A Short History of Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Wittgenstein

by Roger Scruton

  Embodied in the idea of the publicity of ‘sense’, is a rejection of the traditional empiricist theories of meaning. All these theories confuse meaning and association, since they identify the meaning of a term with some subjective idea aroused in the mind of a person who either uses or hears it. Frege also, through his theory of reference, develops the basis for a novel metaphysical rejection of idealism.

  How do predicates refer? How is their reference distinct from their sense? Frege argued that, unlike names, predicates are ‘unsaturated’. Their reference can be understood not as a complete object, but only as an operation which needs to be completed before any object is determined by it. Borrowing a mathematical idea, he called this operation a function. Consider, for example, the mathematical function ()2 + 2 (or, using the symbol for a variable, x2 + 2). This yields a value for any particular number: the value 3 for x = 1, 6 for x = 2, and so on. And its significance lies wholly in that. The mathematical function transforms one number into another.

  Likewise the predicate, ‘x is wise’ should be conceived as determining a function which yields a value for each individual object that is referred to by the name substituted for ‘x’. What is this ‘value’ to which the sentence refers? Frege argued that it can be nothing more nor less than the reference of the sentence as a whole. For having combined the reference of the subject with that of the predicate, we must obtain the reference of their combination.

  To what then do sentences refer? Frege’s answer to this question constitutes what is perhaps the most original part of his philosophy. It is tempting to think that if a sentence refers to anything it is to a fact, or to a state of affairs, or to some such thing. ‘Socrates is wise’ refers to the fact that Socrates is wise. But then to what do false sentences refer? And how many states of affairs are there? If you try to answer the second question, you soon realise that the only way to count states of affairs is by counting either sentences, or their meanings. In which case your idea of the reference of a sentence has been confused with your idea either of the sentence itself, or of its sense. By a series of extremely subtle and persuasive arguments Frege was able to conclude that in fact the only possible answer to the question, ‘To what does a sentence refer?’ is: ‘To its truth value’. That is, to truth, or to falsehood. Truth and falsehood stand to sentences as objects do to names. And predicates refer to concepts which determine functions yielding truth or falsehood according to the objects to which they are applied.

  The analysis of the subject-predicate sentence is completed by answering the question: what is the sense of a completed sentence? Frege argued that the sense is a thought: the thought, in our example, that Socrates is wise. A thought, like a concept, is a public thing, not to be confused with any private penumbra or ‘tone’. It is to be identified in terms of the conditions which make a sentence true. Anyone who supposes that Socrates is wise, supposes that certain conditions are fulfilled, in virtue of which the sentence ‘Socrates is wise’ is true (or, to put it more formally, in virtue of which the sentence refers to the truth value: true). The final analysis of the subject-predicate sentence thus attributes to it two complete levels of meaning, in the following way:

  Subject

  Predicate

  Sentence

  syntax:

  Socrates

  is wise

  Socrates is wise

  sense:

  description

  sense of predicate

  thought ( = truth-conditions)

  reference:

  object

  concept/function

  truth-value

  Just as the sense of the whole sentence is determined by the sense of its parts, so too is the truth-value determined by the reference of the individual words.

  The significance for philosophy of this quasi-mathematical analysis of linguistic structure is enormous. If Frege is right, then the old distinction between extension and intension can be applied to sentences. The extension of a sentence is its truth-value, and the intension its truth-conditions. The extension of a term is detachable from it, and identifiable in other ways. It can therefore be accorded an independent existence. We can think of a sentence as standing for the true or the false. The notion of a logical relation between sentences now becomes completely clear. The complex sentence ‘p and q’ for example, is true if and only if p is true and q is true. Hence the inference from ‘p and q’ to ‘q’ is valid: it takes us from truth to truth. Other ‘logical connectives’ such as ‘if’ and ‘or’ can be clarified in the same way and their logic explained. The principle of extensionality— that every term stands for its extension—can now be used to construct a complete logic of the relations between sentences. It was this idea which revolutionised philosophy, leading first to the ‘logical atomism’ of Russell and Wittgenstein, and then to the new forms of analytical metaphysics which gradually came to replace it.

  Moreover, if Frege’s theory of language is right, the fundamental notion involved in understanding words is that of truth. Some have wished to argue thus: a sentence has meaning because people use it to make assertions. It is therefore the peculiar function performed in assertion that we ought to analyse. It is this ‘assertion’ that provides the essence of linguistic communication, and hence must be isolated as the basic subject matter of any philosophy of language. But consider the following argument: (1) p implies q; (2) p; therefore (3) q. In (1) the sentence ‘q’ is not asserted; in (3) it is: yet the argument is valid. Hence ‘q’ must mean the same in each occurrence, otherwise there would be a fallacy through equivocation. It follows, Frege argues, that ‘assertedness’ cannot be part of the meaning of a sentence. If we ask ourselves what we understand in understanding a sentence, or an argument, then the answer always leads back, not to assertion, but to truth. What we understand is either a relation among truth-values, or the conditions which make a sentence true. Frege also believed that the relation of a sentence to its truth-conditions must be objectively determined. Hidden within the very logic of discourse we discover a metaphysical assumption. This is the assumption of an objective truth, at which all our utterances are aimed, and from which they take their sense.

  These thoughts of Frege’s have been slowly, and somewhat erratically, incorporated into the framework of modern analytical philosophy. Some thinkers object to Frege’s idea that truth-conditions determine meaning. Others object to the specifically ‘realistic’ or ‘anti-idealistic’ interpretation which Frege gave to this idea. In this way, discussion of Frege has reactivated the fundamental question posed by Kant’s metaphysics. How do we steer the middle course between ‘transcendental realism’ and ‘empirical idealism’? This question has now become: ‘What is fundamental to understanding language; truth considered independently of our ability to assess it, or assertion considered as an act circumscribed by our own epistemological powers?’

  Other philosophers object to Frege’s description of the nature of predicates, and his characterisation of the logic of ordinary language in quasi-mathematical terms. Whatever position is adopted, however, whether in the theory of meaning, or in metaphysics, we can be sure that, if the position belongs to the tradition of ‘analytic’ philosophy, it will have tacitly relied on Frege’s ideas, if not to provide its arguments, at least to provide the terminology in which they are expressed.

  18 - PHENOMENOLOGY AND EXISTENTIALISM

  The movement to be discussed in this chapter has a history as long as that of modern logic, and indeed, at the beginning, was hardly separable from the new post-idealism represented at its best in the work of Frege. The term ‘phenomenology’, invented by the German eighteenth-century mathematician J.H.Lambert to describe the science of appearances, had been used by Hegel in his work on the nature of the ‘subjective spirit’— spirit as it appears to itself. However, despite the shared language and shared pretensions, it is clear that Hegel and Husserl are engaged in different forms of enquiry; we must therefore look for the latter’s intellectual origins else
where. In fact the thinker with the strongest claim to be the founder of the phenomenological movement was, in his own eyes, more a psychologist than a philosopher, and a psychologist who professed allegiance to methods which he called empirical. In Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874), Franz Brentano (1838-1917) embarked on an investigation of the human mind which expressly rejected the premises of idealism, and in particular the notion that the true subject matter of psychology is some universal, abstract ‘Geist’, which pursues its courses through the world as though related to individual humans only occasionally and by accident. Psychology cannot take such abstractions as its point of departure. Like any other science, it must start from the individual case, and that means from the firstperson case, which is known to the investigator directly. Brentano, partly because of his emphasis on the first person, did not venture very far into the realm of what we would now call empirical psychology. Instead, he became intrigued by an old philosophical problem, that of the nature of first-person knowledge. What is it that I know when I am presented with the contents of consciousness? And how is the knower distinguished from the known?

  In attempting to answer those questions Brentano reintroduced into philosophy a technicality common in the mediaeval schools: the concept of intentionality. Every mental state or event is, he argued, characterised by the ‘reference to a content’, or the ‘direction upon an object’ (hence by an internal ‘aim’ or ‘intention’). If I believe, then there is something that I believe; if I hate, then there is something that I hate; if I see, then there is something that I see. In every such case, the ‘content’ or ‘object’ is characterised by certain peculiar features. It might be indefinite; it might not exist in actuality; or it might be other than I think it to be. For example, I may be afraid of a lion, but of no particular lion; I may hate the man who tore up my daffodils, although there is no such man; I may admire the man who endowed the hospital but despise the man who killed the Mayor, even though they are one and the same.

  The best way to describe this phenomenon of intentionality is to make a distinction, again relying on scholastic terminology, between the ‘material’ and the ‘intentional’ object of a mental state. When I see as a ghost what is in fact a piece of fluttering cloth, then the intentional object of my seeing is a ghost, while the material object is a piece of cloth. The intentional object is that which is ‘present to consciousness’, and it may not correspond to any material reality. This possibility of non-correspondence explains the peculiarity of the intentional object. Intentional objects are of many logical types: they can be propositions (the objects of belief), ideas (the objects of thought), individuals (the objects of love and hate). They can be indeterminate (a lion), or determinate (the lion before me). In every case they have no existence independent of the mental state that ‘refers to’ or is ‘directed onto’ them. There is no ‘real relation’ between fear, say, and its intentional object, since the two cannot be thought of as existing separately. This is one of the few genuine cases where one might wish to speak, in Bradleyan terms, of an ‘internal’ relation. (See p. 232.)

  Brentano believed that this property of intentionality is peculiar to mental phenomena and common to all of them. It therefore formed, for him, a distinguishing mark of the mental. The property has, however, an intricate logic, and presents rather more difficulties in the description than my brief summary conveys. It has therefore proved difficult to substantiate this particular aspect of Brentano’s thought, or fully to understand its implications. In particular a confusion, sometimes accidental, sometimes deliberate, between intentionality and a lack of what logicians call extensionality (see the last chapter) has made discussions of this topic in recent years peculiarly vertiginous. It must be said of the phenomenologists, however, that their knowledge of modern logic has not, in general, been sufficient to permit these confusions. It is the phenomenon of intentionality that has been of interest to them, and not the search for some general differentiating characteristic of the mental.

  The first important phenomenologist was Brentano’s pupil Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), who began his philosophical career with a book on the foundations of arithmetic that is now chiefly remembered for Frege’s devastating critique of it. Among Husserl’s many writings, those that have attracted the most attention are the Logical Investigations (1900-1), Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology (1913) and Cartesian Meditations (1929, first published 1950). The first of these is of great interest, announcing the theme for which Husserl is known, that of a ‘pure phenomenology’. This theme is further elaborated in the second of his major works. In these works he begins the description of what he was to call the ‘method’ of phenomenological reduction. Husserl’s thought rests on two master-premises. First, he reaffirms the essence of the Cartesian position, that the immediate knowledge that I have of my own conscious mental states is the one sure foundation for an understanding of their nature, provided only that I can isolate what is intrinsic to the mental state, and separate it from all that is extraneous. Secondly, the intentionality of the mental makes ‘meaning’ or ‘reference’ essential to every mental act. To focus on the revealed nature of mentality is therefore also to understand the fundamental operation of ‘meaning’, whereby the world is made intelligible. In virtue of these two premises Husserl was able to construct a philosophy which, like that of Descartes, aimed to produce a complete metaphysical vision from reflection on the peculiarities of consciousness.

  But study of the first-person case is blind if it is impossible to isolate what is contained in it. Just as Descartes sought to separate the ‘clear and distinct’ idea from the mental states with which it is mingled, so did Husserl propose a method whereby to isolate the pure deliverances of consciousness from the encumbrances which impede our understanding of them. This method is that of ‘phenomenological reduction’, or ‘bracketing’ (epoche, from the Greek). All reference to what is susceptible to doubt or mediated by reflection must be excluded from the description of every mental state, leaving the remnant of pure immediacy alone. Let us consider the case of fear. I must not suppose that the object of fear exists independently of my fear. Fear does not guarantee the existence of its object, but only of its own ‘direction’ towards an object. We should therefore ‘bracket’ the material object in examining the nature of fear. But the intentional object remains: we cannot eliminate from fear the idea of an object, since this is contained in the mental state and immediately present to the consciousness of the one who fears.

  What else remains, after the process of bracketing? Husserl spoke of a ‘mental act’, the process of direction itself, which in some way constitutes the essence of fear. The peculiar method of phenomenology is that it takes this mental act as its datum. Nothing else can be described which is either more fundamental to knowledge, or more able to reveal the essence of what is known. Is not the phenomenologist burdened, then, with the old Cartesian question, of how to advance beyond the first-person case to knowledge of an independent world? The title of Husserl’s later, impenetrable work—Cartesian Meditations—suggests, as does its content, that his ‘method’ has indeed cast him into the pit of scepticism. But the major object of this scepticism is, historically speaking, somewhat surprising. It is not the objective world but the observing subject himself. The person (or self) exists for Husserl only in the performance of intentional acts. But he is not identical with any of these intentional acts. Nor can he be the object of such an act since, if he were, then there would have to be some other subject performing the act of which ‘he’ is the object. But who is this subject if not himself? The ‘I’, as Ryle expressed it in another context, is systematically elusive. In what sense, then, can we know that it exists? The ‘I’ exists, Husserl thought, only as the subject and never as the object of consciousness. It must therefore be ‘transcendental’ in something like the sense of Kant’s ‘transcendental self’. Many of Husserl’s voluminous writings are spent in the pursuit of this creature which he declared to be unk
nowable, and it is not surprising that they have seemed to many, in consequence, to be unreadable.

  It is unclear from what I have said that there is any special ‘method’ of phenomenology. How, for example, is it distinguished from the psychology of introspection? In the Logical Investigations Husserl expressly rejects ‘psychologism’—the view that logic is a very general science of the mind. In setting up phenomenology in its place, he claimed to be enunciating a method that is free from, and indeed presupposed by, every empirical enquiry, (His view about the status of his theory was therefore the opposite of Brentano’s; which of them was right is not a matter that I feel able to decide.) Phenomenology is the necessary preliminary to any science of the mind, since it locates—prior to any description, classification or explanation—the individual mental acts which psychology must investigate. Moreover, it is the sole access to meaning. Meaning is created by mental acts, and the world becomes present to consciousness only through those acts. Hence our understanding determines the essences of things, by fixing the manner in which they are known. Phenomenology therefore yields a knowledge not of facts, but of essences. It is consequently (so it is argued) an a priori science.

  Husserl was aware of the impasse into which he had been driven by his Cartesian method, and in his last unfinished work—Transcendental Phenomenology and the Crisis of the European Sciences, published posthumously in 1954—he attempted to overcome the subjective emphasis of phenomenology by means of a theory of the social world. The focus shifts from ‘I’ to ‘we’, albeit a ‘transcendental “we”’. This plural subject is something like the implied community of language users, who together construct the common-sense world in which they are situated. Husserl calls this common-sense world the Lebenswelt, or ‘life-world’: it is a world constituted by our social interaction, and endowed with the ‘meanings’ that inhabit our communicative acts. We reach the transcendental ‘we’ by an imaginative self-projection, from the ‘here’ of first-person awareness to the ‘there’ of the generalised other. What is given in this process is not the elusive residue of some phenomenological reduction, but the Lebenswelt itself.