Husserl’s Thesis of the Ideality of Meanings

Abstract

1. No other thesis of Husserl, in his philosophy of meaning, has been subjected to more unfavorable criticism than the view, which he yet never seems to have taken back, that meanings are ideal entities. And yet it would seem that by that rather misleading locution he was trying to capture an essential moment of our experience of meanings and our commerce with them. That moment may perhaps be described by the following propositions: first, discourse, and more so logical discourse requires that meanings retain an identity in the midst of varying contexts; secondly, meanings can be communicated by one person to another, and in that sense can be shared; further, in different speech acts and in different contexts, the same speaker or different speakers can always return to the same meaning. Now any satisfactory theory of meaning should be able to take care of these interrelated phenomena. The theories that reduce meaning to the private experiences of the speaker or the hearer cannot explain how it is possible for private experiences (images, for example) of one to be communicated to, and shared by, another. Any criterion of identity with regard to such private experiences by which one could say, for example, ‘This is the same image as I had last evening’ is difficult to come by. It may be argued that there is in truth no real communication of meaning at all, so that each person is enclosed within his own world of private experiences.