Abstract
In this essay, I develop Husserl’s view of the relation between sense experience and empirical knowledge by outlining the idea of Husserlian expressivism. I begin the essay by taking a look at the relevant problem on empirical knowledge in the literature. The point is that the content of experience is of the propositional form if experience should have justificatory significance. Husserl emphasizes the epistemological significance of the perceptual presence of objects; nevertheless, he sees perceptual sense as nonpropositional. How can we understand Husserl’s thought? I argue that Husserl’s conception of expression in Ideas I can give us a clue. Interpreting this conception as saying that expression is not representational medium, but the logical form of the content of experience, I argue that we can ascribe the significance to experience as such, which is only made explicit by expression: propositional form is the expressive form of the implicit experiential content. This interpretation also makes a Husserlian conception of reason possible in which perceptual experience as such can have its rationality. Characterizing sense experience as a non-discursive form of reason, I attempt to describe this conception as an explication of holistically conducted inquiry of empirical knowledge.
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- 1.
We added “in the best case,” because there are also bad cases, in which the object actually does not exist as it seems.
- 2.
We will not address the questions about whether the content of experience is conceptual or non-conceptual, or whether experience has content at all. Regarding the latter, we simply assume here that experience has content, following Husserl. The former question is subtler. In our case, the answer totally depends on what the “conceptual” means. At least, according to Husserl’s own usage of “begrifflich (conceptual),” as we can see in this essay, he explicitly rejects the claim that the content of experience is conceptual. He seems to use the term “Begriff (concept)” to mean the content which (1) itself is a proposition, or (2) is a possible part of proposition.
- 3.
Husserl’s terminology is rather ambiguous. This comes from mainly three reasons. (1) He calls intentional content in general Sinn, (2) he does not see the necessity to distinguish Sinn from Bedeutung, i.e., they are synonyms for him (cf. Hua XIX/1, p. 58f./200f.), (3) he identifies the meaning of words and sentences, i.e. linguistic meaning, as the content of intentional experience that is called bedeutungsverleihender Akt (signifying act). However, it does not follow from these that all intentional content is of the same kind, of the same structure. As Husserl states in his later work, if we call every intentional experience that can be the signifying act (meaning-conferring act) Denken (thinking), the distinction would become clearer: to perceive something is not exactly to think of it (cf. Hua XVII, p. 27/23). Hence, we cannot completely agree with McIntyre and Smith’s (1982) interpretation of the expressibility thesis.
- 4.
For the concept of noematic sense, see, e.g., Hua III/1, p. 303/314; Hua XX/1, p. 58f.
- 5.
Besides copula, the examples Husserl provides include “the,” “a,” “some,” “many,” “few,” “two,” “not,” “which,” “and,” “or,” “if,” “then,” “all,” “none,” “something,” and “nothing” (cf. Hua XIX/2, p. 658/272, p. 667/278). For the sake of simplicity, we term both categorial words and their content (correlate) categorials. We can generally ignore the difference of the verbal and content (signification), given the thesis: logical content is an expression.
- 6.
Of course, we should not ignore Husserl’s view that by making a statement, we are conscious of a totally new kind of object, i.e. categorial object. However, this is not confused with the thought that a statement represents a peculiar ready-made entity or object in the world. Rather, the categorial object is originally constituted by the complex process of objectification. In short, representation should not be confused with objectification. Given Husserl’s concept of object, i.e., that to be object is to be the subject of a statement (cf. e.g., Hua III/1, p. 15 [10], p. 47/41; Hua XX/1, p. 282), the objectification whose product is the categorial object is possible by virtue of the expressive operation that is called nominalization or substantiation. In general, we could tentatively say that in making a perceptual statement, we are conscious of the new object only implicitly and, by nominalization or substantiation, we become conscious of the object explicitly (qua the subject of a predicative judgment).
- 7.
Kadowaki (2002) seems to head in the same direction as our view. Regarding my own position, I draw inspiration from Brandom’s works (1994, 2000, 2015). Although I cannot definitely establish if my discussion here may be one that Kadowaki envisaged, his suggestion is worthy of being explication. It is hoped that the present paper will be helpful in this regard.
- 8.
- 9.
He suggests something like this in a footnote by mention of “[a] second way” that starts “from the side of experience and sensuous givenness” (Hua III/1, p. 287/296).
- 10.
Compare this with Sellars’ treatment of the logic of looks (1997, Chapter III.). The relevant point is that the talk of “looks F” depends on the ability to see and say that something is F: one can say that it looks as if x is F only if one can see and say that x is F in the sense that the former can be characterized only indirectly as something that lacks the endorsement that is involved in the latter. Seeing the point from a different angle, this means that we can eschew endorsement when we have some reasons for doing so. This creates space for the claim that seeing is already involved in reason, since it is at our disposal whether to receive appearance at face value. See also McDowell (1996: 11f.) for a related discussion; he would reject the view that experience involves any kind of endorsement, though.
- 11.
Although reason is one of the main themes in his thought, we can hardly find any clear statements that elucidate what he means by that term. In Cartesian Meditations, we finally find one brief account: “Reason is not accidental de facto ability, not a title for possible accidental matters of fact, but rather a title for all-embracing essentially necessary structural form belonging to all transcendental subjectivity” (Hua I, p. 92/57). What we have presented in this essay may be read as an explication of this (all to) succinct description.
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Sato, S. (2019). Husserl on Experience, Expression, and Reason. In: de Warren, N., Taguchi, S. (eds) New Phenomenological Studies in Japan. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 101. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11893-8_7
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