Husserl's Logic

 I.   PURE LOGIC

 

Logic is the study of validity—an inference is valid if, and only if, the truth of the premises guarantees the truth of the conclusion. A deductive argument is said to be valid if and only if it takes a form that makes it impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion nevertheless to be false. Otherwise, a deductive argument is said to be invalid. A deductive argument is sound if and only if it is both valid, and all of its premises are actually true. Otherwise, a deductive argument isunsound. Logic however is concerned with validity and not soundness. The logician wants to be able to recognize truth-preserving inferences by their structure. The logician wants to be able to recognize, from the structure of one set of sentences, that the members of another set of sentences are true and how we pass from the truth of one set of sentences to the truth of other sentences or to put it in another way how is that being committed to the truth of one set of sentences we also become committed to the truth of other set of sentences, relevantly connected with the first set of sentences. In order for logic to be applicable to sentences directly, those sentences must be paraphrased so as to employ a syntax which meshes smoothly with logic. We abstract from sentences that core part which alone is relevant for determining its truth conditions. This core part is the logical form of the sentence. Logical forms are representations of the composition of the sentences, constructed from the logical signs using schematic letters of various sorts. The above mentioned syntax recommends itself on the grounds that it is transparent, economical, and powerful; by limiting our regimented language to a very small number of clearly understood grammatical constructions and categories, we obtain a language with far greater expressive power than its meager basis might lead us to expect.

 

Husserl’s contribution to logic was not concerned with technical aspects atleast directly. Logic had broader connotations in Husserl’s times and included epistemology too. Husserl’s concern were however broader. He wanted to understand the foundations of logic. To Quote:

 

I assume . . . that no one will think it enough to develop our logic merely in the manner of our mathematical disciplines, as a growing system of propositions . . . , without, that is, gaining insight into the essence of the modes of cognition which come into play in their utterance and in the ideal possibility of applying such propositions. . . . Linguistic discussions are certainly among the philosophically indispensable preparations for the building of pure logic: only by their aid can the true objects of logical research [namely, ideal meanings in a theory] . . . be refined. . . . We are not here concerned with grammatical discussions, empirically conceived and related to some historically given language: we are concerned with . . . the pure phenomenology of the experiences of thinking and knowing.

(Logical Investigations, vol. II: Introduction, §1)

 

Husserl proposed a division of labor between the “technicians” of logic and the “philosophers” of logic (Prolegomena, §71). The “technicians” develop mathematical symbolic systems of logic – formalized axiomatic theories – and prove results about their systems, whereas the “philosophers” develop the theory of what the mathematical systems of logic are about, especially how the symbol systems relate to our experience and to the world.

 

Pure Logic is called the theory of theories. Husserl’s theory of science held that any science is a theory, understood as an ideal system of propositions about a domain of study. Thus “pure logic” is, strictly speaking, the theory of theories. Logic studies the most fundamental ideas that underlie all of the sciences.

 

Briefly, Husserl’s theory of theories holds:

 

1. A theory is any unified system of propositions about some given domain. Ideally, the theory is a system of axioms (“basic laws”) and their deductive consequences.

 

2. A proposition is an ideal meaning, specifically, a meaning expressible by a grammatically complete sentence. A proposition is composed from simpler meanings, expressible by noun phrases (names, demonstrative pronouns, descriptions) or by predicates.

 

3. Meanings represent objects of appropriate types. Specifically, meanings are contents of intentional experiences, which are intentionally related to the objects represented by their contents.

 

4. Logic characterizes the logical relations among the propositions, and constituent concepts, in the theory.

 

Domains of study for instance are spatiotemporal things (physics), or mental processes (psychology), or numbers (arithmetic), or geometric forms (geometry).

 

Logicians study Judgment. Judgment is an act which posits that things are a certain way. Pure logic is concerned with ideal meanings, and it is judgments that express these ideal meanings. Judgments refer to objects or states of affairs by way of their meanings. The meanings expressed by judgments are ideal (as opposed to real objects existing in the spatio-temporal world) and the objects to which we are referred by judgments may themselves be either real or ideal. The objects of pure logic and pure mathematics are ideal. Judgments have a ‘form’ and a ‘matter’ (or content). Two judgments with different ‘matters’, for example, may have the same form: ‘This house is red’ and ‘This table is blue’ both have the form ‘This S is P’. Among other things, pure logic will therefore need to track features of judgments and other types of expressions, the ideal meanings expressed by judgments, the objects referred to, and the form and matter in each case.

 

Husserl gives a stratification of ‘objective formal logic’. Pure Logic then studies the correlations among:

 

1. The basic forms of expression in a language in which inference is codified

 

2. The basic forms of meaning expressible in the language, where meanings are ideal intentional contents of thought or judgment;

 

3. The basic forms of logical laws, or rules of inference, governing relations of entailment among propositions expressible by sentences in the language;

 

4. The basic forms of objects represented by the relevant meanings or expressions, including such object-forms as those of individual things, properties and species and relations, states of affairs, and ontological connections among these entities.

 

 

 

First there is constraint on the form of judgments. The basic idea at this level is to lay out the rules and methods for determining whether or not a string of signs (words) is meaningful. This will require purely formal grammar, in order to distinguish formally well-formed strings of signs from strings that are not well formed. When this is in place we need to give these strings some meaning or in other words we have to give semantics of this formal language. To do this we need to find out the categories of meaning that can refer to possible objects in the domain of study. We need to study the correlation between formal categories of meaning and the formal categories of objects to which the former can be applied. The formal categories of meaning are: Proposition, concept, truth, reference, sense etc. Correlated with forms of meaning, according to Husserl, are “formal objective categories” specified by “correlative concepts such as Object, State of Affairs, Unity, Plurality, Number, Relation, Connection etc.” That is, meaning categories are correlated by appropriate rules with object categories. Whereas meaning categories are basic forms of meaning, object categories are basic forms of object. Both these conditions give us syntax, semantics and objects of pure judgment. They determine the possibility of judgment by determining which judgment can truly be regarded as meaningful and which can be regarded as nonsensical. For example: the following two substitutions for ‘This S is P’: ‘This tree is green’ and ‘This careless is green’. The former is a judgment. It expresses a unified meaning. The latter, however, is simply nonsense. Each part of it is meaningful but the whole formed from the parts is not. An expression from the wrong category has been substituted in place of ‘S’. At Level 2, there is the condition that judgment should be grounded. This is the condition that judgment should obey formal laws of thought like: the law of excluded middle and law of contradiction. At Level 3 we are concerned with the truth and falsity of judgments. Truth or falsity is determined by intuition, or by what Husserl calls ‘meaning-fulfillment’. Intuition takes place in sequences of acts carried out through time, and it provides evidence that there are objects corresponding to judgments, or, on the other hand, it can show us how the intentions expressed by our judgments are frustrated. There are different degrees and types of evidence: clear and distinct, adequate, apodictic. Logic and Mathematics have apodictic evidence for a subject.

 

More needs to be said of Husserl’s idea of correspondence between categories of meaning and their ontological correlates – formal categories of objects. Here we may introduce some terminology:

 

Objects: Anything that is an invariant feature in the acts of consciousness

 

Categories: Formal Essence of Objects

 

Field: A Domain Of Objects to which a theory is applied.

 

Manifold: The Form Of The Field.

 

Region: Material Essence Of Objects. Husserl states they are three: Nature, Consciousness And Culture.

 

Here is how Husserl introduces his conception of field and manifolds:

 

The objective correlate of the concept of a possible theory determined only in respect of form is the concept of a possible field of knowledge over which a theory of such form will govern. Such a field is, however, known in mathematical circles as a manifold. It is accordingly a field which is uniquely and solely determined by falling under a theory of such a form, whose objects are such as to permit of certain connections which fall under certain basic laws of this or that determinate form. . . . These laws then, as they determine the field or moreover the form of the field, likewise determine the theory to be constructed, or, more correctly, the form of the theory. In the theory of manifolds, e.g., ‘+’ is not the sign for numerical addition, but for any connection for which laws of the form a + b = b + a, etc., hold. (Prolegomena, §70)

 

In brief, Husserl’s idea is this: (1) A theory depicts the essence of objects in a given domain or field; (2) the theory characterizes its field of objects by virtue of the system of deductive relations among its propositions about said objects, relations that hold by virtue of the logical form of these propositions; (3) the form of the theory is correlated systematically with the form of the field of objects characterized; (4) a manifold is defined as the form of a field, a field characterized by a deductive theory about the field. Thus, a pure logic specifies correlations between the form of a given theory and the form of a field of objects to which the theory can be applied.

 

We thus have:

 

Objects of a Region (Material Objects)

             ^     

Form of a Field (Manifold) (Formal Objects)

             ^

Form of a Theory (Syntax and Semantics)

 

 

Pure Logic studies correlations between these marked by the sign (^)

 

 

Smith (2007) explains the idea thus:

 

Formal logic will appraise the form of the sentence I utter, the form of the judgment-content or sense <Aristotle is synoptic> expressed by the sentence, and the form of the objective correlate of the sentence and of the sense, the state of affairs [Aristotle is synoptic] – explicating all these formal structures ultimately in terms of manifolds. The “material” aspects of my judgment, whose content I so express, include the intentionality and the intuitive or evidential character of the judgment. That is, the content in my judgment prescribes the objective state of affairs [Aristotle is synoptic], and this judgment-content is supported by the evidence I have for the truth of this proposition. These aspects of my judgment ground the objectivity of the logic of such judgment-contents: the ideal character of the proposition itself, and the intuitive evidence it carries in my experience. These aspects of judgment, beyond the formal aspects, are appraised in transcendental phenomenology.

 

 

Pure Logic is thus an a-priori discipline which investigates the structure of judgments and what it takes for these judgments to constitute knowledge. The mark of a science is that study of the essence of objects in a special domain of its own. Logic or Philosophy too is a science, a ‘rigorous science’, which investigates the epistemological foundation of a particular body of knowledge. It does so in three ways: a) setting the formal condition on expression of judgments, b) studying the units of meaning that refer to objects in the world, c) studying the formal objects which a meaning can refer to which gives us a condition on meaningful thought, d) setting formal laws that these categories must obey, e) stating how evidence via intuition relates formal categories to material categories in a region.

 

 

II. LOGIC AND PHENOMENOLOGY

 

 

Judgment as an experience is studied by phenomenology and as expressing a proposition composed of linguistic expressions is the study of pure logic. The content of the latter is derived from the former but here I shall ignore this subtlety to concentrate on Husserl’s larger philosophical goals. Husserl wants to understand how a subject is able to gain knowledge of the world. He seeks to reconcile the ‘subjectivity of knowing with objectivity of knowledge.’ What he is looking for is a priori necessary conditions for knowledge to obtain. He is not interested to answer the skeptic whether we have knowledge or not, he assumes we do have knowledge of the world, we only need to understand how. What conditions need to be fulfilled for a judgment to qualify as knowledge? We looked before that it is the correlation between formal and material categories backed with intuition qualify as conditions that a judgment needs to fulfill in order to qualify as knowledge. Husserl’s method has been to search for the structure of a judgment in virtue of which it can give a subject access to the world. Pure Logic undertakes to study judgment and unearth its structure. Now we shall see how this is related to phenomenology of Husserl.

 

For Husserl philosophy is a rigorous science, it is a science in virtue of being descriptive about its own sphere which consists of ideal objects. Any science whatsoever is naïve; it assumes the ontological existence of the world it seeks to study and does not investigate about its own foundations. Any scientist would tacitly assume concepts like cause-effect to enhance research and use reason to find new facts about the world. Philosophy studies these tacitly assumed concepts and epistemological foundations of reason. The way we do it is doing away with naivety. We bracket the existence of the world and take a neutral attitude towards our consciousness of the world suspending ontological commitments. Philosophy is thus made presupposition less. We concentrate on the way the world appears to us or in other words on the content of our consciousness. Consciousness reveals the world via a sense or a content or as Husserl calls it ‘noema’ (called meaning spoken in context of language). In everyday life our attitude is to believe that we see the world through and through but only when we bracket the world do we concentrate on the way the world appears to us, the medium that carries meaning. Our consciousness reveals the world to have a certain structure, an object having properties. The content of consciousness prescribes a way the world has to be. If it is that way then the judgment is true or else false. Husserl says an object is constituted in an act of consciousness in so far it is intended as such and such. The structure of the content is correlated with the structure of the object as intended. There is thus a correlation established between the act, the content and the world. There has to be correlation between language and the world, language however acquires its content through the intention of the act. The content prescribes that a certain state of affairs obtain and is satisfied if the intended object does exist. The correlation can be put thus:

 

 

Act Content: Individual Sense + Predicate Sense (Noematic Sense)

 

Language: Name + Predicate (Proposition)

 

World: Object + Property (State Of Affairs / Manifold)

 

The point about the formal ontology is that the world exhibits a particular structure in virtue of its formal structure. The formal structure determines how things shall be in the material region. A scientist in whichever field seeks to understand the essence of an object. However this essence is its material essence. The material essence of an object is determined by the formal essence. Thus an oak tree is an individual object capable of bearing properties. The material species Quercus (under which the material object oak tree falls) falls under the formal essence: species.  And the oak tree belonging to the species Quercus is a concrete state of affairs falling under the formal essence: state of affairs. This-instance-of-Quercus is a species moment (a particular instance of the species Quercus) which instantiates the formal essence species without which an oak tree would not be an oak tree. The essence of an object is that property which an object cannot lose without losing its identity. The formal world thus necessitates or determines the structure of the material world. But only in philosophical reflection do we separate form from the matter. The matter fills in the form. No material structure without formal structure. And it is because things have a structure that scientists can study the essence of an object. It is the formal structure of an object that is tacitly assumed and is revealed through phenomenology and is the exclusive field of study for a philosopher. His interest as contrary to the logician is foundational whereas the logician’s concern is technical. Phenomenology thus complements pure logic by studying the correlation between act – content - object, whereas pure logic complements phenomenology by revealing the structure exhibited by them. We thus have an account of what it is to have knowledge, it consists in there being a strict correlation between act – content – object, this correlation consists of correlation between form and matter of judgment backed with intuition that such a state of affairs does obtain. And such a state of affairs ought to obtain if the judgment is to qualify as knowledge. Our access to the world however is fallible and seeks harmony between the act – content – object. This structure tacitly assumed in everyday life is unearthed by phenomenology and codified and studied rigorously in an axiomatic system. This study is pure logic.

 

The purpose here is evaluation of the methods of scientific justification which a scientist himself cannot provide and hence the philosopher is needed to fill the lacuna. However this evaluation is not done with an eye to  answer the skeptic but rather to show how every particular piece of knowledge of the world necessarily exhibits a structure and has to in order to qualify as genuine knowledge. Logic thus is both a practical – normative science. It unearths the structure of judgment and prescribes the conditions that need to be fulfilled in order for a judgment to be true. Its descriptive business thus complements its normative dimension. Normativity of logic provides the necessary and sufficient conditions for a value predicate like ‘good’ to be applied to an argument. Our judgments are objective in virtue of our access to the formal structure of the world as opposed to our sensations and our access to the material world. The former is private and hence not intersubjectively available. The latter is fallible whereas our access to formal object exhibits a high level of certainty. Such certain knowledge is also in display in study of mathematics and logic where our intuitions about mathematical objects can attain a level of certainty that our empirical knowledge can never give us.

 

 

III. HUSSERL’S CRITICISMS OF PSYCHOLOGISM

 

Husserl’s refutation of psychologism can throw more light on objectivity of content and how and why mathematics and logic cannot be reduced to empirical sciences. Psyhchologism is the view that logical laws are psychological laws and the justification of logic depends on conditions internal to the subject. Logic has no metaphysical validity; it is valid in virtue of being laws of thought and can be studied by consideration internal to the thinking subject. Laws of logic are normative because thinking can err; we thus need to set standards or norms for our thinking to be logical. These norms are unearthed through study of thoughts. Hence laws of logic are laws of psychology marked with a high degree of subjective certainty. Logic thus consists in a set of instructions to guide thought to attain its goal, in this way as Charles Sigwart described it, ‘it is the ethics of thought and not the physics of thought.’ A caveat is in order here – proponents of psychologism may be divided into two camps: one would hold that logical laws are psychological laws and hence logical laws are justified in virtue of psychological constitution of mind. The second camp does not go to this extreme and merely notes the relevance of thinking in study of logic. Thus logic is not psychology per se but a set of instructions as Sigwart said that enable our thoughts to gain their goal. Psychology is relevant in order to study patterns of thinking that exhibit logical thinking, but psyche of man does not determine logical thinking. A thought is logical because it fulfills a logical norm. Psychology provides the data for the study of logic to the logician. Following Haack (1978) we can call the former ‘strong psychologism’ and the latter ‘weak psychologism’. Now let’s move onto Husserl’s criticism of psychologism:

 

Husserl says that psyhcologism has three empirical consequences all of which can be refuted:

 

I. If logical rules were based upon psychological laws, then all logical rules would have to be as vague as the underlying psychological laws. Refutation: Not all logical rules are vague. And therefore not all logical rules are based upon psychological laws. 

 

Psychological Laws are common both to fallacious and valid thinking and hence cannot give us logical laws which are concerned solely with valid arguments.

 

II. If laws of logic were psychological laws, and then they could not be known a priori. They would be more or less probable rather than valid, and justified only by reference to experience. Refutation: Laws of logic are a priori; they are justified by apodictic self-evidence, and valid rather than probable. And therefore laws of logic are not psychological.

 

In the same context, Husserl also attacks the idea according to which laws of logic describe correct human thinking, i.e. describe a human thinking unimpeded and unpolluted by irrational, disturbing psychological factors. First, Husserl claims that, in this interpretation of logic, laws of logic would again be causal and therefore probable rather than certain. Second, he points out that the psychologicist has to show how the borderline between correct and incorrect thinking can be drawn in purely psychological terms. And third, he notes that psychologistic logic has failed to prove that there are indeed two qualitatively different kinds of thinking: one kind of thinking that can be explained in terms of logical laws alone, and another kind of thinking that needs to be explained as the outcome of the interplay between laws of logic and interfering irrational factors. Moreover, Husserl charges the psychologicist with neglecting the crucial divide between mental acts in which logical laws figure as contents and these logical laws themselves. Mental acts in which logical laws figure as contents have indeed causes and effects. But these causes and effects must not be transferred to the contents of those acts, i.e. to the logical laws. In other words, psychologistic logicians make the mistake of transferring a property of a mental act to the content or object of that act.  And finally, the psychologicist also overlooks the fact that the laws describing the physical processes and operations within an entity cannot include those laws to which that entity conforms by virtue of its specific physical processes and operations. Thus, even though a calculator conforms to mathematical laws, this conformity has to be explained by physical rather than by mathematical (or logical) laws. Mutatis mutandis, logical laws are not descriptions of those mental processes by virtue of which humans conform to logical laws (Logical Investigations: Prolegomena §22).

 

III. If logical laws were psychological laws, they would refer to psychological entities. Refutation: Logical laws do not refer to psychological entities. And therefore logical laws are not psychological laws.

 

Even if logical laws are discovered through psychology it does not mean that they are psychological. Logical laws are eternal truths and are irrevocable. Truth is the goal of logic and truth is not produced by psychological processes. Psychological Processes are ephemeral and hence cannot be the bearer of a truth value. The proposition “Brutus Killed Caesar” has a truth value eternally even though both are dead. Thus ideal objects like Propositions are bearers of truth value and not psychological items. Truth does not depend on our recognition. Something can be true without being recognized as such. This is known as Independence Theory of Truth. Similarly say the Law of Contradiction is eternally true which it would not be if it depended for its existence on human mind.

 

Psychologism confuses between laws used for setting norms to acquire knowledge and laws that are norms to acquire knowledge. An example of the former is Modus Ponens:

 

If P Then Q

P

Therefore, Q

 

An Instance of the Latter is:

 

Whoever judges that p and judges that p and q, should also judge that q

 

 

Logical Laws are derived from psychological laws which derivation presupposes logical laws, thus psychologism is in a reflective circle which Husserl can avoid.

 

Finally Husserl says that all forms of empiricism and psychologism lead to skepticism and relativism. Relativism is absurd because if it were true it would be conceivable that someone has logical laws different from our but this is inconceivable. Logical laws are laws that ground justification and thinking. Violation of logical laws leads to incoherence and meaninglessness. Thus since skepticism and relativism since they lead to such absurd consequences are themselves incoherent. Mental Life of an individual is private and varies in various individuals and hence cannot serve as the basis of logical laws which are invariant and intersubjectively available. Logic has its own descriptive sphere – ideal objects and the study of these ideal objects provide us with norms for correct thinking.

 

Critics of Husserl have pointed out that (I) is question begging as it assumes without justifying that vagueness is the defining mark of psychological laws. Why can’t logical laws be an exception to this? As Moritz Schlick points out:

 

“One sees immediately that one might with equal right infer the opposite: since logical structures, inferences, judgements and concepts undoubtedly result from psychological processes, we are entitled to infer from the existence of logical rules that there are perfectly exact psychological laws as well… The proponent of ‘absolute’ logic cannot defend his position simply by claiming that all psychological laws are vague; for this amounts to a petitio principii.” (Quoted In Kusch 1995: 66-67)

 

Similarly (II) has been seen as question begging. That Laws of Nature are merely probable has been challenged: Moog says:

 

“There certainly are psychological and physical laws which have only an approximate validity. However, in the case of a law of nature like the law of gravity, it is inadequate to speak of a mere probability of its validity. It is equally wrong to restrict the natural sciences to the inductive method. Even though in the realm of the empirical sciences induction is more important than deduction, in the natural sciences inductive and deductive methods complement each other.” (Quoted In Kusch 1995: 67)

 

Some deny that logical laws are really apodictic and a priori. To Quote Wilhelm Jerusalem:

 

“We look upon ourselves as a part of nature. And thus we believe that the laws according to which our mental life develops, and which regulate our mental life, are laws of nature. Therefore we also assume that mathematical and logical laws too are laws of nature and that they are known not a priori but through experience. And so we seek to find the empirical origin of these laws. If we do not immediately succeed in this endeavour, we continue to try… That we are part of nature and that our mental development happens according to laws of nature, this for us is no dogma but a rule of method. And we follow this rule as long as it proves to be fruitful. We infer: no law of nature is known a priori. Logical laws are laws of nature. Logical laws are not known a priori— Husserl reasons completely differently. His syllogism goes as follows: no law of nature can be known a priori. Logical laws can be known a priori. Logical laws are no laws of nature — But his minor premise is, for Husserl, not a rule of method but an arbitrarily posited dogma. He does not allow anyone to question this dogma.” (Quoted In Kusch 1995: 69)

 

Regarding (III) Moritz Schilck points out that acts of judgment and laws of logic are intertwined such that logical sentence and its truth:

 

“can never be found independently of the act of judgement; the logical sentence is included in the latter and results from it via abstraction…the logical sentence has its place only in the mental experience and does not exist outside it in any sense. The two cannot be separated; the judgement as logical structure, as ‘ideal meaning’…comes to be, once one abstracts, within the real experience of judging, from all individual and temporal elements. And even though one can abstract from all individual psychological factors, one cannot abstract from the psychological in general. In other words, one cannot understand logical sentences as structures without psychological quality. Pace Husserl, logical sentences imply the existence of experiences of judging. For if we take away, from any chosen judgement, everything which is psycho logical, we are left only with the matter of fact that the judgement expresses and upon which it is based.” (Quoted In Kusch 1995: 70-71)

 

The Independence Theory of Truth was challenged by Charles Sigwart:

 

“In the original sense of the terms, only assertions or opinions can be true or false. And assertions or opinions necessarily presuppose thinking subjects who entertain the opinions or utter the assertions. To postulate ‘sentences’ as independent essences is sheer mythology. In so far as Husserl speaks of ‘contradictory facts’ that cannot both be true, he conflates ‘true’ and ‘real’. And thus Husserl lapses into the same conceptual confusion that the German Criminal Code is guilty of when it speaks of…‘pretence of false facts’… Only an opinion, a report about a fact, can be false. But a fact is simply there… When no judgements have been made, then there is nothing of which ‘true’ or ‘false’ could be predicated. Of course, the planets did move, already long before Newton, in a way that conforms to the law of gravity. However, before Newton formulated his theory…no true sentence about these movements existed within human knowledge. After Newton formulated the law of gravity as a sentence, this sentence became, due to its content, true for the past as well. (Quoted In Kusch 1995: 77)”

 

 

That the skeptic and relativist are in self-contradiction is also challenged. The question for them is not whether there are norms or not but whether they are justified in and of themselves or by other norms. Both moves are questionable. So merely reiterating that there are norms does not satisfy the skeptic.

 

IV. Retrospect

 

As Husserl’s Critique of psychologism shows Husserl’s theory of objectivity is necessarily tied and stands and falls with there being an ideal objective realm. Husserl it seems merely presupposes this ideal realm in his critique of psychologism which therefore misses the mark. His argument that psychologism confuses the content of the act with the act itself (say as is true in sensations like pain, where pain is both the mode and the object of sensation), may refute ‘weak psychologism’ but is a straw man with regard to ‘strong psychologism’.

 

Husserl is concerned to solve the problem, how a subject living in his private world of sensations is able transcend himself and acquire genuine knowledge of the world existing outside his skin. In order to answer this question Husserl inquiries into the a priori and necessary conditions for knowledge to obtain. To have genuine objective knowledge we need a subject to form judgment about the world. Judgment refers to the extra mental world outside us. Judgment is an act of consciousness that makes possible reference to the outside world. It is able to do that in virtue of possessing content. It is via sense or content that judgment refers to extra mental world. The content is directed at the world in virtue of possessing a structure or a form. The form of content involves correlation between formal categories of meaning and formal categories of objects. The content expresses a proposition that is composed of an individual and a predicate and which is correlated with a substance and an attribute to which the individual and the predicate refers. There is a domain of objects to which the proposition may refer and which could be possible objects of the proposition. The form of this domain or field is the object of study of formal ontology. Both categories of meaning and categories of objects are ideal objects, denizens of a third a temporal and a causal world. For judgments to be objective they have to have judgeable content which is an instantiations of ideal meaning, a moment of ideal meaning which Husserl in Logical Investigations takes as a species and in Ideas as a category itself. Just as categories of meaning determine the structure of the content of a judgment; categories of objects determine the structure of the extra mental world. A judgment is then synthesis of hyletic data or sensations impinging on sense organs and noetic or conceptual component. Our judgments have directed-ness at the world because of this noetic component. The noetic component orders manifold sensations into a structural whole and presents it to the subject thereby establishing reference to the world. The noetic component has the said formal structure, which determines the content of the judgment. It orders extra mental reality into a structured whole by relating the judgment via a sense towards it. The manifold of sensations are grouped or ordered in virtue of the structure possessed by the noema or the concept. It is because of correlation between formal categories of meaning and formal categories of objects that our judgments have objectivity. When this judgeable content successfully refers to the world or to say that world is the way as it appears in judgment then, correlating form and matter then we have genuine knowledge. So the route to knowledge goes thus:

Syntax --à Semantics --à Formal Objects ---à Material World

This correlation is revealed through phenomenological methods, we pay attention to how the world appears to us, at the content of consciousness rather than at the world which is bracketed. Consciousness binds form and matter together to form a coherent whole, an object then presented to the subject. This functioning of consciousness is hidden when in naivety of everyday life but is revealed by performing a transcendental epoche. Judgement is then seen to be produced by an act of synthesis of hyletic and noematic data. The content of the act and the object are then constituted in consciousness. The content of an act of consciousness projects a structure in the intended object, which object is said to be constituted in consciousness in virtue of strict correlation between intentional structure and the structure of the intended object. This suffices for objectivity of the content of judgment – that there be a strict correlation between structure of the content and the intended object, but more is needed for judgment to qualify as knowledge. We require harmony between content and the world, that is the world should be exactly the way the it is said to figure in the content of the judgment or in other words the content should be satisfied by the world, backed by intuition that such a judgment is true. Ideal objects allow ordering of data coming in through senses; these objects are only tacitly grasped by a subject who is aware of them only through phenomenological reflection. The world has both objectivity and reality but the ideal world has only objectivity, spatio-temporal framework is not applicable to it. Hence it is not real or concrete. Our judgments are objective because they instantiate a moment of ideal meaning. This allows there to be correlation between act – content and the world. The world too has a formal structure that is projected by the content in the intended object. So it is the correlation between formal categories of meaning and formal categories of objects, instantiated by the content and the intended object that allows an act of judgment to refer to the world. Judgments and the material world have a structure in virtue of being instantiations of ideal objects and for the same reason the former is able to refer to the latter. Consciousness binds form and matter together, synthesizing both in an act of judgment and thus reveals an extra mental world to the subject, who is now in a position to acquire reliable knowledge of this world. Husserl’s method is to isolate what he considers the most fundamental fact about the world – consciousness – for in consciousness appearance and reality coincide and then explain the rest of the world through it, making consciousness the foundation of objective empirical knowledge because it binds meaning and the world together.

Has Husserl then solved the problem of reconciling subjectivity of knowing with objectivity of knowledge? Probably not. There seem to be three problems associated with this theory:

 

1. Our access to this ideal world is left in the dark. We are supposed to have a special cognitive faculty to grasp formal structure which is needed to impose order on matter, but this grasping of ideal objects is not explained for the third realm is a-causal and hence like material objects cannot be said to be perceived by impinging on our sense organs. So how is it that we grasp this ideal world? We are supposed to intuit it but there is no good explanation given as to how we come to acquire such an ability. Husserl says that through abstraction and imaginative projection we come to acquire the ability to see essences but this is too simple. Is this is natural phenomena capable of being studied by psychology and neurosciences or does it transcend natural phenomena? In Logical Investigations Husserl seems to go with the first option and in Ideas he introduces a non-natural transcendental consciousness that synthesizes form and matter for us. The maneuver seems to be required if phenomenology has to be a first philosophy, the final court of appeal to philosophical disputes. If consciousness is part of natural phenomena then it cannot be an object of study of the sciences and cannot do the foundational work Husserl supposes it to do. Correlation between form and matter accomplished by consciousness can be an object of empirical study but phenomenology is supposed to be a science which studies consciousness, which is presupposition-less and prior to science for its exclusive aim is to study foundations of science. Hence the shift to a transcendental consciousness which precludes its being made an object of study by empirical sciences and thus fit for phenomenological reflection and to provide a priori foundation for science. Philosophy is a rigorous science which gives an exact description of how things appear in consciousness, its exclusive domain of study, which cannot be usurped by empirical sciences. So phenomenology is not answerable to the world, rather it is the other way round. Either way it does not clarify the problem of subject’s implicit access to ideal world.

 

2. The relation between ideal and real objects is also left mysterious. Smith (2007) compares ideal objects to grammatical form of a sentence which is filled in by the material content of the sentence. But can really grammatical form exist independently from the semantic part of the sentence? They may exist independently in thought when we abstract from them but not ontologically. Smith also says that the relation between the ideal objects and real world is a formal link but that does not help. To bridge the gap between the ideal and real worlds was our problem to start with and another formal link does not solve it. Adding formal links adds something on the side of the ideal world but nothing on the side of material world and it seems that the ‘twain shall never meet’. Every formal item may be correlated with the material item but we do not need correlation we need connection. An ideal correlative world does not determine the structure of the material world for it is just a correlate like two parallel lines never meeting at any point. We have here two horns of a dilemma: if we need the ideal realm to necessitate the structure of the real world then we need some relation between the two, such a relation would either allow independence of the two like in correlation but then mere correlation does not necessitate the possession of the structure with that which is correlated. If the world instantiates a formal structure then a stronger relation is needed but such a relation would not allow the autonomy of an ideal world. Husserl’s world of ideal objects is a-temporal, even if the material world were not to exist at all, the ideal world would still exist, and it cannot come into being and cannot cease to exist. It is important to note the importance of correlation between form and matter, the material world has to have a structure as the content of consciousness projects it as having and possession of this structure by the material region is dependent on ideal objects, yet if no account of this dependence is forthcoming then matter may lack such a structure and we would be back to making the Kantian distinction between phenomena and noumena. The subject is to be credited with genuine knowledge of the world then harmony between content and intended object is needed, because knowledge is knowledge of an extra mental world which is supposed to be exactly the way it is supposed to appear in consciousness. So it seems Husserl has traded problems: where the problem was to bridge the gap between subjects and objects it is to bridge the gap between ideal and real worlds.

 

3. Finally the problem is Husserl’s phenomenology. Truth, objectivity, reference to the world are analyzed on the basis of subjective appearances only, ruling out any appeal to extra mental reality whatsoever. But these very concepts make an appeal to extra mental reality and hence cannot be studied in isolation. Imagine a botanist saying that he is interested only in studying the leaf but not the stem. Things are interconnected with each other in myriad ways and hence cannot be studied in isolation. It is one thing to attend to facts and another to isolate them and then study them. Husserl’s ideal world needed to build a bridge between subject and the world, to eliminate the gap between them so that subject can acquire knowledge of the world, but for that we require the material world to possess the structure it is projected by the content of consciousness to possess. This is the point with there being harmony between judgment and the world, for the world should exist exactly the way it is said to be constituted in consciousness. But we can never be assured of this if we limit ourselves to considering solely the subject’s point of view in isolation from the rest of the world. For there to be harmony between the content and the world we need to investigate both sides of the relation and not just one. Knowledge needs to be in conformance with an extra-mental world, but we cannot decide whether a subject has knowledge or not sitting exclusively on the subjective end of things. David Bell in his book 1995 on Husserl makes this point forcefully:

“Even if we allow that certain phenomena can properly be characterized as self-evident, and even if we accept that certain experiences are capable of fulfilling other experiences, we nevertheless lack the resources with which to explain how such subjective, intentional experiences can ever make contact with reality, or can ever be related to things which are not subjective or intentional in such a way as to constitute objective knowledge of them. And so, as Gunther Patzig puts it, in the Logical Investigations ‘the daring bridge called evidence, intended to connect judgement with fact, had the drawback, rather unfortunate in a bridge, that it ended on the same side of the river from which it began’. Given the naturalistic perspective that informs the phenomenology of the Logical Investigations, Husserl found it impossible to escape the domain of seemings, or to provide an account of objective truth and knowledge using only the materials available within descriptive psychology. In the last resort, therefore, that work fails in its overall aim at precisely the point, and for just the reason, that the Philosophy of Arithmetic had earlier done so. Neither work could satisfactorily explain, in naturalistic terms, how ‘the psychological’ and ‘the logical’ were to be reconciled, how ‘that which is intrinsically objective [can] become a presentation, and thus, so to speak, something subjective’. This failure was, I believe, inevitable, given the combination in Husserl’s early thought of two Brentanian commitments. One was to a methodological solipsism according to which the workings of the mind can be investigated and understood in complete isolation from any facts concerning the nature, or even the existence, of non-mental reality. The other commitment was to a naturalism which viewed mental phenomena as merely one species of natural occurrence amongst many others – albeit one that could be investigated independently of all the others. These two points of view combine to yield a programme according to which, on the one hand, the properties of a certain class of natural occurrences (mental acts) are to be analysed and explained in isolation, but according to which, on the other hand, the members of that class possess properties (being true, referring to reality, constituting knowledge, etc.) which can only be analysed or explained by appeal to the relation in which they stand to items outside that class. In short, the programme is unworkable because it simultaneously requires and prevents an explanation of mental phenomena considered in isolation.”

 

Phenomenology imposes self-imposed limitations on a philosopher, there should be no methodological constraints as such and a philosopher should investigate every angle of a problem. It is the nature of the philosophical problem that should determine method rather than the other way round. Otherwise a philosopher is reduced to fixing problems according to a premeditated method, forcefully molding data into a set framework, failing to do justice to philosophical issues. 

 

 

An alternative picture may be here suggested contra Husserl which at the moment is undeveloped but worthy of further consideration. Rules of inference have a pragmatic value in as much as they allow us to make correct inferences or acquire correct beliefs about the world. Their validity lies in certain form of responsiveness to the world; they are constructed not discovered in an apriori third realm. They are constructed does not mean that they are arbitrary but rather faithful to the structure of the world in virtue of which they allow us to make correct inferences. They are not a product of psychological laws. Their epistemic virtue lies in facilitating reasoning about the world. They allow us to think correctly. They do so not because they have a special epistemic status or live in special realms but because we form them in order to track the world in the right way and they allow us to do that. They are formulated with the explicit purpose to allow us to reason correctly. We do not have any privileged intuitions about these rules from the start that reflection allows us to discover. Norms are standards we construct for further guidance and are useful because successful. It may be said that law of non-contradiction is a condition on saying anything coherent. That is not correct. The law did not exist somewhere in a platonic realm making our discourse coherent. They have no special existence as such. Husserl would have us believe that whenever we reason correctly we have a tacit grasp of logical laws that determines valid reasoning, this tacit grasp is made explicit by transcendental reductions. It is this picture that I seek to oppose. Consider Miyamoto Musashi’s book – The Book Of Five Rings – where he said that he won most of his battles without any explicit knowledge of strategy. But just because he was not following any rules does not mean he was not fighting, the rules codify the way to fight correctly but it does not mean that fighting correctly has to be a rule following behavior. In this way laws of logic are like rules of cricket. They allow us to play successfully. But a question also arises regarding responsiveness to the world. We can reason correctly even before taking a logic course but after learning logic we can reason consistently. This does not mean that earlier we had an implicit understanding of the logical laws that we were unconsciously applying but now we can do it consciously and explicitly. Rule Following makes a difference in behavior but not all actions can be called rule following, a line of demarcation is needed. Our practices have consistency or conformance with the world as a regulative ideal. The rule of how a cover drive should be played resonates the way the ball is delivered and can be maneuvered through the field of play. It may also embody ways to tackle swing so that a player does not get out due to it. The generality of logical laws lies in their application not their prior existence. But while logic is concerned with how we can reason correctly, why we can reason correctly is a different question which has to take the ‘how’ question into equation in order to give a correct answer. The why question may be understood by taking into consideration the structure of the world, thus I believe Husserl’s form – matter distinction was not wrong after all(what was wrong was taking it as two different realms) in the end though wrongly executed. Contra Empiricism knowledge does presuppose formal conceptions like substance-attribute, universal – particular. Empiricism embarks on a genetic project of showing how a subject forms concepts about cause and effect, substance and attribute but such a project if it is to be successful must not presuppose the formal conceptions it seeks to explain as subject’s contribution to the world. Empiricism but does presuppose them. For example in Essays on Human Understanding II xxvi Locke explains acquisition of cause-effect concepts on seeing variations in our sensations. But this seems to presuppose the fact that the subject is already viewing it as cause and effect. Husserl rightly points out that our judgments are a synthesis of hyletic and noetic components, the former are sensations while the latter are  conceptual, i.e. ways to group sensations together to form a coherent whole or an object. But it is the relation between noetic components and the world that we seek to understand and have to if we have to understand how we have an objective knowledge of the world. But the objectivity of concepts cannot be secured by making them denizens of an abstract world that by definition is objective. Husserl’s views on synthesis also are not original and he owes them to Kant. The entire point of the Transcendental Analytic was to emphasize contra empiricists that the categories of understanding cannot have genesis in human experience and that experience presupposes these categories and the point of Transcendental Dialectic was to show that contra rationalists the categories are not applicable to things-in-themselves which always shall remain unknown to us. The categories of reason may be a la Kant categories of Understanding that get imposed on the world or a la Aristotle descriptions of structure the world actually possesses. But anyways, the question of formal categories and formal ontology is of paramount importance but their study should be undertaken the way Kant or Aristotle did, not through positing a third realm al la Husserl or Frege or Plato. An example may help. Suppose I ask someone at a party why Mr. X is getting differential treatment? His reply may be, “He is a VIP”, being a VIP marks out a certain aspect of the man. Marking out categories may help to specify the structure the world or our thoughts may have. Contra Husserl the category – Species marks or specifies the structure an oak tree may have – Quercus but we need not require a formal object – Species to be possessed by the oak tree too. Quercus is a feature of the world; we mark or specify this structural fact about the world and others like it by a system of categories made as comprehensible as possible. This takes us into the metaphysical foundations of logic but it remains to be seen whether Aristotle is right in thinking that the world has such a structure or whether Kant is right in taking categories to be categories of understanding only. My sympathies at the moment lie with Aristotle.