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Husserl Logical Investigations I Ch. 1: Expression and Meaning

1 The ambiguity in the term sign

Every sign is a sign of something, but not every sign has meaning, a sense that

the sign expresses. Signs in the sense of indications do not express anythingunless they happen to fulfill a significant as well as an indicative function. Tomean is not a particular way of being a sign in the sense of indicatingsomething. In communicative speech, meaning is always bound up withindication, but meaning is also capable of occurring without such a connectionsince expressions function meaningfully even in isolated mental life where theyno longer serve to indicate something.

2 The essence of indication

Indicatory signs are characteristic qualities that make the objects to which they

attach recognizable. A thing is only properly an indication if it serves to indicatesomething to some thinking being.

4 Digression on the origin of indication and association

If A summons B into consciousness, we are not merely simultaneously orsuccessively conscious of both A and B, but we usually feel their connectionforcing itself upon us, a connection in which the one points to the other andseems to belong to it. To turn mere coexistence into intentional unities of thingsis the constant result of associative functioning. Indicative objects or states ofaffairs do not merely recall or point to others, but they also provide evidence

for them.

5 Expressions as meaningful signs. Setting aside of a sense of expression

not relevant for our purpose

Indicative signs are distinct from meaningful signs (expressions). Provisionally,each part of speech (and signs of the same sort) is an expression, whether ornot it is uttered or addressed with communicative intent to any persons. Such adefinition excludes facial expression and the various gestures which involuntarilyaccompany speech without communicative intent. Such utterances are notexpressions in the sense of speech; in such manifestations, one man

communicates nothing to another, and they have no meaning. Theseexpressive movements mean something to one who interprets them, but theylack the meaning of indicative verbal signs.

6 Questions as to the phenomenological and intentional distinctions which

pertain to expressions as such

Every expression is typically distinguished between:

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(1) The physical expression (the sensible sign, the articulate sound-complex,the written sign on paper).

(2) The meaning or sequence of mental states linked with the expressionthat make it the expression of something.

However, this distinction between physical signs and sense-giving experiencesis mistaken. In the case of names, what they show forth (mental states) isdistinct from what they mean (content). Further, the content of a name is distinctfrom what it names (the object). Similar distinctions (and others) will be made inthe case of expression, and only by paying heed to these relations can theconcept of meaning be delimited and the opposition between the symbolic andthe epistemological function of meanings be worked out.

7 Expressions as they function in communication

Expressions were originally framed to fulfill a communicative function. Thephysical sign first becomes spoken word or communicative speech when aspeaker produces it with the intention of expressing something through itsmeans. He endows it with a sense he desires to share with his auditors. Such asharing becomes possible if the auditor also understands the speakersintention. He does this inasmuch as he takes the speaker to be a person who isnot merely uttering sounds but speaking to him, which is accompanying thosesounds with certain sense-giving acts that the sounds reveal to the hearer. Whatfirst makes mental commerce possible is the correlation among the physical andmental experiences of communicating persons. Speaking and hearing, theintimation of mental states through speaking and the reception thereof in

hearing, are mutually correlated.

All expressions in communicative speech function as indications. They serve thehearer as signs of the thoughts of the speaker and the other inner experiencesthat make up his communicative intention. This function we shall call theirintimating function. The content of such intimation consists in the innerexperiences intimated. Ordinary speech permits us to call an experience

intimatedan experience expressed.

To understand an intimation is not to have conceptual knowledge of it: it

consists simply in the fact that the hearer intuitively takes the speaker to be a

person who is expressing this or that. Common speech credits us with perceptseven of other peoples inner experiences; we see their anger, their pain etc.Such talk is quite correct as long as we allow outward bodily things likewise to

count as perceived, and in general, the notion of perception is not restricted

to the adequate*. If the essential mark of perception lies in the intuitivepersuasion that a thing or event is itself before us for our grasping, then thereceipt of such an intimation is the mere perceiving of it. The hearer perceivesthe speaker as manifesting certain inner experiences, so he also perceives the

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experiences himself; he does not, however, himself experience them: he doesnot have an inner but an outer percept of them. Here we have the differencebetween the real grasp of what ison the basis of adequate* intuition and the

putative grasp of what ison the basis of inadequate presentation. The formerinvolves something experienced whereas the latter involves a presumed being

to which no truth corresponds. (See CM, 6 for a discussion of adequacy andintuition. Also look at Chad Kidds Husserls Phenomenological Theory ofIntuition.)

8 Expressions in solitary life

Expressions that are used in communication depend essentially on theirindicative operations. But they also play a role in uncommunicated, interiormental life. A word only ceases to be a word when our interest stops at itssensory contour: when it becomes a mere sound-pattern. But when we live theunderstanding of a word, it expresses something (and the same thing), whether

or not we address it to anyone.

Is it the case that in soliloquy one speaks to oneself and employs words as

indicative signs of ones own inner experiences? This view is unacceptable. Inthis case, the pointing of the word to its meaning is something entirely different.The existence of the sign neither motivates the existence of the meaning norour belief in the meanings existence. What we use as an indication must beperceived to be existent. This holds for communicative expressions but notsoliloquy. We should not confuse the imaginative presntations with theirimagined objects: the imagined verbal sounds or printed words (and theirobjects) do not exist, but their imaginative presentations do. The words non-

existence neither disturbs nor interests us since it leaves the words expressivefunction unaffected.

In a monologue, words can perform no function of indicating the existence ofmental acts, since such indication would there be quite purposeless. For theacts in question are themselves experienced by us at that very moment.

9 Phenomenological distinctions between the physical appearance of the

expression, and the sense-giving and sense-fulfilling act

The sense-informed expersrsion breaks up into the physical phenomenon and

into the acts which give it meaning and intuitive fullness, in which its relation toan expressed object is constituted. In virtue of such acts, the expression is morethan merely a sounded word. Insofar as it means something, it relates to what isobjective. This objective can be actually present through accompanyingintuitions or may at least appear in a representational mental image, but thisneed not occur: the expression functions significantly but lacks any basicintuition that will give it its object. The relation of expression to object is nowunrealized as being confined to a mere meaning-intention. A name names its

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object in every circumstance because it meansthat object. But if the object isnot before one, mere meaning is all there is to it. Only when the object is presentis the meaning-intention fulfilled, and the naming becomes an actual, consciousrelation between name and object.

We have, on one hand, acts essential for an expression to be an expression (averbal sound infused with sense)meaning-conferring acts or meaning-

intentionsand on the other, acts that are non-essential to expression but fulfillit or actualize its relationship to its objectmeaning-fulfilling acts. In the realizedrelation of the expression to its objective correlate, the sense-informedexpression becomes one with the act of meaning-fulfillment. One should not say

that an expression expresses its meaning (its intention). To make meaning-intentions known to the hearer is the prime aim of our communicative intention,for only insofar as the hearer attributes them to the speaker will he understandlatter.

10 The phenomenological unity of these acts

To be an expression is a descriptive aspect of the experienced unity of the signand thing signified.

All objects and relations among objects only are what they are for us, throughacts of thought essentially different from them, in which they become present tous, I nwhich the ystand before us as unitary items that we mean. Where thenaively objective interest dominates, where we live in intentional acts withoutreflecting upon them, one simply speaks of expression and what isexpressed, name and thing named. But where phenomenological interest

dominates, we endure the hardship of having to describe phenomenologicalrelationships which we may have experience on countless occasions, but ofwhich we are not normally conscious as objects, and we have also to do ourdescribing with expressions framed to deal with objects whose appearance liesin the sphere of our normal interests.

14 Content as object, content as fulfilling sense and content as sense or

meaning simpliciter

Every expression intimates something, means something, and names orotherwise designates something.

A statement of perception expresses a perception, but also the content of aperception. We distinguish in a perceptual statement, as in every statement,between contenet and object; by the content we understand the self-identicalmeaning that the hearer can grasp even if he is not a percipient. In the unity offulfillment, the fulfilling content coincides with the intending content, so that, inour experience of this unity of coincidence, the object, at once intended andgiven, stands before us, not as two objects, but as onealone.

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The manifold ambiguities in talk about what an expression expresses, or about

an expressed content, may therefore be so ordered that one distinguishesbetween a content in a subjective and objective sense.

15 The equivocations in talk of meaning and meaninglessness connected with

these distinctions (meaning-less and sense-less)

(1) It is part of the notion of an expression to have a meaning: this preciselydifferentiates an expression from other signs mentioned above. Ameaningless expression is, therefore, no expression at all.

(2) In meaning, a relation to an object is constituted. To use an objectsignificantly and to refer expressively to an object (to form a presentationof it) are one and the same. It makes no difference whether the objectexists or is fictitious or even impossible. Rigorously interpreted, anexpression has meaning if the object exists but is meaningless if not.

(3) If the meaning is identified with the objective correlate of an expression, aname like golden mountain is meaningless. Marty objects: If the wordsare senseless, how could we understand the question as to whether suchthings exist, so as to answer it negatively? These objections confuse truemeaninglessness [from (1)] with the a priori impossibility of a fulfillingsense. An expression has meaning in this sense if a possible fulfillmentcorresponds to its intention.

(4) Men have come to locate the significance of expressions inaccompaniments of intuitive imagery. This led to a total denial of meaning

to absurd expressions. The new concept of meaning therefore originatesin a confusion of meaning with fulfilling intuition. On this conception, anexpression has meaning if and only if its (meaning-) intention is fulfilled.

20 Thought without intuition and the surrogative function of signs

Signs are in fact not objects of our thought at all, even surrogatively; we ratherlive entirely in the consciousness of meaning, of understanding, which does notlapse when accompanying imagery does so. The true meaning of the signs inquestion emerges if we glance at the much favored comparison of mathematicaloperations to rule-governed games, e.g. chess. Chessmen are not part of the

chess-game as bits of ivory and wood having such and such shapes and colors.Their phenomenal and physical constitution is quite indifferent, and can bevaried at will. They become chessmen, counters in the chess-game, through thegames rules which give them their fixed games-meaning. And so, arithmeticalsigns have, besides their original meaning, their so-to-say games-meaning, ameaning oriented towards the game of calculation and its well-known rules.

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