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SMITH, DAVID WOODRUFF and MCINTYRE, RONALD. Husserl and in- tentionality: A study of mind, meaning, and language. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1982. 1. The book here under review is an historically informative and conceptually interesting contribution to phenomenology and analyt- ic philosophy. It is a study of intentionality in general and of Husserl’s approach to it in particular. Its chief aim is to present an adequate account of Husserlian intentionality, based upon Ideas, Volume 1.l This is supplemented by documented studies of related intentionality-theories of (early and late) Brentano, Meinong, and Frege. The authors maintain that intentionality can be fruitfully studied by relating the Ideas theory to that of (a part of) Husserl’s later Cartesian Meditations (The Hague: Martinaus Nijhoff, 1973 and other editions), and that this can best be done with the aid of a Hintikka-style possible world approach to propositional attitudes.

This combination of supposedly esoteric phenomenological doc- trine and contemporary analytical philosophy is responsible for much of the book’s attractiveness. One can now, I believe, clearly appreciate that Husserl was a deep and rigorous thinker who argued that a non-naturalistic account of intentionality and a Frege-like2 theory of meaning go hand in hand. This book therefore supple- ments the discussion in D. Fdlesdal’s well-known “Husserl’s No- tion of Noema” (Journal o fphi losophy , vol. 66 (1969), pp. 680- 687), although the two works go in somewhat different directions. Roughly, Fdlesdal shows the extent to which Frege-like notions of meaning and abstract semantic entities (Sinne = senses) are present in Husserl (as noernata and their S i ~ n e ) . ~ Smith and McIntyre,

I wish to thank Professor Dagfinn F0llesdal for several excellent discussions of Husserl. ’ A new translation of Ideas I (by Fred Kersten) is now available from Martinus Nijhoff in The Hague. ’ I employ this term because of the uncertain extent of the reciprocal influence between Frege and Husserl with respect to their theories of meaning. See Charles Parsons’ review of Gottlob Frege, Wissenschaftlicher Briefwechsel (Felix Meiner, Hamburg, 1976), published in Synthese, vol. 52 (1982), pp. 325-343.

I hope the reader will compare the works I discuss with Husserl’s earlier Logical investigations (trans. J . N. Findlay, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970 (two volumes)). This is a work of extraordinary power and depth.

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while retaining senses (for linguistic items and mental acts (or: states)), employ additional entities such as states of affairs and possible worlds.

2. Husserl and intentionality consists of eight chapters and a valua- ble bibliography. Chapter I discusses rather familiar material con- cerning the peculiarities of intentional linguistic and mentalistic contexts. Problems of failure of substitution and quantification in contexts expressive of propositional attitudes are discussed in some detail. The authors stress that the linguistic phenomena arise be- cause human thought is itself intentional, perhaps in an irreducible fashion. Although this is currently debatable, one can surely accept intentional acfs as a component of at least one traditionally appeal- ing approach to the mind.

Chapter I1 treats some “classical approaches” to intentionality. There are instructive discussions of early and late Brentano, Mein- ong, and Frege. It is contended that both early Brentano and Frege held that “. . . the intentionality of an act does not consist in a peculiar sort of ‘intentional relation’ to an ordinary object, but in an ordinary relation to a peculiar sort of ‘intentional object’ ” (p. 41). This claim is then used to argue that the structure of these philos- ophers’ theories precludes the formulation within them of articulate accounts of mental intentional reference to ‘ordinary’ (e.g. phys- ical) objects. Basically, all of their intentional semantic relations (it is argued) can relate acts of propositional attitudes to abstract entities only. (I consider this combined treatment of Brentano and Frege to be one of the most stimulating parts of the text.) One must find, then, “some solution to the problems of intentionality that will not construe all our intentions as relations only to the contents of our own minds” (p. 53).

3. Chapter I11 (“Fundamentals of Husserl’s theory of intentiona- lity”) presents, in effect the thesis that Husserl found one such solution. Husserl was interested in developing a plausible theory of mental activity that could treat intentional mental states (acts) in a way that was relatively neutral with respect to the idealism-realism debate then dominant in Austro-German philosophy. This interest

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was one of the motivations that led Husserl to work out (and constantly refine) his “phenomenological reductions.” These are exhibited here in a manner that deprives them of much of their seemingly controversial character (i.e. as leading to some form of idealism or solipsism). They are rendered legitimate to analytical philosophers at the cost of interpreting (much of) Husserl’s phe- nomenology as an “epistemological rather than a metaphysical doctrine” (p. 104). Although this will generate dissent, it is essential to the authors’ approach to Husserl.

Husserl held (in Ideas I) that an act comprises both real and ideal cognitive components. These are the “noeses” and “noemata” respectively. Noemata are abstract entities that themselves ‘contain’ abstract constituents similar to Frege’s Sinne. Attitudinal acts of belief, ostensive seeing, etc. each have a distinctive kind of associat- ed noema. For example, if x, is an act wherein Jan believes that X is red, then Jan can intend X if (i) x1 is suitably related to the noema (roughly) expressed by the phrase “believes that X is red”, and (ii) this noema is suitably related to X (Ideas I , paragraphs 87-135). This belief-noema is a complex abstract entity containing a Frege- like noematic Sinn that is a semantic entity corresponding to “ X is red”. This complexity of meaning-entities is studied in Chapter IV.

An adequate theory of intentionality must explicate the phrase “suitably related” used above. The authors argue that under certain assumptions (see the following paragraph) an act, say x1 again, intends object X by virtue of the instantiation of two semantically primitive relations: (i) the entertainment by x1 of the Sinn in the noema; (ii) the prescription of X by this Sinn. In general, intention is the ‘composition’ of these two relations (p. 143):

(*) ACT (noesis) NOEMA (Sinn) - [OBJECT] entertains mescribes

intends

Since Husserl (following Brentano) is quite clear that one can (preanalytically speaking) ‘intend an object that does not exist’, e.g. in act x2 of my thinking of Wodan, it is not clear that (*) is an accurate schema for understanding Husserl. But the authors retain

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(*) by allowing noemata (or their Sinne) to prescribe both actual and possible objects. On this reconstruction, entertainment “does not require any explicit [e.g. quasi-perceptual] awareness of the Sinn by the subject who entertains it” (p. 144). This solves the above-mentioned problem found in early Brentano and Frege, since we now have room both for entertained senses and (actual or possible) intended objects. Schema (*) receives a deeper analysis in the remaining chapters.

4. These chapters develop the notion of horizon studied by Husserl in Cartesian meditations. Husserl realized that the analysis of (the internal complexity of) a sole noematic Sinn, e.g. that ‘in’ a given belief-noema, does not provide an exhaustive phenomenological description of an act that entertains that noema. For if, say, I now believe that p via act x, then x in some sense presupposes (i) a coherent set of background beliefs, and (ii) other actual or possible acts epistemically compatible with (i) and with x. In Husserl’s terminology, x and p “predelineate” a horizon of acts and noemata; such noemata contain Sinne that I can entertain (in alternative courses of experience), given that x entertains the noematic Sinn here denoted by ‘p’. Thus a full description of my current cognitive state due to x demands reference to other possible acts and their (abstract) noemata.

The authors reconstruct this idea for belief by associating with each person s, each propositional Sinn x, and each possible world w, a set HB (s, x, w) of possible worlds representing the noema- horizon af an act of s of believing x (in w). The assumption of a set of worlds approximate a full-blooded account of the semantics and pragmatics of belief-acts. A fragment of extensional English is then introduced in which propositional senses like JC can be sententially expressed. Fixed, s-relative correlations between this fragment, a domain of senses and states of affairs, and a domain of possible worlds then permit the establishment of truth-conditions for sen- tences of the form s believes that p . Husserl is reconstructed (i) by showing that the range of the function H B plays an essential role in the analysis, after arguing (ii) that possible worlds and possible objects are legitimate Husserlian entities. Admitting possible per-

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sons and their acts in possible worlds makes possible an interesting analysis of certain types of de dicto and de re belief. This shows that much is alive in Husserl for philosophers who accept acts and abstract entities as primitive and uneliminable cognitive items. It is hoped that Husserl and intentionality will encourage the study and imaginative use of the diverse Husserlian texts.

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MET APHILOSOPHY Editor: Terrell Ward Bynum

Vol. 15 : 2

A common occurrence: conflicting duties.

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Assuming the logically impossible.

Selfhood, modality, and philosophies of mind.

Theoretical models and the theory of sense-data.

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The two basic fallacies.

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