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Brentano and Mauthner on Grammatical Illusions

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Philosophy of Language in the Brentano School

Part of the book series: History of Analytic Philosophy ((History of Analytic Philosophy))

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Abstract

This chapter aims to suggest that Brentano’s theory of intentionality, at least in its later formulation, is not only about mind but also belongs to a tradition of deconstructing language that includes prominent figures of Austrian and German philosophy such as Mach, Vaihinger, and Wittgenstein. In order to establish this, the author explores some differences and similarities between this theory and Fritz Mauthner’s critique of language. He argues that the very starting point of both is one and the same fact: the failure of existential generalization.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Albertazzi (2006, 177–178) provides the following list of entia rationis: ‘1. All abstract nouns like “extension”, “colour”, “thought”, “space”, “time”, given that in reality there exists only the extended, the coloured, the thinking, something spatial, temporal. 2. Nouns expressing possibility like “capacity for thought”, “capacity for movement”. 3. The contents of presentations like “the non-being of the centaur is”, “a non-existent centaur is”. 4. Whatever belongs to the Aristotelian category of ens per accidens. For example, in “this man is armed” the predicate has solely the meaning of an extrinsic determinatio, given that there is no real identity between subject and predicate. 5. Whatever belongs to the Aristotelian category of ens tamquam verum. For example, one can only say that “an oak is” if one recognises an oak; or “the non-being of the centaur” only means that one denies a centaur. 6. All scientific fictions, like unreal numbers, fractions, infinity and infinitesimals in mathematics’.

  2. 2.

    See (Mauthner 1906, 72–73; 1910, 370), where Mauthner refers to the medieval-scholastic notion of intentional object. Brentano would reject such a formulation due to his commitment to some form of empirical dualism. I will discuss this point later on.

  3. 3.

    For Mauthner’s Mach-inspired monism, see, for example, (Mauthner 1910, 370–371). On this difference between Brentano and Mauthner, see (Albertazzi 1986, 43–44; Bredeck 1992, 106 ff.; Le Rider 2012, 242).

  4. 4.

    ‘The medieval-scholastic realism—which I always call “word realism” for the sake of distinction—teaches that universals or concepts are something real, that, for example, to the […] concepts of stallion, horse, quadruped, animal, organism, thing, etc., corresponds in the real world something that is not an individual and yet is really a stallion, a horse, etc.’ (Mauthner 1901–1902, III, 616–617). See the related notion of ‘concept realism’ (Begriffsrealismus) in (Vaihinger 1922, 403 ff.).

  5. 5.

    ‘The human language in itself is an abstractum, an intangible shadow just like the old mental faculties; the human language in itself has absolutely no grammar, and hence no philosophical grammar’ (Mauthner 1901–1902, I, 193). ‘It would be timely to cease to dream of a philosophical grammar. There is no general grammar, let alone a philosophical one’ (Mauthner 1901–1902, III, 261, transl. by Weiler 1970, 146). Max Scheler was entirely right in his 1914 review of the third volume of Mauthner’s Beiträge (second edition), when he opposed to Mauthner Husserl’s project of a ‘pure grammar’ (Scheler 1914, 119). Mauthner criticises Husserl’s idea of an ‘objective-ideal meaning’ in (Mauthner 1910, 90). It is also worth noticing that herein lies a major difference between Mauthner’s and the Tractarian Wittgenstein’s critiques of language (Nájera 2007, 161; Gakis 2012, 89). The question is whether the illusions of ordinary language are constitutive of language in general, or whether a language grounded in logical or psychological analysis can liberate us from them. Also see below on Brentano’s distinction between logic and ordinary language grammar.

  6. 6.

    Albertazzi very rightly opposes Mauthner’s’substantial conventionalism’ to Brentano’s project of a ‘reform of language’ that ‘in no way reduces the possibility of an ontology, albeit strongly reist, guaranteed in the last analysis by the fact of inner perception relative to the representation of things, and guarantor in its turn of the symbolic translation performed by the common innere Sprachform’ (Albertazzi 1989, 149, 154; see also Albertazzi 1996, 103).

  7. 7.

    Mauthner rejects the idea of a non-linguistic knowledge. See (Weiler 1970, 292).

  8. 8.

    I have developed this interpretation of Brentano’s theory of intentionality in (Seron 2017a, b, 2019).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Liège, Liège, Belgium

    Denis Seron

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Liège, Liège, Belgium

    Arnaud Dewalque

  2. Department of Philosophy, University of Liège, Liège, Belgium

    Charlotte Gauvry

  3. Department of Philosophy, Free University of Brussels (ULB), Brussels, Belgium

    Sébastien Richard

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Seron, D. (2021). Brentano and Mauthner on Grammatical Illusions. In: Dewalque, A., Gauvry, C., Richard, S. (eds) Philosophy of Language in the Brentano School. History of Analytic Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52211-7_4

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