Logical Phenomenology

Logical Phenomenology

What would a phenomenological study of logic look like? It would investigate the modes of consciousness proper to the various categories of logic: variables, quantifiers, individual constants, connectives, predicates, premise and conclusion, rules of inference. This could be directed to a formal language such as we find in a logic textbook or it could be directed towards a suitable fragment of natural language. It would presumably identify different types of intentionality, both as to intentional object and intentional act. Thus, it might invoke a sense of multiplicity for quantifiers, a sense of assembly or construction for connectives, and a sense of completion for whole sentences—these being constitutive of the corresponding mental acts. This is how the relevant symbols inhabit the consciousness of the logical mind. It wouldn’t be much use to describe the mental acts involved as “a feeling of negation”, “a feeling of conjunction”, “a feeling of quantification”, “a feeling of deduction”: these descriptions may be true enough but they are not informative; we need something that elucidates the mental acts not merely names them. Someone might object that there are no such mental acts: consciousness is a blank when thinking logically. But this is hard to believe, because logical thought is conscious thought and must engage consciousness at a fine-grained level. Something must be going on in consciousness when we reason logically (say, perform a mental act of conjunction elimination), so it should be possible to say what it is. No doubt the process is rapid and difficult to monitor—we don’t self-consciously notice what is going on in our consciousness when we reason—but it should be possible to articulate it by various techniques, as we can the processes of conscious perception (also very rapid and difficult to keep track of). At any rate, it’s worth a try. We will want to sift what is essential from what is accidental, what is constitutive from what is merely associative. What conjunction reminds you of may not be of much general interest (the way your grandmother used to emphasize the word “and” when agitated, for example); we seek the universal, the essential. Feelings of hesitancy when using “if” will likely not be of the essence but quite idiosyncratic, and it is doubtful that they always occur even in a specific individual. So, the task won’t be easy—a good deal harder than identifying the overt behavior that goes with the logical symbols (though that isn’t easy either). But not all worthwhile endeavors are easy; let’s see what our efforts can come up with. Here I will focus on three semantic categories that have excited a good deal of interest from analytic (non-phenomenological) philosophers: names, demonstratives, and descriptions. For it is easier to do effective phenomenology when we already have a plausible analysis to work from: when we know what these linguistic devices mean and how they work, we can attempt to answer the question of their representation in consciousness. We can decide what it is like to use them once we know what their correct semantic analysis is. So: what is the consciousness of a being that uses and understands names, demonstratives, and descriptions? Specifically, what kind of intentionality is involved? To answer this question, I am going to assume certain well-known theories of these expressions; the task will be to spell out the phenomenological implications of these theories. First, names: what is the distinctive phenomenological content of consciousness when using a proper name? Assume the name is logically proper, a label for some object, a directly referential term; there is no mediating descriptive or conceptual or perceptual or imagistic content. Then we can say that consciousness grasps the bearer of the name without any intervening representational medium: there is no sense or mode of presentation standing between the speaker’s consciousness and the object denoted. There is immediate apprehension, direct contact, bare acquaintance: the being of the person or thing named is brought within consciousness without any help from other types of representation. (Sartre would say that consciousness is pure nothingness at this point, just empty directedness toward a particular being.) The intentionality involved is of the disappearing kind, i.e., the singular proposition in question contains the object named and nothing else. Its existence is contained in the intentional act. There is no phenomenological distance or rift between subject and object. Consciousness does not stop short of the fact (to quote Wittgenstein). The act of naming is primitive, isolated, and basic—a kind of bare pointing. This is linguistic consciousness at its most fundamental level (most child-like, we could say). But that isn’t all: in the case of actual names of natural language, there is a social dimension. The speaker is aware of his dependence on other speakers to secure a reference; these other speakers form another intentional object for him (another noema, as Husserl would say). He is aware of the social context of use, and hence of himself as a social being. Names link him to other people and his consciousness registers that fact. Thus, his field of intentionality includes, in addition to the reference of the name, the existence of other people on whom he is linguistically dependent (and perhaps dependent in other ways): not family resemblance but family reliance. He is part of a family of name users. So, his consciousness is permeated not only by objective particulars as the referents of names but also other people as mediators of naming practices: his mind reaches out to both entities in the act of naming. In the case of demonstratives, we have a different structure of intentionality: the social element is gone but something else takes its place as referential aid, viz context. The mind grasps the object by exploiting the context of utterance: a use of “that dog” secures a unique reference by occurring in a particular spatiotemporal context with a certain unique dog identified. Content is a function of character and context, as Kaplan would put it. And the speaker is aware of this; she knows that context enables her reference to work. Thus, her consciousness is directed towards the world in which demonstrative reference occurs—the world surrounding the act of speech. She is aware of herself as existing in a world of space and time, along with dogs and other objects of reference. She has what may be called extended intentionality (like the social world bound up with names). That is, she is aware of context, and hence of her place in the world. The intentionality here need not be sophisticated; it could just be egocentric space and time based on perceptual awareness (she need not have an objective conception of space and time). Still, her consciousness is directed to the world that constitutes context—as well as the part of the world she is currently referring to. Presumably this will involve bodily awareness, so that she is conscious of her own body as located. This is not true of naming, which could occur without the body (semantically speaking). In demonstrative reference the body is part of the apparatus, and this is represented in consciousness. Evidently, the same is true of “here” and “now” (the case of “I” is complicated). What is important, phenomenologically, is that consciousness extends beyond the immediate object demonstratively referred to (this is a truth of the phenomenology of the logic of demonstratives). The case of descriptions is different again: here the referential apparatus is confined to the words occurring in the description. Indeed, it doesn’t even extend beyond the reference of the predicates contained in the description: there is no reference to the object that satisfies those predicates at all (I am assuming Russell’s theory of descriptions). What we have is reference to universals (and acquaintance with same if we follow Russell) from which a uniquely identifying description is constructed. Consciousness never reaches beyond these, save derivatively. There is no direct singular reference to particulars. Nor is context or the social world invoked in the intentionality involved. Here the speaker is on his own with only his words to go on. His world is pro tem a world of universals; there might not even be any particulars in it. And he is aware of the indirectness, the distance, the fallibility of his attempt at reference to a world of particulars. This produces what we may call “referential anxiety”: it isn’t easy to generate a description that succeeds in achieving singular reference. There could be many objects in the world that satisfy the descriptions assembled. Descriptive intentionality is fraught with referential insecurity, because of the difficulty of guaranteeing uniqueness of reference. In a sense, descriptions are more intellectually demanding than names or demonstratives, because with them it is necessary to find words that fit the world: we must formulate such convoluted locutions as “There exists a king of France, and only one king of France, and this king of France is bald”. The speaker must hope that his existential proposition is true, and his uniqueness proposition, but these are eminently fallible. His consciousness is taxed and troubled by such exertions; his intentional acts are burdened with insecurity. He can’t rely on context or other people to help him out. This is why he often resorts to inserting names or demonstratives into his descriptions; it’s the only way to guarantee unique reference. So, phenomenologically, descriptive reference is in a class of its own: demanding, intellectualist, fraught, indirect, and restricted to universals. Names bring the world right up close; demonstratives bring in the world as context; descriptions don’t bring in the world at all (except indirectly). Accordingly, intentionality takes different forms in the three cases, shaping the phenomenological landscape. This is what (part of) the phenomenology of logic will look like.[1] We can thus imagine what a more extensive phenomenology of logic might include: truth-functional intentionality for the classical connectives, modal intentionality for modal logic (thoughts of possible worlds, property modifiers, etc.), intimations of plurality for quantifiers, and so on. Wherever there is a logical concept there will be a movement of consciousness corresponding to it; typically, it will involve a more complex form of intentionality than that contained in the concept itself. Phenomenology is characteristically holistic (in one harmless sense).[2]

[1] As phenomenologists like to say, this is all part of the “lived experience” of doing logic—logic as we actually experience it.

[2] The phenomenology of the whole sentence is particularly important to this holism. Grammatically, a sentence is said to express a “complete thought”.  Frege stressed the primacy of the sentence (the context principle) and regarded sentences as complete expressions. So, we would expect sentences to be accompanied by a form of intentionality that corresponds to this idea of completeness. There has to be an act of consciousness that constitutes recognition of such completeness. Since words have their meaning in sentences, the phenomenology of word meaning must somehow connect with the phenomenology of sentence meaning, which means that the sense of completeness will be implicit in the grasp of word meaning. Here is a potent source of phenomenological holism. Even if word meaning is incomplete, it will be experienced as involving the noema of completeness. Consciousness of word meaning always involves consciousness of complete sentence meaning. Intentionality is not atomistic.