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 anything
unless they happen to fulfill a significant as well as an indicative function. To
mean is not a particular way of being a sign in the sense of indicating
something. In communicative speech, meaning is always bound up with
indication, but meaning is also capable of occurring without such a connection
since expressions function meaningfully even in isolated mental life where they
no 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 indicate
something to some thinking being.

4 Digression on the origin of indication and association

If A summons B into consciousness, we are not merely simultaneously or
successively conscious of both A and B, but we usually feel their connection
forcing itself upon us, a connection in which the one points to the other and
seems to belong to it. To turn mere coexistence into intentional unities of things
is the constant result of associative functioning. Indicative objects or states of
affairs 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 or
not it is uttered or addressed with communicative intent to any persons. Such a
definition excludes facial expression and the various gestures which involuntarily
accompany speech without communicative intent. Such utterances are not
expressions in the sense of speech; in such manifestations, one man
communicates nothing to another, and they have no meaning. These
expressive movements mean something to one who interprets them, but they
lack 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:
(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 expression
that make it the expression of something.

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

7 Expressions as they function in communication

Expressions were originally framed to fulfill a communicative function. The
physical sign first becomes spoken word or communicative speech when a
speaker produces it with the intention of expressing something through its
means. He endows it with a sense he desires to share with his auditors. Such a
sharing becomes possible if the auditor also understands the speakers
intention. He does this inasmuch as he takes the speaker to be a person who is
not merely uttering sounds but speaking to him, which is accompanying those
sounds with certain sense-giving acts that the sounds reveal to the hearer. What
first makes mental commerce possible is the correlation among the physical and
mental experiences of communicating persons. Speaking and hearing, the
intimation of mental states through speaking and the reception thereof in
hearing, are mutually correlated.

All expressions in communicative speech function as indications. They serve the
hearer as signs of the thoughts of the speaker and the other inner experiences
that make up his communicative intention. This function we shall call their
intimating function. The content of such intimation consists in the inner
experiences intimated. Ordinary speech permits us to call an experience
intimated an 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 percepts
even 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 intuitive
persuasion that a thing or event is itself before us for our grasping, then the
receipt of such an intimation is the mere perceiving of it. The hearer perceives
the speaker as manifesting certain inner experiences, so he also perceives the
experiences himself; he does not, however, himself experience them: he does
not have an inner but an outer percept of them. Here we have the difference
between the real grasp of what is on the basis of adequate* intuition and the
putative grasp of what is on the basis of inadequate presentation. The former
involves something experienced whereas the latter involves a presumed being
to which no truth corresponds. (See CM, 6 for a discussion of adequacy and
intuition. Also look at Chad Kidds Husserls Phenomenological Theory of
Intuition.)

8 Expressions in solitary life

Expressions that are used in communication depend essentially on their
indicative operations. But they also play a role in uncommunicated, interior
mental life. A word only ceases to be a word when our interest stops at its
sensory contour: when it becomes a mere sound-pattern. But when we live the
understanding 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. In
this 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 nor
our belief in the meanings existence. What we use as an indication must be
perceived to be existent. This holds for communicative expressions but not
soliloquy. We should not confuse the imaginative presntations with their
imagined objects: the imagined verbal sounds or printed words (and their
objects) do not exist, but their imaginative presentations do. The words non-
existence neither disturbs nor interests us since it leaves the words expressive
function unaffected.

In a monologue, words can perform no function of indicating the existence of
mental acts, since such indication would there be quite purposeless. For the
acts 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 to
an expressed object is constituted. In virtue of such acts, the expression is more
than merely a sounded word. Insofar as it means something, it relates to what is
objective. This objective can be actually present through accompanying
intuitions or may at least appear in a representational mental image, but this
need not occur: the expression functions significantly but lacks any basic
intuition that will give it its object. The relation of expression to object is now
unrealized as being confined to a mere meaning-intention. A name names its
object in every circumstance because it means that object. But if the object is
not before one, mere meaning is all there is to it. Only when the object is present
is the meaning-intention fulfilled, and the naming becomes an actual, conscious
relation between name and object.

We have, on one hand, acts essential for an expression to be an expression (a
verbal sound infused with sense)meaning-conferring acts or meaning-
intentionsand on the other, acts that are non-essential to expression but fulfill
it or actualize its relationship to its objectmeaning-fulfilling acts. In the realized
relation of the expression to its objective correlate, the sense-informed
expression 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 understand
latter.

10 The phenomenological unity of these acts

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

All objects and relations among objects only are what they are for us, through
acts of thought essentially different from them, in which they become present to
us, I nwhich the ystand before us as unitary items that we mean. Where the
naively objective interest dominates, where we live in intentional acts without
reflecting upon them, one simply speaks of expression and what is
expressed, name and thing named. But where phenomenological interest
dominates, we endure the hardship of having to describe phenomenological
relationships which we may have experience on countless occasions, but of
which we are not normally conscious as objects, and we have also to do our
describing with expressions framed to deal with objects whose appearance lies
in 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 or
otherwise designates something.

A statement of perception expresses a perception, but also the content of a
perception. We distinguish in a perceptual statement, as in every statement,
between contenet and object; by the content we understand the self-identical
meaning that the hearer can grasp even if he is not a percipient. In the unity of
fulfillment, the fulfilling content coincides with the intending content, so that, in
our experience of this unity of coincidence, the object, at once intended and
given, stands before us, not as two objects, but as one alone.
The manifold ambiguities in talk about what an expression expresses, or about
an expressed content, may therefore be so ordered that one distinguishes
between 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 precisely
differentiates an expression from other signs mentioned above. A
meaningless expression is, therefore, no expression at all.

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

(3) If the meaning is identified with the objective correlate of an expression, a
name like golden mountain is meaningless. Marty objects: If the words
are senseless, how could we understand the question as to whether such
things exist, so as to answer it negatively? These objections confuse true
meaninglessness [from (1)] with the a priori impossibility of a fulfilling
sense. An expression has meaning in this sense if a possible fulfillment
corresponds to its intention.

(4) Men have come to locate the significance of expressions in
accompaniments of intuitive imagery. This led to a total denial of meaning
to absurd expressions. The new concept of meaning therefore originates
in a confusion of meaning with fulfilling intuition. On this conception, an
expression 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 rather
live entirely in the consciousness of meaning, of understanding, which does not
lapse when accompanying imagery does so. The true meaning of the signs in
question emerges if we glance at the much favored comparison of mathematical
operations 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 be
varied at will. They become chessmen, counters in the chess-game, through the
games rules which give them their fixed games-meaning. And so, arithmetical
signs have, besides their original meaning, their so-to-say games-meaning, a
meaning oriented towards the game of calculation and its well-known rules.