“Der Gedanke, dieses seltsame Wesen”––aber er kommt uns nicht seltsam vor, wenn wir denken. Der Gedanke kommt uns nicht geheimnisvoll vor, während wir denken, sondern nur, wenn wir gleichsam retrospektiv sagen: “Wie war das möglich?” Wie war es möglich, daß der Gedanke von diesem Gegenstand selbst handelte? Es scheint uns, als hätten wir mit ihm die Realität eingefangen.”

––Ludwig Wittgenstein1

1. The “space of reasons”2 is a provocative metaphor for thinking about the nature of

meaning: What belongs in that space and how does it get there? What, if anything, constrains it

from the outside? How is it connected to the world? Handling these problems well requires an

adequate grasp of the relationship between perception and thought. One question of particular

importance is: how do looks get their logic? As Wittgenstein observes, the link between seeing

and saying does not ordinarily strike us, yet it tends to resist philosophical analysis.

John McDowell is perhaps the most distinguished analytic philosopher working on these

questions. His work on one side tries avoid what Wilfrid Sellars named “The Myth of the

Given,” and its naïve foundationalism. The idea of the Myth, as McDowell puts it, is “the idea

that sensibility by itself could make things available for the sort of cognition that draws on the

subject’s rational powers.”3 On the other hand, McDowell wants to avoid coherentism, a

variation on the theme of idealism. In this essay I assess McDowell’s attempt to achieve this

balancing act, taking Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations as a guide. Husserl handles the

1 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. Elizabeth Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Alden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), §428. “‘A thought––what a strange thing!’––but it does not strike us as strange when we are thinking. A thought does not strike us as mysterious while we are thinking, but only when we say, as it were retrospectively, ‘How was that possible?’ How was it possible for a thought to deal with this very object? It seems to us as if we had captured reality with the thought.”

2 Wilfrid Sellars coined this phrase. Steven Galt Crowell writes that this metaphor “signal[s] an interest in distinguishing between explanations that also provide justifications (reasons) and those that do not (causes).” Cf. Steven Galt Crowell, Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning: Paths Toward Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 3. Crowell’s treatment is more influential on my essay than the footnotes testify. He links the space of reasons to Wittgenstein (logical space), early neo-Kantians (Geltungsbereich), and Husserl and Heidegger (roughly, “transcendental consciousness” or “world”). His work is a valuable contribution towards thinking about the convergences and divergences between analytic and phenomenological approaches in a fruitful way.

3 John McDowell, “Avoiding the Myth of the Given,” Having the World in View: Essays on Kant, Hegel, and Sellars (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 257.

1

same issues that trouble McDowell, but his phenomenological approach affords him the

resources for rethinking the entire problematic of logic and looks.4

The paper is divided in the following manner: I first recount briefly the historical context

of Wilfrid Sellars’s essay “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” and his famous argument

against the Myth (§ 2). Next, I analyze one of McDowell’s recent essays, “Avoiding the Myth of

the Given,” in which he develops a more nuanced position than the one he held in Mind and

World.5 Attending to these nuances will uncover the affinity between his concerns and the issues

in Logical Investigations, while also establishing differences in the way Husserl and McDowell

formulate and approach the problem (§§ 3-5). Then I turn directly to Husserl. I argue that his

unique diagnosis of the problem of seeing and saying allows him to expand the too-narrow

notion of intuition in modern epistemology, and to relieve judgment of its undue burden in the

Kantian paradigm (§§ 6-7). My thesis is that Husserl’s notion of categorial intuition allows him

to account for the possibility of formally saturated seeing, so that it is the identity of the things

themselves, and not the synthetic effort of judgment, which constitutes the bridge between seeing

and saying, between looks and their logic.

2. Both Gottlob Frege and Edmund Husserl, each a distinguished mathematician in his own

right, were interested in the issue of the normative status of logic. They argued that the

intellectual domain, the space of reasons ruled by logic, cannot coherently be ‘sunk into’ the

merely psychological.6 Despite their radically divergent histories, the analytic and continental

4 Crowell, The Space of Meaning, 15. Crowell makes a similar point in comparing McDowell to the neo-Kantian Emil Lask: “For both, then, epistemological dilemmas are to be overcome through the recognition that meaning spans the traditional divide between perception and conception. Yet to work out the difficulties facing such a view requires a phenomenological perspective that remains largely absent in both Lask and McDowell.”

5 John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).

6 Cf. Edmund Husserl, Prolegomena of Pure Logic in Logical Investigations Vol. 1, trans. J.N. Findlay

2

schools of thought––or, at least their respective founders––had a common enemy in

psychologism, at the beginning.

Still, their differences should not be downplayed. While Husserl directly attacks the

epistemology motivating psychologism, Frege tends to avoid epistemology altogether.7 Since

Frege ignores modern empiricism, rather than uprooting it, the analytic philosophy following

him grew some rotten branches, particularly the Vienna Circle and logical positivism. The core

tenet of logical positivism is its verificationism, which states, roughly, that any meaningful

proposition requires the reduction of its content to observational reports.8 In other words, all

purportedly logical sayings must reduce to seeings. But this idea raises a problem: if seeing that

something is the case (i.e. seeing infused with logic) is reducible to a psychological phenomena

(seeing as an impingement of raw data on the eyes), then how can it be the foundation for

science, or for the normative life of the mind at all? Are we then back to psychologism?9

Wilfrid Sellars offers a forceful exposition of this problem in “Empiricism and the

Philosophy of Mind.”10 The title of his seminal essay connotes a reckoning; he forces the analytic

(London: Routledge, 2001). The ‘sinking’ formulation here comes from one of Robert Sokolowski’s lectures. For a good treatment of Frege and psychologism, cf. “Psychologism and Logical Analysis,” in Richard Cobb-Stevens, Husserl and Analytic Philosophy (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990), 7-27.

7 Cobb-Stevens, Husserl and Analytic Philosophy, 9. “Husserl derive[s his] position from the principle of intentionality, arguing that the empiricist account of mind fails to distinguish between mental processes and their intentional ‘accusatives’, but Frege bases his argument entirely on the claim that meanings have nothing psychological whatever about them.” Frege rules out description because he thinks it amounts to psychologism.

8 Cf. A.J. Ayer ed., Logical Positivism (New York: The Free Press, 1959), 11: “the meaning of a proposition is its method of verification.” Cf. also several essays in this collection, particularly the ones by Moritz Schlick and Rudolf Carnap.

9 Willard Quine famously opted for the psychologizing of knowledge. Cf. Willard Quine, “Epistemology Naturalized,” Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 69-90.

10 William DeVries and Timm Tripplett eds., Knowledge, Mind, and the Given: Reading Wilfrid Sellars’s “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2000).

3

tradition to come to terms with its troubled empiricist past.11 Sellars criticizes the chimerical

notion of sense-data that is central to empiricism. He thinks it is absurd that a supposedly brute

sense is at the same time a data, something given to the knower that figures into propositional

claims.12 Sense-data is a chimera because it has a sensation for a body but a proposition for a

head.

This incoherent conception of sense-data is the reason why Sellars thinks the Given is a

Myth. He argues as follows: If sense-data is to function as the foundation of our knowledge

claims––claims that place us in the space of reasons––then it must first of all be (a) epistemically

independent, not founded on other knowledge claims; and (b) epistemically efficacious, i.e.,

capable of justifying other claims in the space of reasons. If sense-data were both (a) and (b),

then it would truly constitute a “Given,” and Sellars’s attack would be unwarranted. But, this

“Given” must be either (c) propositional, or (d) non-propositional. If it is (c) then it cannot be (a),

and if it is (d) then it cannot be (b).13 That is to say, sense-data cannot be both an independent,

pure seeing, without logical form, and a justificatory (efficacious) seeing, which is always

already propositionally structured. The thought that sense-data could perform this double duty is

only a myth of the empiricist tradition. Sensory experiences, unlike judgments, do not have a

propositional form. Looks do not come prepackaged with logic. This Sellarsian framework sets

the stage for McDowell.

11 There is not a consensus on Sellars’s view of empiricism. Robert Brandom thinks he pronounced it to be anathema, while McDowell holds that Sellars only wanted to reform it. Cf. “Why is Sellars’s Essay Called ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’?” in McDowell, Having the World in View, 221-24.

12 Wilfrid Sellars, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” §7.

13 DeVries and Tripplett, Knowledge, Mind, and the Given, xxx-xxxii. My own formulation of the argument is greatly indebted to the authors’ observation that the tension between epistemic independence and propositional form is the crux of Sellars’s attack on the Given.

4

3. One of John McDowell’s goals in his book Mind and World is to provide an adequate

account of “the way concepts mediate the relation between minds and the world,”14 or, to do

epistemology without falling into the Myth. We are tempted by the Given, he says, because we

want reality to have some bearing or constraint on our thought; we do not want the “operations

of spontaneity,” the faculty of understanding, to amount to nothing more than “frictionless

spinning in a void.”15 McDowell offers a neat summary of the dilemma:

[We have] a tendency to oscillate between a pair of unsatisfying positions: on the one side a coherentism that threatens to disconnect thought from reality, and on the other side a vain appeal to the Given, in the sense of bare presences that are supposed to constitute the ultimate grounds of empirical judgments. I suggested that in order to escape the oscillation, we need to recognize that experiences themselves are states or occurrences that inextricably combine receptivity and spontaneity.16

The words “receptive” and “spontaneous” belong the philosophical vocabulary of Immanuel

Kant: he characterizes intuition or sensibility (the power of sensation) as the receptive faculty,

and thinking or understanding (the power of discursivity) as the spontaneous faculty. McDowell

avoids the Myth by arguing that, “in experience, spontaneity is inextricably implicated in

deliverances of receptivity.”17 The idea that we could separate the receptivity of seeing from the

spontaneity of saying in the first place is the Myth of the Given. As Kant writes, “Thoughts

without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind.”18

Before looking more closely at McDowell’s proposal, it is worth noting that Husserl sees

his work in the Logical Investigations as a corrective to this vague Kantian paradigm:

14 John McDowell, Mind and World, 3.

15 Ibid., 11. McDowell attributes the coherentist position to Donald Davidson.

16 Ibid., 24.

17 Ibid., 40-41. He continues: “We must not suppose that receptivity makes an even notionally separable contribution to its co-operation with spontaneity.

18 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Smith (Macmillan: London, 1929), A51/B75.

5

The old epistemological contrast between sensibility and understanding achieves a much-needed clarity through a distinction between straightforward or sensuous, and founded or categorial intuition. The same is true of the contrast between thinking and seeing (intuiting), which confuses philosophical parlance by confounding the relations of signification to fulfilling intuition, on the one hand, with the relations of sensuous and categorial acts, on the other.19

Husserl argues that the dualistic scheme of understanding and sensibility is not the right

distinction, and neither is the dualism between thought and intuition. The “old epistemological

contrast,” which we find in Kant but which has its roots in empiricism, holds that signitive

intending is to intuitive intending as sensuous acts are to categorial acts. The problem with this

parallelism according to Husserl is that it sets up a contrast between the “perceptual” domain and

the “formal” one.20 And this contrast has two infelicitous consequences. First of all, intuition is

construed too narrowly, in too close of a relationship to the signitive act. That is why in the First

Investigation Husserl establishes that the meaning a word expresses is constituted by a signitive

act, which expresses not a concept, but rather the content of the fulfilled act of intuition. Thus

meaning is not reducible to perception, nor is perception reducible to meaning.21 Identifying the

signitive with the sensuous leads to the error of reducing meaning to perception, or vice-versa.

Instead, the signitive act and the intuitive act are distinct.

The second infelicitous consequence of the Kantian parallelism is that it denies the

capacity for categorial intuition, and therefore for formal saturation. For Kant and McDowell,

judgment bears the entire burden of categoriality. One of Husserl’s tasks in Investigation VI is to

redirect this emphasis on judgment by showing how we can categorial intuit things. We might

19 Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations Vol. II, trans. J.N. Findlay (London: Routledge, 2001), 186. For citations of this text I will provide the roman numeral of the investigation followed by the paragraph number(s) and pages from this edition.

20 I first grasped this improper parallelism thanks to Robert Sokolowski’s lecture notes on Husserl’s Logical Investigations.

21 Husserl, VI, §1-4. ###-###.

6

be tempted to think that categorial intuition is just as much of a chimera as the sense-data of

givenism, since it combines the logical domain (categorial) with the looking domain (intuition).

This view is wrong in a very interesting way, but for now let us keep it open as a possible

objection while we return to McDowell’s solution to the link between seeing and saying.

4. Although Kant uses the privative language of blindness and emptiness, we can articulate

his dictum in two positive theses:

Formal Imposition Thesis: Intuitions see only with concepts.

Material Saturation Thesis: Thoughts are filled only with content.

McDowell spends most of his energy in Mind and World defending the formal imposition thesis,

arguing that the spontaneity of understanding, and the concepts it generates, must be at work “all

the way out,” so to speak. Concepts have an “unbounded” role to play in cognition and even in

perception.22 The advantage of the formal imposition thesis is that it avoids the Myth by

dispatching the notion that intuition could be non-conceptual.

Now the obvious objection to the formal imposition thesis is that it “slippers the slope”

toward the conflation of concepts and content. That is why McDowell needs the material

saturation thesis if he wishes to avoid coherentism, the position that thinking has no connection

to the world, no constraint from the outside. While defending the material saturation thesis,

McDowell offers a distinction to preserve the gap between thought and content:

“Thought” can mean the act of thinking; but it can also mean the content of a piece of thinking: what someone thinks. Now if we are to give due acknowledgement to the independence of reality, what we need is a constraint from outside thinking and judging, our exercises of spontaneity. The constraint does not need to be from outside thinkable contents.23

22 McDowell, Mind and World, “Lecture II: The Unboundedness of the Conceptual,” 24-45.

23 Ibid., 28. McDowell’s italics.

7

With this distinction McDowell intends to dispel some of the ambiguities in the material

saturation thesis. On the one hand, thought refers to thinking, the agent’s act. Alternatively,

thought refers to the content, the object of the agent’s act. We can envision McDowell drawing

the boundaries between thought-as-act and thought-as-content in a way apparently avoids

givenism as well as coherentism:

The Givenist View: [Act] ←→ [Content] ←→ [Reality]

McDowell’s View: [Act] ←→ [Content/Reality]

The Coherentist View: [Act/Content]24

When McDowell says there is nothing outside thought, he does not mean there is nothing outside

the act of thinking, but that there is nothing outside the content of the thought. The coherentist

view denies the material saturation thesis (so reality gets swallowed by thinking), while the

givenist view denies the formal imposition thesis (so reality becomes opaque, content-less). With

his own view, McDowell tries to make good on both sides of the Kantian dictum: the content of

thought ensures its fulfillment, its commerce with the world, while “the unbounded conceptual”

reaches all the way into the world, via those thinkable (conceptual) contents.

5. McDowell had wondered in Mind and World, “Why can we not acknowledge that the

relations between experience and judgments have to be rational, and therefore within the scope

of spontaneity, without being thereby committed to a concession about experience itself?”25 This

24 A givenist is one who endorses the Myth. There is a interesting parallel between these three views and the three conceptions of “constitution” as treated by John Haugeland: “counting-as” (givenism), “creating” (coherentism), and “letting-be” (transcendentalism). Haugeland endorses the “letting-be” view of constitution, which places him in the phenomenological camp with the likes Heidegger, although he also attributes that view to Kant. Cf. John Haugeland, “Truth and Rule-Following,” in Having Thought: Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 305-360.

25 McDowell, Mind and World, 53N7.

8

question was relegated to the footnotes in those lectures, but in his essay “Avoiding the Myth”

McDowell addresses some ambiguities in the notion of content to try to preserve the autonomy

of both experience and judgment while trying to preserve a connection between them. While he

still holds the basic thesis from Mind and World––that experience is the actualization of

conceptual capacities in receptivity––McDowell no longer endorses the uniformity of content: “I

used to assume that to conceive experiences as actualizations of conceptual capacities, we would

need to credit experiences with propositional content, the sort of content judgments have.”26 The

uniformity of content thesis holds that all content is discursive or propositional. McDowell now

says, “what we need is a concept of content that is not propositional but intuitional.”27 This is an

intriguing proposal, but is it a live option in Kantianism? Propositional contents are discursive,

and thus legitimate dwellers in the space of reasons. Intuitional content, on the other hand, is

non-propositional and thus non-discursive. What, then, makes propositional and intuitional

contents species of the same genus?

McDowell’s answer is that content is conceptual. On his position, seeing paper-being-

white or gold-being-yellow, or, to use Sokolowski’s preferred example, car-being-dented, are

meaningful only because and insofar as we form the requisite judgment: “The paper is white,”

“The car is dented,” etc.28 In judging we say that such-and-such is the case, and thus in

experience we see that things are thus-and-so. “Saying that” belongs to understanding, which is

the faculty of judgment. “Seeing that” belongs to the receptivity of intuition, but it gets its

content from its propositional form, indicated by the word that. McDowell writes, “We should

26 McDowell, “Avoiding the Myth,” 258.

27 Ibid., 260.

28 I borrow the examples of white paper and yellow gold from Husserl’s Logical Investigations, and the dented car example from Robert Sokolowski’s class lectures.

9

center our idea of the conceptual on the content of discursive activity. Now, intuiting is not

discursive, even in the extended sense in which judging is. Discursive content is articulated.

Intuitional content is not.”29 We can, in other words, only have meaningful content in intuiting

“the white paper,” because we can form the judgment: “the paper is white.”

The direction of priority between saying and seeing indicates a primacy of judgment in

Kant and McDowell: understanding provides the unity of content in propositions and in

intuitions.30 Judgment is the fulcrum of all knowledge, and all content is conceptual. This

conclusion is interesting, because while McDowell agrees with Husserl in recognizing the need

for intuitional in addition to propositional content, he takes this insight in the opposite direction:

It is right to say the content unified in intuitions is of the same kind as the content unified in judgments: that is, conceptual content. We could not have intuitions, with their specific form of unity, if we could not make judgments, with their corresponding forms of unity. We can even say that the unity-providing function is essentially a faculty for discursive activity, a power to judge. But its operation in providing for the unity of intuitions is not itself a case of discursive activity.31

McDowell locates the unity of truth in judgment. According to this view, the distinguishing mark

of content is that it is conceptual, for, otherwise, the only live option seems to be givenism. The

only option left, given the formal imposition and the material saturation thesis, is that

understanding (the discursive faculty), has the power of judgment, which provides the unity of

the content in its propositional and its intuitional varieties. McDowell and Kant have no formal

saturation thesis. Thus, the primacy of judgment in their philosophy leads to the view that we

cannot categorially intuit things.

29 Ibid., 262.

30 McDowell, “Avoiding the Myth,” 260. McDowell quotes Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A79/B104-5: “The same function which gives unity to the various representations in a judgment also gives unity to the mere synthesis of various representations in an intuition; and this unity, in its most general expression, we entitle the pure concepts of the understanding.”

31 Ibid., 264. My italics.

10

In short, McDowell reverses the priority of saying and seeing. He argues: if we didn’t

have the logical concept, we could not find the thing when we look in the world. This thesis is a

reversal of Husserl’s position, as we will now see. He argues precisely the opposite: we lean on

the unity given in perception in order to articulate the object, to “clothe it with syntax” and

welcome it inside the space of reasons.32 Attending to this difference is important, because critics

of Husserl often accuse him of trying to pull off a Cartesian project, building outward from mind

to world. Nothing could be further from the truth.

6. As I mentioned earlier (§3), Husserl thought the Kantian paradigm was confused because

it arranged a parallel between the formal domain and the perceptual domain. The dominant

question in that paradigm is: “How is logic (saying) imposed on looks (seeing)?” Husserl asks a

different question. Following up on the results established in LI I, he notes that when we come to

the question of what “sorts of acts that can [ . . . ] function in meaning” we face a problem:

But when we seek to tackle this question we at once encounter [ . . . ] the relation between meaning-intention and meaning-fulfillment, or to speak traditionally, and in fact ambiguously, the relation between ‘concept’ and ‘thought’ on the one hand, understood as mere meaning without intuitive fulfillment, and ‘corresponding intuition’, on the other.33

In LI I, Husserl replaced talk of concepts with a treatment of the signitive intention that

constitutes an act of meaning. Correspondingly, in LI VI he widens the notion of intuition,

addressing it as a fulfilling act, which presents a presence that fills (or contradicts) what the

signitive act absently expressed. Husserl replaces the Kantian dichotomy of ‘concept/thought’

and ‘intuition’ with the contrast between ‘meaning-intention’ and ‘meaning-fulfillment’. His

answer to the question about how looks get their logic lurks in his phenomenological description

32 Husserl, VI : “the name seems to clothe the thing, like a garment” ###.

33 Edmund Husserl, VI, 184.

11

of the transition from empty to filled intending, and then from the fulfillment of sensuous

intuition to the fulfillment of categorial intuition.

In the sixth chapter of LI VI, “Sensuous and Categorial Intuitions,” Husserl tries to work

out this transition: if words “clothe the thing, like a garment,” that is, if they find fulfillment in a

percept, then what does syntax clothe? Or, in Husserl’s words, “What may and can furnish

fulfillment for those aspects of meaning which make up propositional form as such, the aspects

of ‘categorial form’ to which, e.g., the copula belongs?”34 How is it that “the whole sense of the

statement finds fulfillment through our underlying percept,”35 syntax and all?

I have argued so far that Husserl moves out of the Kantian paradigm by drawing a

distinction between sensuous and categorial acts, and their corresponding fulfillments. The

difference between sensuous and categorial intuition for Husserl is that sensuous intuition

directly gives the intended object, but without an act of identification.36 There is “performed”

identification without articulated identity.37 In the distinction between unthematized and

articulated identity, Husserl prepares the grounds for widening the notion of intuition: “If we are

asked what it means to say that categorially structured meanings find fulfillment, confirm

themselves in perception, we can be reply: it means only that they relate to the object itself in its

categorial structure.”38 This distinction is important because the categorial aspect of the

intending does not relate to the bare object of sense-perception but rather to the categorial

34 Husserl, Logical Investigations, 271.

35 Ibid., 271.

36 Ibid., 285.

37 Ibid., 285. “An act means something, an act of identification means identity, presents it. In our case [the case of sense-perception] an act an identification is performed, but no identity is meant.”

38 Husserl, Logical Investigations, 280.

12

presentation of the object. At the same time, the categorial structure belongs to the object itself,

not to the discursive imposition of judgment.39

This point returns us to the possible objection that Husserl is trafficking with the Myth. It

is not surprising that the notion of categorial intuition would make an anti-givenist like

McDowell suspicious. Its very name (categorial intuition) combines the formal and perceptual

domains, transgressing a line that forms the very basis of Kant’s philosophy.

Yet Husserl manifests his own distaste for the givenist position throughout the Sixth

Investigation. He does not think it is true that ‘saying’ collapses into ‘seeing’, or that logic is

ontologically identical to descriptions, which in turn are reducible to looks. He insists on the

falsity of the claim that “meaning has its seat in perception,”40 and argues “the concept sensuous

object (real object) cannot arise through reflection on perception, since this could only yield us

the concept perception.”41 Husserl speaks here very much in the spirit of an anti-givenist; he is

aware of the contribution of subjectivity to knowing, and consequently of the fact that

syntactically articulated (logical) statements do not find a corresponding percept in mere

sensation.

But now the real difference between McDowell’s and Husserl’s anti-givenism emerges.

Husserl’s response to psychologism, as we saw earlier (§ 2), is not to retreat to logical analysis,

but rather to widen the notion of intuition. It is true, Husserl says, that we perceive states-of-

affairs––but this perception is not the kind that the givenists suppose and the anti-givenists

suspect: “As the sensible object stands to sense-perception so the state of affairs stands to the

39 Husserl, Logical Investigations, 289: “The working of synthetic thought, of intellection, has done something to [the presentations], has shaped them anew, although, being a categorial function, it has done this in categorial fashion, so that the sensuous content of the apparent object has not been altered. The object does not appear before us with new real (realen) properties; it stands before us as this same object, but in a new manner.”

40 Husserl, Investigation VI, 272.

41 Husserl, Investigation VI, 279.

13

‘becoming aware’ in which it is (more or less adequately) given––we should like to say simply:

so the state of affairs stands to the perception of it.”42 Husserl avoids the Myth of the Given

because he holds that states-of-affairs are not sensuously intuited. Rather, they are categorically

intuited. Categorial intuition sets up the articulation of the thing, which before we had just

straightforwardly (sensuously) perceived. Thus, identity is not imposed on objects of perception

by the synthetic unifying work of the understanding; it is articulated by the subject but from the

thing, in such a way that the thing’s categorial structure emerges: “Our act of identification is in

sober fact a new awareness of objectivity, which causes a new ‘object’ to appear to us, an object

that can only be apprehended or given in its very selfhood in a founded act of this sort.”43 Husserl

draws attention to the fact that the categorial act ‘gives’ a new object, because it has thematized

the object’s identity, but also that this new object does not change the object of mere sense-

perception; rather, it is founded upon it.44

Once this insight is clear, we have gone beyond Kant’s axiom: “it is no longer a

parallelism between the meaning-intentions of expressions and the mere percepts which

correspond to them: it is a parallelism between meaning-intentions and the above mentioned

perceptually founded acts.”45 The idea is that we have a fulfillment of intention already in

perception’s sensuous presentation, and categorial intuition is founded on this pre-categorial

intuition. The mark of categoriality is articulation; it thematizes the identity of the object.46

That categorial acts are founded acts is a crucial feature in Husserl’s account of link

42 Husserl, Logical Investigations, 279.

43 Husserl, Logical Investigations, 285.

44 Founded acts are acts that cannot take place without an anchoring, founding act.

45 Husserl, Logical Investigations VI, 273.

46 Thank you to Dr. Michele Averchi for helping me on this point. Cf. Robert Sokolowski.

14

between seeing and saying: the categorial intuition sets up an object prepped for predication but

founded on the sensuous percept. Therefore syntax, the syncategorematical components of

sentences, also find fulfillment in perception, taken in the wider sense. The widening of intuition

makes the work of putting judgment in its place––the second task––much easier.

7. In order to destroy the judgment paradigm in Kantianism, Husserl extends the logic of the

argument against the Given––no state-of-affairs from sensation or reflection upon it––to the

phenomenon of judgment as well:

As the concept Sensuous Object (Real Object) cannot arise through reflection upon perception, since this could only yield us the concept Perception (or a concept of certain real constituents of Perception), the concept of state of affairs cannot arise of reflection on judgments, since this could only yield us concepts of judgments or of real constituents of judgments.47

Husserl reasons that, just as reflection on mere sensation could not yield its proper object, so a

reflection on judgment could not yield the proper object of a judgment (state-of-affairs) either.

He flips the anti-givenist logic against the anti-givenist. The givenists suppose that syntax finds

fulfillment when we reflect on our sensations, and Sellars and McDowell rightly note that such a

fruit of reflection is incoherent. But, Husserl argues, it is also incoherent to suppose that a

reflection on our judgments yields the concept “state-of-affairs.” Syntax finds fulfillment while

we are world-directed, before we reflect on our acts. In that way, categorial structure is not the

outcome of judgment; it is the condition of the possibility of judgment.

We can return to our examples to make sense of this move. For Husserl, “gold-being-

yellow” and “car-being-dented” are manifested to us. They found the articulation of the

sentences “The gold is yellow” or “the car is dented.” In saying this, Husserl admits Kant is both

on and off target: “being can only be apprehended through judging, but this does not at all mean

47 Husserl, Logical, 279.

15

that the concept of being must be arrived at ‘through reflection’ on certain judgments.”48 Kant is

on target in trying to accommodate the contribution of the knower, but in focusing on the acts of

the knower––better, in not recognizing them as intentional (world-directed) acts––Kant

precludes the possibility of manifestation; all the work belongs to the knower. Judgment,

however, is not the wellspring of identity, and therefore cannot be the locus of truth.49 Being,

identity, and truth are experienced, and only on that ground is any kind of judgment possible.

Husserl distributes the work of knowing between the knower and the known.

Husserl’s big target is not Kant but reflective epistemology itself, the view that “the

logical categories such as being and non-being, unity, plurality, totality, number, ground,

consequence etc. –– arise through reflection upon certain mental acts, and so fall in the sphere of

‘inner sense’, of ‘inner perception’.”50 The common error of the empiricists and Kant is that they

place all the burden of knowing on reflection, whether the reflection targets the material

saturation (seeing) or the formal imposition (saying) of our knowledge. Husserl attributes this

reflexitivity to epistemological empiricists, especially Locke,51 but the turn also is the source of

the undue burden on judgment in Kant’s philosophy. Husserl provides a nice dictum to counter

the Kantian view:

Not in reflection upon judgments, nor even [in reflection] upon fulfillments of judgments, but the fulfillments themselves lies the true source of the concepts state-of-affairs and being (in the copulative sense). Not in these acts as objects, but in the objects of these acts, do we have the abstractive basis which enables us to realize the concepts in

48 Husserl, Logical Investigations VI, 279.

49 Heidegger capitalizes on this coup d’etat of judgment, when he argues that the apophantical as is founded on the hermeneutical as. Cf. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper, 1962), §31-33.

50 Husserl, Logical Investigations, 278.

51 Where does Husserl talk about Locke?

16

question.52

Husserl’s focus on intentionality, the directedness of our acts towards objects, allows him to

overcome reflective epistemology, by shifting the focus away from acts as objects, and towards

the objects of those acts.

Robert Sokolowski has a good treatment of the kind of philosophical work that Husserl

has made possible with this critique of reflective epistemology. He writes that we must guard

against what we could call the “bubble theory” of judgment, which takes facts and judgments as

two separate arrangements subsequently united in the mind. While it is true that facts are not

like vegetables just waiting to be picked (that is the Givenism error), it is also true that judgments

are not an arsenal of propositions ready for employment in our mental cabinet (that is the

Kantian error). In bubble theory, “[the judgmental] domain is like the bubble of discourse in

comic strips,” and “our misleading picture would take the bubble of discourse as a mundane part

of the world around the comic strip characters.”53 Viewed this way, judgment tends to be taken

as the locus of the achievement of truth, rather than as a reflection upon achieved truth.

Consequently we assume either that a judgment is “the same thing as a fact intended in the

absence of its perceptual ingredients,”54 which is roughly what the Vienna Circle held, or,

alternatively, that it is the same thing as “categorial articulation,” rather then “categorial

articulation which is taken as supposed.”55 The second error is the downfall of Kant’s axiom and

McDowell’s proposal. They collapse what Sokolowski calls “the fact as registered” and the

52 Husserl, Logical Investigations VI, 279 (§44).

53 Robert Sokolowski, Husserlian Meditations, 43.

54 Sokolowski, Meditations, 47.

55 Ibid., 49.

17

judgment, or, the “fact as supposed.”56 Collapsing these two moments of the fact precludes the

possibility of categorial intuition, and opens up a gap between the mind and the world that

generates reflective epistemology in the first place.57

Husserl’s notion of categorial intuition thus relieves the undue burden Kant and

McDowell place on judgment. As human beings we do not externally impose logical binders on

opaque data of sensibility. Instead we have the possibility to (categorically) articulate the

(categorial) structure that belongs to the manifestation of things. This is another way of saying

correct question to ask is not about the connection between the domain of perception and the

domain of logic or form, but rather about the correlation between formal meaning and formal

saturation.58 Husserl begins with the fulfillment of an intuition in sense-perception. He then asks

how fulfillment works in cases where categoriality, and therefore logic, is involved with looks.

Husserl’s notion of categoriality allows him to accomplish the two-fold task of widening

intuition and putting judgment in its proper place.

8. I began the essay with a quote from Wittgenstein. His question about the possibility of

thought capturing reality is a question about constitution, or as Haugeland says, “making sense of

things.”59 We saw that McDowell’s Kantian axiom for dealing with constitution is “thoughts

without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind.” Husserl’s own axiom is “Not

56 Ibid., 52.

57 Ibid., 53. Epistemologies sometimes consider these two states as independent wholes––as pieces instead of moments. Then they ask how one of these pieces can be made to match the other: how can propositions or judgments or opinions be made to fit facts or states of affairs or things? How can a whole “in the mind” be made to match a whole “in the world”? They cannot this question, and so the insoluble “problem of knowledge” arises.

58 Sokolowski makes this point in his lecture notes on Husserl. Unpublished transcript, 54.

59 John Haugeland, “Truth and Rule-Following,” 353.

18

in these acts as objects, but in the objects of these acts, do we have the abstractive basis which

enables us to realize the concepts in question.” Husserl’s approach lets him formulate the notion

of categorial intuition, and therefore the thesis of formal saturation, which can find no place in

the Kantian dichotomy of formal imposition and material saturation. Kant’s axiom was

influential in helping us overcome the Myth of the Given; since intuitions without concepts are

blind, we cannot assume that a sense-perception will give us an articulated object. But Husserl’s

account of the givenness of objects, and the requisite act of the subject to let those objects, be

fills in a lacuna overlooked in Kant: since thoughts without content are empty, we cannot assume

that a judgment gives us an articulated object either. This final point determines the differing

solutions to the problem of seeing and saying in Husserl and McDowell (our Kantian

representative): for McDowell, the unity of experience must be provided, imposed, by the

synthetic-spontaneous activity of understanding. Husserl thinks instead that the acts by which

identity is given (both the unthematized kind in straightforward perception, and articulated kind

in categorial intuition) need to be phenomenologically described. Husserl recognizes that

judgment is the wrong place to look for the identity of an object or even the unity of a state-of-

affairs.

19

Bilbiography

Ayer, A.J., ed. Logical Positivism. New York: The Free Press, 1959.

Cobb-Stevens, Richard. Husserl and Analytic Philosophy. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic

Publishers, 1990.

Crowell, Steven Galt. Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning: Paths Toward

Transcendental Phenomenology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001.

deVries, Willem and Timm Tripplett. Knowledge, Mind, and the Given: Reading Wilfrid

Sellars’s Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” including the complete text of

Sellars’s essay. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2000.

Haugeland, John. “Truth and Rule-Following.” In Having Thought: Essays in the Metaphysics of

Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New

York: Harper, 1962.

Husserl, Edmund. Logical Investigations. Rev. ed. Translated by J.N. Findlay. London:

Routledge, 2001.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Norman Kemp Smith. London:

Macmillan, 1929.

McDowell, John. Having the World in View: Essays on Kant, Hegel, and Sellars. Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.

––––––. Mind and World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994.

Sokolowski, Robert. Husserlian Meditations: How Words Present Things. Evanston, IL:

Northwestern University Press, 1974.

Quine, Willard. “Epistemology Naturalized,” 69-90. In Ontological Relativity and Other Essays.

New York: Columbia University Press, 1977.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Rev. 4th ed. Translated by G.E.M.

Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker, Joachim Schulte. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

20