Phenomenological Immanence, Normativity, and Semantic Externalism

This paper argues that transcendental phenomenology (here represented by Edmund Husserl) can accommodate the main thesis of semantic externalism, namely, that intentional content is not simply a matter of what is 'in the head,' but depends on how the world is. I first introduce the semanti...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Synthese (Dordrecht) 2008-02, Vol.160 (3), p.335-354
Main Author: Crowell, Steven
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Consciousness
Education
Epistemology
Externalism
Husserl, Edmund (1859-1938)
Immanence
Intentionality
Internalism
Intuition
Logic
Metaphysics
Noemata
Normativity
Original Paper
Person
Phenomenology
Philosophy
Philosophy of Language
Philosophy of Science
Pragmatics
Semantics
Transcendentals
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Summary:This paper argues that transcendental phenomenology (here represented by Edmund Husserl) can accommodate the main thesis of semantic externalism, namely, that intentional content is not simply a matter of what is 'in the head,' but depends on how the world is. I first introduce the semantic problem as an issue of how linguistic tokens or mental states can have 'content'—that is, how they can set up conditions of satisfaction or be responsive to norms such that they can succeed or fail at referring. The standard representationalist view—which thinks of the problem in first-person terms—is contrasted with Brandom's pragmatic inferentialist approach, which adopts a third-person stance. The rest of the paper defends a phenomenological version of the representationalist position (seeking to preserve its first-person stance) but offers a conception of representation that does not identify it with an entity 'in the head.' The standard view of Husserl as a Cartesian internalist is undermined by rejecting its fundamental assumption—that Husserl's concept of the 'noema' is a mental entity—and by defending a concept of 'phenomenological immanence' that has a normative, rather than a psychological, structure. Finally, it is argued that phenomenological immanence cannot be identified with 'consciousness' in Husserl's sense, though consciousness is a necessary condition for it.
ISSN:0039-7857
1573-0964
DOI:10.1007/s11229-006-9083-3