Transcendental Logic.
See Mohanty (1976, ch. 1), Bell (1990, p. 116), Zahavi (2003, pp. 23–25). Husserl’s distinction between content and object corresponds to the distinction between reference and referent stressed by Dummett (1973) with respect to Frege’s philosophy of language. See Dummett (1993, p. 53). Indexicals, demonstratives, and proper names notoriously complicate the picture, but this does not affect the issue at stake here (Mulligan and Smith 1986, §7).
Husserl took states of affairs to be complex objects and held that a state of affairs is the “full and complete object” that corresponds to a whole judgment. He therefore took states of affairs—not truth values—to be the proper referents of sentences (Hua XIX/1-2, pp. 415–416; see Dummett 1993, pp. 55–56).
Dummett (1973, pp. 89–91, 190–91) distinguishes between the sematic role of expressions and their relation to referents as two components of the notion of reference, where the former specifies the contribution an expression make to the truth-value of sentences by virtue of the latter. Mutatis mutandis, this applies to Husserl’s view that semantic categories correspond to formal ontological categories to the effect that each expression contributes to determine the state of affairs represented by the propositions in which it occurs according to the ontological category its referent belongs to: noun phrases typically contribute particulars or universals, adjectival and predicative phrases contribute instantiated properties and relations, complete sentences states of affairs.
In order to support his reading, Bundgaard proposes to sever the treatment of the relations between independent and non-independent meanings from the analysis of pure grammar that takes the stage at §10, and he conjectures that at this point a “change of scope” occurs in the fourth Investigation, shifting the focus from the mereological semantic relations among contents to the “linear” grammatical relations among linguistic symbols (Bundgaard 2004, p. 62). Yet there is no need to postulate a “change of scope”. What in fact happens in §10 is that the general idea of a part–whole relation is turned to the specific features such relations take in the semantic sphere, that is, to the formal laws governing the combination of contents into propositional wholes. Since these laws are syntactic, they are conceived as logico-grammatical laws.
Husserl seems to allow, at times, that linguistic expressions are required to perform—not just to express—judgments that pertain to the “higher intellectual sphere”—that is, judgment displaying a connection of propositions (Hua XIX/1-2, pp. 7-8). This may suggest that the structure of thought is, in that case, constituted by linguistic structures or, more modestly, that the latter are required for the former to be psychologically “realized” (Hua XIX/1-2, p. 8). Yet the parallelism between the laws of “authentic”, intuitive thought and “inauthentic”, symbolic thought implies that higher mental processes can be carried out without symbols (Hua XIX/1-2, pp. 137, 177, 710ff.). This is consistent with Husserl’s distinction between the conceptual and the symbolic aspect of logical operations in the Philosophy of Arithmetic, and generally with Husserl’s theory of signs (Centrone 2010a, b, pp. 42–43; Centrone 2015).
Both “authentic” and “inauthentic” thought display a combinatorial structure and their difference in this respect narrows down to the fact that the combinations accessible to authentic thought are restricted to the representation of possible objects of intuition, so that contradictions turns out to be inconceivable, while contradictory and antonymic meaningful symbols can be constructed—provided that their constituents are meaningful—for which no possible truth maker is there to be intuitively apprehended (Hua XIX/1-2, pp. 716ff., 720ff.).
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I am grateful for comments on earlier drafts to Andrea Borsato, Mark van Atten, and Ulrich Reichard.
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Bianchin, M. Husserl on Meaning, Grammar, and the Structure of Content. Husserl Stud 34, 101–121 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-017-9223-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-017-9223-2