gillett, husserl, wittgenstein and the snark intentionality and social naturalism

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Husserl, Wittgenstein and the Snark: Intentionality and Social NaturalismAuthor(s): Grant GillettSource: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 57, No. 2 (Jun., 1997), pp. 331-349Published by: International Phenomenological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2953721 .

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Philosophy and Phenomenological Research Vol. LVII, No. 2, June 1997

Husserl, Wittgenstein and the Snark: Intentionality and Social Naturalism

GRANT GILLElT

University of Otago

The Snark is an intentional object. I examine the general philosophical characteristics of thoughts of objects from the perspective of Husserl's, hyle, noesis, and noema and show how this meets constraints of opacity, normativity, and possible existence as generated by a sensitive theory of intentionality. Husserl introduces terms which indicate the normative features of intentional content and attempts to forge a direct relationship between the norms he generates and the actual world object which a thought intends. I then attempt to relate Husserl's account to Fregean insights about the sense and reference of a term. Neither Husserl nor Frege suggest plausible routes to a naturalistic account of intentionality and I turn to Wittgenstein to provide a naturalistic reading of the crucial terms involved in the analysis of intentional content. His account is normative in a way required by both Husserl and Frege and yet manages a kind of Aristotelian naturalism which avoids crude biologism.

They hunted till darkness came on but they found Not a button, or feather, or mark, By which they could tell that they stood on the ground Where the Baker had met with the Snark

In the midst of the word he was trying to say, In the midst of his laughter and glee, he had softly and suddenly vanished away- For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.

Snarks are clearly intentional objects. Lewis Carroll says of a Snark that it has a meagre, hollow, but crisp taste, a habit of getting up late, slowness in taking a jest, fondness for bathing machines, ambition, and can either have feathers and bite or have whiskers and scratch. What is more it can be mis- taken for a Boojum, in which case the observer will vanish forthwith and never be seen again, like the unfortunate baker. Call this descriptive specification 'Sn*' as it contains all the descriptive criteria for counting a thing as a Snark. Given these facts, what would make it true to say of a thinker, say Algernon, that he is thinking of a Snark? Obviously, we cannot just point to an object and ask whether his thought concerns that object because Snarks do not exist to be pointed at in that way. What is more, an ob-

HUSSERL, WflTGENSTEIN AND THE SNARK 331



ject which possessed the characteristics itemised in Sn* might not qualify. Imagine, for instance, that Algernon is thinking of a large emu-like bird which has a propensity to bite people and all the other relevant habits and at- titudes; arguably it could not be a Snark if there were no connection in his mind (or Lewis Carroll's) between this creature and the Snark.

Nevertheless, whatever we say about the Snark, it is clear that it is the object of a circumscribed and determinate class of thoughts. For instance, it seems that a purely descriptive specification of a Snark is insufficient in that certain thoughts about Lewis Carroll or his poetry, however misremembered or dimly remembered, are part of thinking of a Snark. Thus an actual animal with most of the features in Sn* would not do for a Snark although it might seem the same as far as anyone could tell (and could, indeed, subsequently be named a snark). However, one could be thinking of a Snark even if there were no object present or possibly present which was designated by that term. This and the problem with actual (descriptively adequate) candidates forces us to consider the individuation of intentional objects. Recall that the problem with an object apparently fulfilling Sn* is that we do not know whether that is the sort of thing Lewis Carroll meant or had in mind when he conceived of the Snark. Therefore individuating conditions sufficient to ground the attribution of thoughts of a snark have to pay attention to this 'having in mind' relation. That relation does not seem to require that there be a physical object fulfilling the semantic requirements of the thought but there could be. Imagine, for instance, that Lewis Carroll, when he wrote 'The hunting of the Snark' was writing about a creature seen by him in a vision but which actually existed in the Pyrenees. This case suggests that our account of intentionality or aboutness has to be flexible and allow for either possibility. (The possibility that the object of a fictional thought might be an actual object required us to posit a supernatural set of events and so may not be a strong constraint on a naturalistic account of intentionality.)

These observations raise some critical problems for an account of intentionality and its objects. What must be said apart from the fact that a subject has a qualitatively or descriptively adequate specification of the object? What ought we to say about thoughts which do not have external or manifest objects? Can we give a unified account of objects like Snarks and objects like the Clapham Omnibus?

These and other possibilities lead to the idea of intentional objects and the philosophical distinction between the contents of consciousness and the objects of consciousness. That distinction is prominent in Husserl's analysis of mind. What is more, Husserl's account has some interesting resonances with that of Wittgenstein who is commonly held to deny that there are any such things as mental contents which transcend the natural realities publically identifiable in relation to a thinker. Comparing the work of these two thinkers brings to light some instructive and often neglected features of con-

332 GRANT GELLETI7



tent which emphasise Wittgenstein's conceptual (if not historical) connections with phenomenology.

We should, before we begin, note three constraints, arising from the points already made, on an adequate account of intentionality.

First, the opacity constraint: intentional content is opaque in that it captures the object according to a certain way of thinking.

Second, the normative constraint: there are some mental ascriptions which count as involving a given content and others which do not. It remains to be seen how the norms are to be construed.

Third, the possible existence constraint: an intentional object may or may not exist and an adequate account of intentionality should accommodate either case.

Husserl on Contents and Objects

Husserl borrows from Brentano the idea that consciousness is essentially noetic or intentional. Brentano claimed that mental predicates are distin- guished by the fact that they have intentional contents. Thus my thought is not just a thought simpliciter, it is and must be a thought of this or that; my desire is not undirected although it may be relatively ill-defined; and my perception is not vacant although it may be unfocussed. I will assume that mental predicates are essentially intentional in the sense that they take objects or are directed upon things and that those things are in general not adequately specified for the purpose of mental descriptions by mentioning the objects concerned; they can be specified only by identifying the "description under which" (Anscombe, 1981) the thing in question is apprehended. Thus it will not do to say that Little Miss Muffet is aware of a little black creature beside her because if that were all she were aware of she might not be frightened away. To explain her alarm we might need to know that she recognised the thing as a spider and that she had a fear of spiders. Husserl talks of "the way in which the perceived object with its distinguishing features is presented" (I, p. 236),1 Frege (1977) of the "manner of presentation" of a thing, and Evans (1981) of the "way of thinking" associated with a particular thought. It is this way of thinking of or apprehending an object that is important in psychological explanations such as "he realised, with dawning horror, that the Snark before him might be a Boojum". Contemporary content theorists discuss this in terms of cognitive significance, but Husserl adverts to meaning:

Every intentional experience, thanks to its noetic phase, is noetic, it is its essential nature to harbour in itself a 'meaning' of some sort, it may be many meanings. (I, p. 237)

1 - Throughout I refer to Husserl's Ideas (1962) as I, p. xxx.

HUSSERL, WFITGENSTEIN AND THE SNARK 333



If we do not rigorously attach 'meaning' to the meanings of utterances in a natural language then Husserl's claim concerns the same thing as "cognitive significance". For Husserl this is a feature of the noetic phase of an experience.

At this juncture we need to delve a little more deeply into Husserl's idea of the noetic in order to explore the constraints on an account of intentionality.2

FIGURE 1.

Experience of a tree: OBJECT CONTENTS (ACTUAL) REAL IDEAL

the hyle }--------> sensory matter

the tree the noesis form: appearings

(an object in the world)

<-------------------------------------- the noema fixes, steers mind onto

Figure 1. pictures Husserl's analysis of a simple perceptual experience of a tree. In interpreting it we must bear in mind that Husserl implicitly and ex- plicitly dissociates himself from idealism. Thus:

I perceive the thing, the object of nature, the tree there in the garden; that and nothing else is the real object of the perceiving "intention". A second immanent tree, or even an "inner image" of the real tree that stands out there before me is nowise given, and to suppose such a thing by way of assumption leads only to absurdity. (I, p. 243)

For Husserl, intentional contents are informed by meanings and not identical to real world objects transcendent of experience but they are not 'shadow' or 'inner' objects. Therefore we must provide an interpretation of mental relations which does not assume inner mental objects and yet allows that things are seen as or thought of as being thus and so where the 'thus and so' is func- tionally linked to a mind and not merely to a mind-independent standpoint on the object (an idea which is, in any event, problematic). For instance, 'the

2 There is an extensive discussion of-Husserl's view of intentionality in D. W. Smith & R. McIntyre Husserl and intentionality (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1982) and H. L. Dreyfus (ed.) Husserl, Intentionality and Cognitive Science (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

334 GRANT GILLETIT



morning star' is a mental categorisation which, absent human beings and their diurnal rhythms of life, would not be applied to Venus (the term 'Venus' itself, has of course a rich cultural history). How do we read Husserl's noema and noesis so as to satisfy the three constraints on intentionality and not slip into idealism?

Husserl distinguishes between the "proper components of the intentional experiences, and their intentional correlates" (I, p. 237). The hyle or matter of the object and the noesis are both proper components or part of the phenomenological event, say, of seeing a tree; therefore they are intentionally real. They are meaningful in virtue of their relations to the actual tree (in the world). But the noetic content or noesis which is structured by its relation to the tree is 'steered onto' or related to its object (the actual tree) by the noema. The noema is an intentional correlate of the experience itself and is therefore ideal not real. To look at it otherwise, the noesis is immanent to the mind and the noema transcendent of the mind but in a different way from the (actual) object. Both are transcendent of the real content of experience because they are not contained in the experience (I, p. 261). The noematic refers to meaning (Sinn-I, p. 238) and is unchanged in different noetic phases of contact with actual objects. Thus, at one point, Husserl remarks that the actual colour, shape or nature of an object manifests itself through a "hyletic phase" of concrete experience which takes varying perspectives on it. These are united as referring to the one thing by the meaning constituting function of the noema. Husserl's view clearly preserves for noema (or Sinn) something which transcends an individual moment of experience as it appears to the subject but which is intrinsic to the meaning of that experience.

But is Husserl's account so very different from an idealist picture in which the danger always looms that the way of appearing (at a given moment to a given subject) will displace the object known. This 'displacing' threatens to force the view that the subject can never be intentionally related to objects themselves but only to representations or ideas of objects. Husserl is clearly intolerant of this idea but there is a powerful intuition that our ideas of things are the currency of the mind, and that, absent actual objects as the proper objects of certain classes of thought, we can only preserve aboutness or intentionality by positing representational objects. It remains to be seen whether Husserl's use of noema and noesis helps to secure a plausible realism against this idealist pressure.

Let us take a further example to try and clarify Husserl's view. I walk around a Henry Moore sculpture. I am struck by various impressions of solid- ity, contour, surface, space and mass, and so on. These are united into one mental occurrence-my experience of the Moore sculpture. The sculpture is inert if salient, the impressions are inherently shifting but they are drawn together by a formative meaning or intentional focus-the sculpture. This focus as a central meaning for my experience overarches or includes the mo-

HUSSERL, WflTGENSTEIN AND THE SNARK 335



ments of my (potentially disjointed) perception. The noematic correlate, my intentional relation to the sculpture as such, is therefore just as transcendent of my perceptual series as the (actual) object which I see as a sculpture. Thus my immanent or real experience has two intentional correlates:

(i) the object (in the world);

(ii) the noema which unifies it and relates it to that object.

Note Husserl's contrast between consciousness and reality or what he calls actuality (I, p. 121). [In Ideas, Husserl uses the term 'actual' for the familiar sense of 'real' and his technical use of 'real' refers to the occurrent contents of the mind.]

The ideality of the noema and its role in fixing the object of the thought in a way that does not depend on the occurrent mental goings on of a subject suggests that the noema determines what counts as an integral part of the experience e.g. of a tree, the Moore sculpture, or Dvorak's 8th Symphony. This is a step toward conceptualising my second or normative constraint on an adequate account of intentionality. It allows the essential or canonical content of a given thought not to be a function of occurrent ideas, which Frege calls "men's varying states of consciousness" (LI, p. 25).3 This aspect of Husserl's view also prefigures Dummett's insistence that the sense of a term should guide a thinker on to its reference (1981, p. 47).

So far I have claimed that there is a clear sense in which the contents of consciousness are intentional and not to be reduced to or simply equated with actual objects in the world. This claim is embodied in the opacity constraint and the possible existence constraint. I have picked up Husserl's (Aristotelian) terminology for the analysis of content and outlined the distinction between what can properly be said to be immanent (real) in the mental activity of a subject-hyle and noesis-and what is transcendent or cannot be contained there-the actual object and the noema. The exclusion of actual objects from the mind is a fundamental feature of any broadly realist metaphysics of thought and I have not argued for it. Indeed it seems absurd to think that one should need to prove that things like desks or chairs exist in some sense apart from the minds of thinkers. The interesting point is Husserl's further exclusion, the sense, meaning, or noema of an intentional object which defines, in the case of an actual object, its actual world reference. Frege and most non-relativist philosophers want this not to be a function of individual or collective impressions but a noema is not the kind of thing that happily inhabits a world of actual objects. Therefore we have yet to avoid the trap, into which Frege (and to some extent Husserl) fell, whereby

I shall indicate references to Frege's Logical Investigations (1977) by using the abbre- viation LI.

336 GRANT GILLETI7



we are forced to posit a 'third realm'. This realm is supposed to be distinct both from the world of objects and from the consciousness of thinkers and it houses the senses, noemata, or contents which are essential to thoughts and determine their truth or falsity. The problem is particularly acute in the case of purely intentional objects like the Snark.

When I quake with fear at the idea that I might ever confront a Snark I am not fearing an image in my own mind for images cannot hurt me in that sense. Neither am I fearing an abstraction from various inscriptions or utterances because such notional objects hold few actual terrors. I am fearing a thing which, endowed with the properties described by Lewis Carroll, might do to me what happened to the baker. This is entirely parallel to Reid's ob- servation that when I think fire causes heat I do not think that my idea of fire causes my idea of heat (1785). But Husserl and the realist both meet a stern test in the cases of objects of thought like Snarks.

For Husserl, there must be a noema correlated with an act of thinking about a Snark. The noema has a prescribed and meaningful form which con- stitutes different noetic moments as hyle through which the actual object- correlated with the noema-presents itself (I, pp. 261-62). My opening remarks have suggested that there is something essential to this noema which incorporates a reference to Lewis Carroll's work. What we must therefore do on Husserl's behalf is to provide a sense in which the Snark can have the cognitive significance of an object while being noematically related to a fictional creation. But then we come to Husserl's 'real' contents. What, for instance, is the hyle for a Snark? The hyle comprises the unstructured appearings which are informed by the noema (itself normative and related to the actual object) so as to become noetic. Specifying hyle is a fairly daunting problem even where they can be related to an actual object (and thereby the object related to the thoughts of a thinker). At least in the actual object case there are actual or causal connections that could link the thinker to the object and serve as some kind of grounding for the noetic content. For a Snark there are no such causal connections with anything remotely like the object of mystery and imagination it is said to be and therefore we need a different account of the noematic constitution of the object.

However, we cannot, because of Husserl's distinction between noesis and noema, allow our account to lay too much stress on the creative role of the apprehending mind. If we were to do that we would lose sight of the transcen- dence of the noema. What is more, a further question would then arise: How does the actual object become determinant of the noematic content and thus constrain (and not merely get created out of) the hyletic and noetic content which have mental (real) existence? The need for noemata to be robust in the face of shifting phenomenal content is made even more evident when we turn to Frege's analysis.

HUSSERL, WIITGENSTEIN AND THE SNARK 337



Frege on content

Frege, in stressing the relationship between the sense of a sentence and the content of a thought, paved the way for the linguistic turn in the analysis of mental content. I will assume that, even if the contents of thoughts are not necessarily linguistic in nature, the successful analysis of the meaning and understanding of the term 'Snark' (i.e. of the intentional aspects of the relevant bit of language) will bear a close relation to the general nature of intentionality.4 This assumption suggests that an account of the objectivity of sense (Sinn) will furnish valuable clues to the nature of Husserl's noema. That approach to the problem of intentionality can be supported by argu- ments adduced by Dummett and Davidson.

Dummett accepts that a core range of thoughts are those assessable for truth and notes the difficulty in giving an account of truth and falsity independent of language (1981, p. 42). He also notes the internal relation between a sentence and a thought such that the sentence "conveys the thought to you directly" and this in virtue of its components. He argues, perhaps most tellingly, that the objectivity of sense, if it is not to rest on faith in the coin- cidence that we share the same inner goings on, requires that the grasp of a concept is most perspicuously understood in terms of the correct use of the term which expresses it. He thus concludes that "the only way in which we can give a philosophical account of thought is by giving an account of language" (1981, p. 52).

Davidson, argues differently, claiming that the only adequate basis on which to make the range of mental ascriptions which holistically comprise our system of thought is through the interpretation of a sufficiently articulated language (1984, p. 155 ff). If this evidential basis is the ground of an ascription <S thinks p> then it holds equally whether we put Anne or I in the 's' position. On the basis that self and other ascriptions are linked a priori by their common basis in a theory of interpretation (of a broadly Tarskian form), he concludes "the attribution of desires and beliefs (and other thoughts) must go hand in hand with the interpretation of speech" (1984, p. 163). I am aware that this is the merest sketch of two profound theses about the relation between thought and language but shall not dwell on either account at this point because my present purposes can be served by more modest claims.

If thoughts are involved in the understanding of natural language then an account of meaning and understanding for natural language will at least reveal the intentionality of a significant subset of thoughts. Such an account might also suggest a broader explanation of intentionality which could embrace a larger range of intentional phenomena than those involved in language use.

4 I will signal the fact that mental content is not necessarily linguistic by using the notation <c> (e.g. <frog>, <tree>) for conceptual content and 'c' for a linguistic item (e.g. the verbal item or spoken word 'frog' or 'tree').

338 GRANT GELLETI7



This is plausible if, as many would argue, all thought is propositional in nature, but, quite apart from that claim, a significant range of thoughts are tied to language use and therefore an account of linguistic meaning is likely to be a useful way to assess any analysis of intentional content.

Frege, as we have noted, stressed the objectivity of Sinn but did not analyse its relation to what Husserl called 'real' mental content (occurrent mental goings on) except in a negative sense: "thoughts are neither things in the external world nor ideas" (LI, p. 17). This led him to posit his "third realm" with "an actuality ... quite different from the actuality of things". However Frege recognised that the efficacy of a thought "is brought about by the per- formance of the thinker" (LI, pp. 29-30). He argued that this efficacy must come about through the grasp of a thought and that only the inessential features of a thought could depend on the fact that it was grasped by a given thinker. The essence of a thought, in Frege's opinion, must be timeless and have an invariant relation to truth. On this basis he proceeded to investigate the logical properties of thoughts without paying attention to the relation between the thought and the thinker. He quickly found, as one might expect, that actual or natural language and the actual use of concepts was somewhat too messy for this Platonic investigation. We must therefore look beyond Frege for a naturalistic understanding which does justice to Husserl's analysis of thought content. I will look to Wittgenstein but before I do so I will note some psychological observations highly relevant to understanding meaningful or thematic conscious mental content.

Seeing this or that

The discussion of figure and ground in Gestalt psychology anticipated the current stress in cognitive science on the active nature of perception and its simi- larity to things like hypothesis testing.

In Figure 2 there is a pattern of small numbers. If you join the numbers from 16 to 37, a figure emerges. The Gestalt thesis is that perception or the apprehension of objects is, to some extent, always like this in that we are always constituting objects by disclosing meaningful forms in conscious experience. The link to Husserl's analysis can be made by asking which way the eye in the figure is pointing. For most readers it will point either to the right or to the left depending on whether the figure is seen as a duck or a rabbit. In recognising this difference between the ways in which the figure appears, one becomes aware of what Husserl would call two different noemata as competing meanings for the same hyletic content. As one or the other noema becomes dominant, the details of the figure change their componential meanings. Thus the impression that the ears are in their laid-back position shifts to an impression that the beak is slightly open as the rabbit or duck

HUSSERL, WITTGENSTEIN AND THE SNARK 339



FIGURE 2.

1 37 89 75 58 79 75 66 55 91

57 73 09 63 56 31 32 33 48 57

40 27 28 29 30 98 60 52 34 10

99 43 26 25 24 79 <(0>92 35 51

84 21 22 23 77 64 03 81 36 49

14 11 20 19 18 59 62 48 37 12

45 82 13 51 46 17 92 38 77 95

64 44 15 76 88 16 50 39 69 71

59 52 46 78 72 41 80 93 81 48

becomes the organising noema for the experience. For Husserl the real or immanent noetic phenomena here are those impressions and the ideal intentional accompaniment is the concept or meaning <duck> or <rabbit>.

This is consistent with Frege's analysis to the extent that Frege discussed ideas as having a distinct existence from that of senses or thoughts. However Frege does not so clearly distinguish between the moments of immanent content, designated hyle and noesis by Husserl, and the objective or universal sense or content as grasped by an individual thinker. For Husserl, the laid- back appearance of the rabbit's ears is a real part of my present mental activity. That activity is organised by the noema <rabbit> into <rabbit as experienced> but it also contains hyletic content that can be experienced differently (as a component of the noesis <duck as experienced>). Frege recognises the difference between this and the 'form' or 'third realm' entity <rabbit> and notes that its relation to the truth of a thought in which it appears differs from that of <duck>. He also recognises that both are distinct from my present grasp or use of them to 'in-form' my experience but he does not further analyse my current mental activity. Were he to do so, he would notice the need to transform the hyle-the sensory matter that appears to me-into a noesis-<the duck as experienced>.'

That need gives rise to a further analytic debt: the need to account for the influence of the noema or (normative) form on my use of the hyle. This requires an analysis of the relation between a (transcendent) thought and a thinker, a problem which, in Frege's hands, had a distinctly Platonic flavour

5 Arguably, the failure to discern the cognitive activity involved here is what gives cre- dence to theories which picture the mind as a locus of semantically or syntactically structured states which have a certain propositional configuration independent of any actual skill or operation by the thinker.

340 GRANT GILLETr



and led him to divorce his logical investigations from the real world of psy- chologically endowed beings and their characteristic activities. I will approach the problem by using Wittgenstein's naturalistic analysis of mind.

Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein refuses to separate the ascription of an intentional content, such as <the expectation that an apple will fall off a tree>, <the idea the Mars is a red planet>, and so on, from participation in a range of linguistic practices. He argues that it is in language that we discern the connection between thought and reality so that, for instance, an expectation and its fulfilment make connection through language (PI, #445).6 He can be read as claiming that the articulated relations between a subject and the world that come about through the use of language are the locus of intentionality. Wittgenstein and Davidson both hold (for different reasons) that thoughts of the level of com- plexity found in human beings are impossible without the support of language and language-related activities. I will not examine that claim in any detail but merely record my commitment to the thesis that a wide range of human thoughts are ascribed and made possible on the basis of the subject's participation in language games where utterances express the relevant proposi- tions.7 I will argue that the suggested internal relations between language and thought yield a fruitful analysis of the problem of noemata and noetic content.

Wittgenstein clearly locates meaning in the rule-governed practices of human beings. Thus, to discover the meaning or conceptual content of a term like 'baroque', one must go to the human situations in which it is used and identify what grouping or connection between things is being marked by the use of that term. In a similar way, to find out the meaning of the term 'five', I have to appreciate certain practices of counting or grouping and using signs to mark how many things there are rather than their colours, shapes, or relations to each other (PI, #1). I will accept this naturalistic thesis about meaning and try to see whether it helps with the problem of naturalising intentionality. Before I do so we ought to notice that the use of the sign or marker of a given conceptual content in a discursive context is not, in general, a matter of subjective determination by individuals or groups. If the word 'red' refers to the colour red so that for a co-linguistic group its cognitive significance is internally related to that reference, then no member or collective within that group can meaningfully decide that it will not have that sense or meaning. The concept associated with the term 'red' has a role in thought which is (to some considerable extent) independent of historical or cultural de-

6 All references to L.Wittgenstein (1953) Philosophical Investigations are indicated by PI and a section number (#nn) or English page number (NNNe).

7 I have argued for this commitment in Representation, Meaning, and Thought (1992).




terminations. This notwithstanding, shifts in cultural knowledge, such as that which distinguishes fish from dolphins, may change the conceptual structure of areas of human thought.

The dolphin case is an interesting test case for Platonism and Wittgen- stein's 'social naturalism'. As long as Husserl and Frege try to forge direct links between meaning (Sinn or noema) and actual objects, this case is difficult because the inclusion of dolphins among the mammals was a product of the growth of zoology as a science. But Wittgenstein has no such handi- cap; he can claim that the use of the term creates a context which implicates both the object and the practice in which the term is used. The two jointly determine the meaning of the term. Thus he can claim that the mammalian properties of dolphins only become articulable once certain linguistic practices have arisen but also that the coexistence of dolphins and those practices creates a situation where the relevant features of actual dolphins are the basis of that articulation. The possibility of certain intentional relations is created

by linguistic use but their content is determinate whether or not any thinkers make use of those possibilities.

Once we accept this analysis there is a clear sense in which what one

grasps when one grasps a given meaning is not a matter for private mental determination. Thus the meaningful use which is the basis of my grasp of say, the concept <aardvark>, is normative with respect any given act of thinking which uses that concept. What counts as an aardvark emerges from an examination of the shared practices which determine the truth or falsity of claims concerning real world objects called aardvarks. But it is not enough just to mention the physical objects that comprise the set of aardvarks or a particular physical object to which my present thought relates. To grasp the concept <aardvark> is not only to latch on to objects which happen to fall into the relevant set but to understand those objects as belonging to a class picked out by that concept. And it is this particular principled grouping that I must have in mind if I am to count as thinking of the thing before me <That

is an aardvark> because that thought embeds a quite specific way of conceptualising objects that are, as a matter of fact, aardvarks. Aardvarks can also be thought of as objects which generally measure about six feet from end to end, as nocturnal hunters (if eating ants can be called hunting), and as ground bur- rowers. Any or all of these characterisations may capture the content of a thinker's experience at a given point of time and we will only understand certain things about her if we get the right one. For instance, if she said 'Oh, so that is an aardvark, I thought it was just an ant-eater' and we held that mental content could be specified solely in terms of objects rather than the meaning attached to them, this thought would be difficult to accommodate. This is, however, exactly the kind of situation that reinforces the opacity constraint on an account of intentionality. According to Wittgenstein we latch on to the

appropriate meaning by locating her in relation to a rule-governed practice

342 GRANT GILLETT



which grounds the concept in question. The grasp of this practice may or may not be linked to the grasp of certain others such that a thinker may or may not understand different ways of talking and thinking about objects of the type in question.

The 'linguistic practice' reading of sense or Sinn gives Wittgenstein a way of interpreting Husserl's analysis which does not advert to the Platonic "third realm". The noema is glossed as the core or canonical use. Competence in this is criterial for the grasp of a given meaning. However, the ascription (or self-ascription) of that competence is not a matter of necessary and sufficient conditions nor of a single specification designed to cover all cases. Thus, I might count as understanding the concept <dolphin> in virtue of the fact that I fraternise with them, can pick them out from sharks, and have an intimate knowledge of their travels through the oceans and yet I might mistakenly be- lieve that they are a kind of fish. On the other hand I would not really count as understanding the concept <electron> just in virtue of being very good at picking up what I called 'electron fairy leaps' in a cloud chamber. If I really believed electrons were small magical persons then I do not think my ac-

quaintance with their fleeting manifestations would save my hopeless epistemic case. Despite these vagaries, it is plausible that there is some relatively core set of abilities or semantic skills that one needs to possess in order to have some warrant for the grasp of a given concept and, on Wittgenstein's analysis, this warrant does not reduce to a function of the mental goings on of an individual thinker.

The Noema, thus conceived, is an abstraction from the core mental and social skills relating thinkers to actual objects as those objects are designated by a term. They are based on the thinkers' participation in language games and related activities. The semantically structured skills from which these ab- stractions are drawn both shape individual contents or noeses and link them to actual classes of objects. The public practice of using a term such as 'wolf' is therefore the place to look for the noema <wolf>. That practice normatively constrains the range of objects to which the term 'wolf' can be applied. It des-

ignates the truth conditions, a sufficiency of which must be grasped if the thinker is to count as understanding 'wolf'. By so doing, it determines that

any phenomenal content which is to count as <an experience of a wolf> must be organised along lines which capture the core feature or features which (in a holistic, varying, but reliable way) distinguish things of that class. The practice also determines which other practices will impinge upon correct use of 'wolf' (those involving, for instance, 'animal', 'dog', 'carnivore', and so on). My phenomenal content derives from but does not directly contribute to these relations; they are transcendent of me and will tolerate any phenomenal content that suffices to secure my convergence in judgments with those who count as knowing what wolves are. My experience of what is before me can therefore show a great deal of perspectival variation or subjective detail as

HUSSERL, WIGENSTEIN AND THE SNARK 343



long as my judgments link the noema <wolf> to actual objects of the correct class. It is plausible that the phenomenal contents a subject experiences in a given act of noetic consciousness might be quite idiosyncratic as long as the organising meaning bears its "ideal" (Husserl) or "logical" (Frege) relation to its actual world referent and does not 'hare off' down some psychologistic track.

The Noesis is an actual mental content that arises within an intentional relation (involving the exercise of a rule-governed skill) between a particular subject and a particular situation. It is a function of the subject and his history but it is mappable onto a world of meanings transcendent of individual practice. Thus, for instance, Kripke's 'Pierre' thinks both:

1. <Londres est jolie>; and

2. <London is not pretty> (1979).

Now, if we are limited to austere noemata and actual objects as determinants of noetic content, Pierre presents a philosophical problem. The actual object (and therefore Husserlian noema) for 'Londres' as spoken by Pierre is the same as that for 'London', which seems to preclude his simultaneously hold- ing 1. and 2. But Wittgenstein allows us to appreciate that the core set of practices which have formed Pierre's grasp of 'Londres' are of the tourist- brochure type and have little to do with the reality of East End life in which he has learnt to use 'London'. Therefore the intentional relation manifest in <Londres est jolie> has different content from that manifest in <London is not pretty> although the actual object and noema of the two beliefs is the same. Anyone with an acquaintance of London sufficiently rich to capture both its tourist-brochure and its less attractive aspects can appreciate the mis- take made by a subject with more limited noetic content. That is not to say that content is individualistic, merely to note that the set of sufficient linguistic practices underpinning a given noetic content for a particular thinker are selective, and historically situated. They are a subset of the range that determine the actual object and may encompass only some indeterminate sufficiency (for meaningful use) of the core practices from which the noema is abstracted.

The hyle is that undifferentiated or primitive sensory content arising in a relation between a subject and the world which is the setting for intentional activity. This relation is describable but not perhaps by the subject. As the subject in that relation to an object uses certain techniques or semantic skills, thus forming noetic content, the relation takes a certain contentful form and can be located amongst the web of techniques that relate the individual to di- verse sets of things in different ways. The Husserlian reading is that the hyle assumes noetic content in the individual's mind. Thus, for instance, I notice an aardvark passing by and this primitive noticing is immediately 'painted

344 GRANT GILLET-



over' by a noetic 'brush'-<look at that long-nosed furry animal, I think it is an ant-eater>. But whether my characterisation of the thing is correct or not defers to the practices in which the component terms forming my noetic content-'long-nosed', 'furry', 'animal', and so on-are used. If I have got them right then my noetic content actually is that of a long nosed furry animal and does not just appear that way. In this case, I am portrayed as a bit unsure about the membership of the thing in the class of things properly termed ant- eaters so I might look for help here ("Is that an ant-eater?"). When the compe- tent user gives me the correct warrant ('Yes, it is'), I then have a further noetic possibility created by my latching on to the technique (of perceiving and classifying) associated with (the noema corresponding to) the term 'ant- eater'.

This leaves us with a Wittgensteinian reading of Husserl as follows.

FIGURE 3.

Wittgenstein Husserl

shared warrants or rules governing a core set of noema ideal techniques for the use of a term

contents

actual techniques used by noesis I

Subject in this situation }real

actual interaction hyle with object

OBJECT

Wittgenstein and the Snark.

Wittgenstein's analysis seems to thrive on actual down-to-earth relations between physical subjects and the physical world in which they are active. For instance, he remarks that the intentionality of perception is a matter of forg- ing internal relations between objects rather than constructing Cartesian fac- similes, templates, or structures (PI, p. 212e). Thus to see a thing as green or triangular is to respond to that thing according to its relations to a set of other things (which share, for example, the same colour-green, or shape- triangular). To intend or think of greenness or triangularity, one must grasp the principle on which things belong in the relevant class. However, in the passage where he most stresses the fact that a thought is embedded in the world and is not like an inner picture or propositional entity set apart from the world as an epistemic correlate, Wittgenstein also remarks that "Thought can be of what is not the case" (PI, #95). Thus, by his own account, his




naturalistic analysis is played out with an eye on the problem of intentional objects. His view on intentional objects emerges most clearly from his remarks on expectation and on Moses.

Wittgenstein is quite clear that in understanding linguistic meaning we get as close as we can to understanding the wholly intentional state of expecting thus and so: "It is in language that an expectation and its fulfilment make contact" (PI, #445). Given his doctrine that meaning is use (PI, #43), this re- mark seems to direct us to the actual use of the propositional terms in which an expectation is expressed as giving us the content of the expectation. Thus, for instance, the expectation of eating a beef satay, is connected via those situations in which the term 'beef satay' is used, to actual satay rolls. Nothing could be more concrete than the target of the connection; the context of use directs us to actual human activities and the actual objects which they in- volve. But does this help us with the Snark?

The closest Wittgenstein comes is his discussion of 'Moses'. He notes that if I say "Moses did not exist" (PI, #79), this may mean different things in that I might be expressing any one of a range of thoughts. He suggests that even if a descriptive specification is required to give the sense of what I am saying it does not mean that that description is what I have in mind when I think of Moses. He talks of the "props" on which my thought leans, those things that 'surround' my thinking about Moses, by giving the term 'Moses' a use and context of use for me. We could say that these things are conceptu- ally connected to my conception of Moses. Thus Wittgenstein remarks of the use of certain terms to refer to a particular man: "They must surely belong to a language and to a context, in order really to be the expression of the thought of that man" (PI, p. 217e). In other words, once I have specified the linguistic contexts within which I have come to use the term, then I can say what thought it expresses. Budd paraphrases the point as follows:

What occurs in my mind is describable in the way it is-as an image, or the expression of a thought, of Jack-in virtue of facts other than my state of consciousness and, in particular, in virtue of my mastery of a language, my past and present situation, and what I would do. (1989, p. 136)

These facts cannot be totally idiosyncratic because the normative constraints which apply to noemata or shared rules (and in virtue of which an intentional object counts as Moses) entail that only certain noetic contents will do as being 'of Moses'. A similar analysis may reveal to us the determinants of content or noema appropriate to the Snark.

When we look for the context in which the term 'Snark' finds a use we cannot avoid Lewis Carroll's 'The Hunting of the Snark'. Thus, to count as understanding or grasping the intentional object formed by a Snark we would need to have some familiarity with that context. But Carroll, as much if not more than many other writers, is aware of the power of language. His words

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are replete with near significance, they are not just strings of nonsense. There are nominatives where we are used to finding them and descriptives that weave together the familiar and evocative with the outre or totally other: "the top of the tide", "making lace", "on the top of a neighbouring crag", "a chasm", are combined with concepts like <brillig>, <tove>, <outgrabe> and <Snark> whose content is only encountered in its Carrollian context. Thus the subject, thinker, or language user is located in the midst of a whole series of expectations, apprehensions, and so on attendant on the uses with which he is familiar and which set the scene. In this evocative or "ripe" context the purely intentional object has all sorts of noetic content on which to thrive. The familiar words show "the post where the new word is stationed" (PI, #257). We could say there is a cognitive or phenomenological 'slot' marked out for the content we are to apprehend and it is sufficiently constrained by the contents related to it for the core or canonical8 usage-noema-to be transcendent of your or my particular idea or conception even if there is no actual world referent to which to fix our respective uses.9

The noetic techniques which are called forth by the context in which 'Snark' is used are, therefore, fairly determinate and have their own logical space to occupy. Thus it is not up to me or you to decide what a Snark is even though, in a very real sense, it is a product of your, or my, or any other reader's inspired imagination. The connection between Carroll's conception and mine is forged by a range of transcendent intentional correlates of my occurrent mental contents viz. the rule-governed practices and actual contexts in which the embedding descriptive words have a regular use. These correspond as closely as anything can to Husserl's transcendents: noema and (actual not mental) object. It emerges that the noema for an intentional object, such as a Snark, is given by two things:

1. the source of information or context within which the denoting term (here 'Snark') is encountered; and

2. the senses or meanings of the content-conferring descriptors embedding the term within that context.

The object to which the noema steers the mind is a construction. Its existence as an intentional correlate of the real mental contents (Hyle and noesis) is derivative from that of other objects which are found in the actual world.

8 Note that I have avoided any particular definition of canonicity and, in particular, would avoid any which attempted to attach to every Sinn a set of necessary and sufficient conditions in which that Sinn would be related to truth.

9 This conceptual 'slot' is not a context but something like a conceptual version of Hume's "missing shade of blue". It is therefore not the same as the "horizon" discussed by Husserl which refers to the phenomenological background or fringe of a figure picked out in perception or imagination.




Thus an acquaintance with a purely intentional object is secondary to con- tributing semantic competencies which are themselves to be cashed out in solid Aristotelian praxis.

How does this account meet our constraints on adequacy for an account of intentionality?

1. Opacity The account explains why intentional content is opaque because any content specification relies on a particular context of use and thus may not be connected to another context. For instance, I may not realise for a time that the first star seen in the evening is the same heavenly referent as the last seen in the morning.

2. Normativity Intentional content is normatively constrained by those rules which govern the usage of the relevant terms. These rules are shared and are manifest in a related range of linguistic practices and thus they transcend the occurrent activity, practices, or mental contents of an individual.

3. Possible existence In most cases the question as to whether a practice concerned an actual object or a constructed object would be quite easily answered. And a philosopher inclined to naturalism is hardly likely to be sympathetic to cases devised with the help of supernatural possibilities. However the kind of naturalism recommended by the present account provides an explanatory apparatus which is essentially the same for actual and purely intentional objects. This is probably all that can be asked.

Conclusion.

The present attempt to reconcile Wittgenstein's language-based analysis of intentionality and Husserl's phenomenology has dual significance. First, it argues for the ongoing relevance of Husserl's phenomenological analysis of intentionality which tends not to appear in contemporary accounts of mental content. Husserl could see that there was an ideal or normative aspect to mental content which he called the noema. He could see that this had to be independent of the occurrent mental contents of a given thinker at a given time, but, like Frege, he could not move from that insight to an adequate account of the metaphysics of noemata. Second, the present study locates Wittgen- stein's thought in a phenomenological tradition which is broadly European rather than narrowly emergent out of British Empiricism. Wittgenstein is also, arguably, a naturalist about the mind and mental content. It is instructive that his account of intentionality picks up and reinforces the connection between contents and actual world-involving activity which was central to the phenomenology of Hegel, Marx, and Sartre. The problem case for such anal- yses is the purely intentional object. I have tried to make plausible the view that this problem case is well accounted for by a Wittgensteinian gloss on a well-bred phenomenological analysis.

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References

Anscombe, G. E. M. (1981) Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind. Ox- ford: Blackwell.

Brentano, F. (1981) Sensory and Noetic Consciousness (ed. 0. Kraus; Tr. L. L. McAlister). London: Routledge.

Budd, M. (1989) Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Psychology. London: Rout- ledge.

Dummett, M. (1981) The Interpretation of Frege's Philosophy. London: Duckworth.

Evans, G. (1982) The Varieties of Reference. Oxford: Clarendon. Frege, G. (1977) Logical Investigations (ed. P. Geach). Oxford: Blackwells. Gillett, G. (1992) Representation, Meaning and Thought. Oxford: Clarendon. Husserl, E. (1962) Ideas (Tr. W. R. Boyce Gibson). London: Macmillan. Kripke, S. (1979) 'A Puzzle about Belief in Meaning and Use (A. Margalit,

ed.) Dordrecht: Reidel. Sajama, S. & Kampinnen, M. (1987) A Historical Introduction to Phe-

nomenology. London: Croom Helm. Wittgenstein, L. (1953) Philosophical Investigations (Tr. G. E. M.

Anscombe) Oxford: Blackwells.

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gillett, husserl, wittgenstein and the snark intentionality and social naturalism

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