Abstract
Theories of meaning developed within the analytic tradition, starting with Gottlob Frege, and within continental philosophy, starting with Husserl, can be distinguished by their disagreement about the phenomenon of collapse or failure of meaning. Our text focuses on Frege’s legacy, taken up by Rudolph Carnap, which culminated in a view of the collapse of meaning defined first by a purely syntactic conception of categorial error and second, when Tarski entered the scene, by the paradoxes created by the conflict between the use of the predicate truth and the concept of proof. As positivism’s conventionalism and late model-theoretic semantics became the paradigms derived from this position, the result, in our view, was a conception of meaning success and meaning failure dominated by dependence on a technological conception. We will argue that this dependence leads to the inability to evaluate the breaks in rational parameters and crises of meaning addressed by the phenomenological and transcendental perspectives. Husserl’s critique of logic as technology is the basis for the reflexive standpoint on the phenomena of meaning failure that leads to a theoretical and eidetic ideal approach to that phenomenon. It is then suggested that this phenomenological reflective standpoint on the problem of meaning failure is the origin of the doors that lead to the divergent paths between the analytic and continental traditions. Thus, this is an article with three argumentative phases connected into a larger unity. The first phase presents Husserl’s critique of a purely extensional, syntactic, and recursive conception of logical consequence and the concept of truth; the second presents Hussel’s larger conception of meaning-failure; the third—presented in an appendix— presents a lesson on the division between continental and analytic philosophy.
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Notes
According to van Heijenoort (1967), there are two fundamental lines of thought in the history of modern logic: logic as a language represented paradigmatically by Frege’s conceptual notation and logic as a calculus represented mainly by logic algebra.
Dummett (1991) takes a semantic stance on the meaning of logical constants.
What he called “logic as philosophy of science” (1969, 102).
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the reviewers and referees of the journal who helped shape this article by providing valuable suggestions and corrections. I would also like to thank my friend and author Gregory E. Desilet for proofreading the manuscript and for earlier conversations and discussions.
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Vollet, L.R. Two Versions of Meaning Failure: A Contributing Essay to the Explanation of the Split Between Analytical and Phenomenological Continental philosophy. Husserl Stud 40, 1–23 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-023-09336-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-023-09336-6