The Linguistic Linkage Compulsion: A Phenomenological Account

ABSTRACT

The paper attempts to provide an answer to the question of the semantic compulsion exerted by language on its speakers. It does so via an analysis of Husserl’s extended meaning chain and his comments in his Nachlass on language as Zumutung (imposition). The central thrust of the paper is the question of how the linguistic linkage compulsion (LLC) affects the components of Husserl’s language meaning paradigm, consisting of Bedeutungsintention (meaning intention), the minimal sense of Bedeutung, and Sinn as saturating meaning fulfilment. As to its methodological commitment, the paper employs a Husserlian description of the intentional acts of active and passive syntheses which we cannot but perform when we engage in natural language as communication. The paper concludes with a review of its findings from the perspective of Husserl’s key concept of intentionality.

KEYWORDS:

• Linguistic linkage compulsion
• language as imposition (Zumutung)
• Abrichtung
• order-words
• symbolic violence
• extended meaning chain

Introduction

Although the semantic insights about natural language produced so far by neuroscientific research have been meagre, (Pulvermüller 2010) they have provided one important empirical finding which language philosophy in all its guises would do well to acknowledge as a reliable anchor for all inquiries into linguistic meaning constitution. Accepting the findings of empirical research in this case is to follow Kant’s advice in the Critique of Judgment that not to do so would set the trap of Schwärmerei (eccentricity).¹ The limit set by neuroscience is that comprehending a word or phrase in any natural language is never immediate; it only appears to be that way. Linguistic meaning constitution takes time. As Friedemann Pulvermüller et al. have discovered, the comprehension of single words and short phrases takes roughly 250 ms. (2006; 2009) Which establishes beyond doubt that any act of even minimal linguistic meaning making is a process resulting in a semantic event.² Which refutes the presupposition, for example, that linguistic meaning is well characterized as a property. What sort of event it is from the phenomenological perspective taken here will gradually emerge as the paper advances its observations. The main reason for choosing the Husserlian paradigm of natural language to investigate linguistic meaning as an event is that it offers an elaborate exploration of the various steps involved in the event structure of verbal semantics.

Suffice it here merely to observe that a phenomenological description of the acts of consciousness involved in the meaning event will show that during the period of 250 ms we are not free to entertain any intentional content apart from, or in addition to, the word sound or phrase sound we are in the process of comprehending. That this is so of necessity may at first appear counter-intuitive to our desire to be in control of what we think and say. Yet try as we may, we cannot escape this fundamental limitation of our cognitive freedom.³ During our semantic uptake in response to the sounds “yellow sports car” we are not in a position to entertain the concept “green carpet” or, for that matter, anything else. During that briefest of moments of this meaning event we are the victims of the linguistic linkage compulsion, or LLC. Though introduced some years ago, LLC is in need of closer scrutiny as a critical concept, a clarification which is the core purpose of this paper. (Ruthrof 2011; 2013, 23; 2014, 20f.; 2021, 49ff.)

Following the Husserlian paradigm of natural language, all pragmatic considerations will be subsumed under a broadly conceived semantics.⁴ (Ruthrof 2021) In doing so, I ask what precisely LLC is compelling the speakers of a language to do. Not only have we been drilled by the speech community to take up the word sounds as accurately as possible, we are also forced to forge a link between two very different ontological domains: non-linguistic aboutness as well as its mode of presentation. Accordingly, we can define LLC as consisting of two always already interrelated compulsory components, what a linguistic expression is about and the voice or tone by which it is delivered. Which commits us to an utterance theory of language and rejects sentence-based semantics as reductive by changing the object of inquiry into something it is not. After all, what is being linked here are word sounds in their syntactic and grammatical order with what we have been drilled to imagine. I have elsewhere formulated this combination as the imaginability thesis of natural language, according to which linguistic meaning events are a function of their Vorstellbarkeit and language is conceived as a “set of instructions for imagining, and acting in, a world” (Ruthrof 2021, 1f.) What then is the epistemic status of LLC? It appears to the phenomenological gaze as a limiting condition of the intentional acts which we cannot but perform when we engage in natural language. At the same time, LLC entails a binding commitment to Vorstellbarkeit (imaginability), schematized to appropriate degrees, as a transcendental condition without which the speaker of a language cannot proceed from Husserl’s meaning intention via Bedeutung to Sinn and, likewise, the hearer of an utterance from the sounds of syntactic strings to Bedeutung and meaning fulfilment. As to its conceptual boundaries, whereas Husserl’s Zumutung applies to the phonetic, syntactic, grammatical, and semantic acts which we are trained to perform in all discursive operations, LLC is relevant only to the semantic side of natural language.

Viewed strictly by itself, then, compressed into our 250 ms timespan, our event of minimal meaning making is beginning to look more complex than the ease with which we routinely perform such acts would suggest. Nor is there general agreement amongst our dominant theories of natural language about what is going on here. As Barry C. Smith observed in his paper “What I Know When I Know a Language”, there is broad agreement on the idea that to know a language “is knowledge that connects sound and meaning”. (2006, 941; Ruthrof 2020) However, on the questions of how precisely meaning is to be conceived and in what exactly this connection consists positions are sharply divided. The bulk of existing approaches fits well between these two powerful paradigms: Frege’s reduction of natural language to the sense and reference relation, plus the negligible aspect of its Färbung, (Frege 1970) up to its recent offshoot of hyperintensional semantics, (Duzi et al. 2010) as against Husserl’s expanded meaning chain stretching from the categorial core forms of meaning intention to its replacement by Bedeutung (roughly Frege’s sense) and Sinn as saturated meaning fulfilment. In this chain, says Husserl, speakers and addresses are involved in an “infinite regress” of “mutual interpretive acts”, which presupposes the idea of a “communicative consciousness” of Mitunterredner (speech partners) and Adressaten (addressees). (2005, 36; 26)

In making a methodological commitment to Husserlian phenomenological principles of act description, (Ruthrof 2021, 2019) the paper addresses Husserl’s expanded meaning chain with the aim of clarifying the function of LLC in the process of linguistic meaning constitution.

1. Language as Coercion

That natural language exerts a certain degree of compulsion has been noted since antiquity. In the normative nominalism of the Analects of Confucius we not only find a coherent system of instructions as to proper behaviour that would guarantee political and social harmony under the binding meta-rule of obedience, but also specific directives as to the correct employment of language to guarantee appropriate punishments. (1996, 159f.; Chu and Ruthrof 2012, 44ff.; Xunzi Rectification of Names 1967; 1977) In Plato’s Phaedrus, (1983, 274b–278e) linguistic coercion is explored in terms of the restrictions which the written tradition of philosophy imposes on its authors.⁵ (Szlezák 1999, 39) In twentieth century writings, the compulsion wielded by language has been addressed by Wittgenstein under the heading of Abrichtung (language drill), (2009, PI §§5, 86, 157, 189, 198, 206)⁶ by Foucault in his analysis of institutionalized “enunciative modalities”, (1972, 50–55; 88ff.), by Deleuze and Guattari in their discussion of “order-words”, (1987, 76ff.) in Lyotard in the notion of the differend, conceived as discursive injustice (1988),⁷ by Lecercle’s conception of language as a form of violence (1990), and by Bourdieu when he speaks of the symbolic violence inherent in discourse. (1977; 1990; 1991; 1993)

Yet half a century before Wittgenstein’s remarks on linguistic Abrichtung (drill), Husserl had already introduced the idea of natural language as a Zumutung inherent in customary speech (Sprachüblichkeit). (2005, 57, 74f., 104, 170)⁸ It is here that we find the earliest modern analysis of language in which the idea of meaning making is analysed from the angle of language as imposition. In this respect, two core characteristics of Husserl’s approach to natural language are decisive: (1) his insistence that any analysis cannot but acknowledge that the necessary, central function of language is communication; (1900/1901) and (2) that the exploration of language as communication demands a radical extension of the Fregean framework of sense and reference. At the heart of this revision is Husserl’s expanded meaning chain consisting of meaning intention (Bedeutungsintention) drawing on pre-predicative core forms of substantivity and adjectivity as categorial intuition, (1997, 210f., 221f., 224; 1969, formal and trans, 294ff., 301ff., 310; 2005, 400), word sound consciousness (Wortlautbewusstsein), Bedeutung (Wortbedeutungsbewusstsein; roughly Frege’s sense), and meaning fulfilment via Sinn (in which Frege’s reference is subsumed as a narrowly conceived component). By means of the extended linguistic meaning chain and its implications, Husserl established a powerful counter paradigm to the dominant Fregean approach. From this angle, the exploration of the linguistic linkage compulsion (LLC) in the following sections then is designed to achieve two aims: one, to place the problematic of linguistic coercion on a phenomenological footing; and two, to make a conceptual contribution to Husserl’s distinction between Bedeutung and Sinn. In addition to evidence drawn from his published writings, much of this exploration is indebted to Husserl’s notes in his Nachlass volumes. (2002b, 2005, 2012, 2014; 1973b, c, d)

In the Nachlass, Husserl speaks of the word of natural language as a Zumutung, an “imposition”, and an Aufforderung, a “demand”, which he discovers in the “social ought”, the Sollenstendenz conveyed in the standard use of language, that is, in what is habitual or customary speech or what is “sprachüblich”. (2005, 57, 74f., 104f., 170, 313) “The word itself is an imposition” with which it is “behaftet” (affected, burdened). (2005, 74; 104) The way we are to grasp the meaning of linguistic expressions, then, is “allgemein vorgezeichnet” (generally prescribed). (2005, 75) So, not only do we tend to fall victim to “the seduction of language”, as Husserl’s observes we do in the Crisis, we are already victimized by language as linguistic Zumutung, that is, as a “constant danger” posed by “the unavoidable sedimentations of mental products in the form of persisting linguistic acquisitions”. (1970, 362) Amongst the many things in natural language which demand compliance from its speakers, by far the most substantive form of imposition is the connection which we are drilled to forge between the sounds of linguistic expressions and their meanings. In this context, Husserl speaks of the “unity of word sound consciousness and meaning consciousness”, (2005, 32) a unity resulting from a form of coercion identified in this paper as the linguistic linkage compulsion or LLC.⁹ But what precisely is being linked here?

From the perspective of phenomenological act description, the answer appears to be word sounds and Vorstellungen schematized according to need. In this picture of semantics, Husserl is building on Kant’s schematism and, more specifically, on Kant’s description of a typical schematic Vorstellung such as the imaginable outline of a dog: “the concept ‘dog’ signifies a rule according to which my imagination can delineate the figure of a four-footed animal in a general manner”. (CPR A141/B180) Husserl’s refinement of Kant’s example of the concept ‘dog’ adds to the outer horizon of the imaginable animal such inner horizons as typical forms of canine conduct. “When we see a dog, we immediately anticipate its additional mode of behaviour: its typical way of eating, playing, running”. (1973a, 331). Nor are such schematizations restricted to the domain of apophantic expressions about actuality. After all, the bulk of natural language expressions is about absent things, where the Kantian Vorstellung is indispensable.¹⁰ Whenever Husserl employs the term, he means meaning-endowing, that is, “bedeutungsverleihende Vorstellung”. (2005, 345) What matters semantically in both cases is the way we feel compelled to combine Husserl’s acts of word consciousness (Wortlautbewusstsein) with those of meaning consciousness (Wortbedeutungsbewusstsein): “we have word sound consciousness in connection with empty or full meaning consciousness”, whereby “empty” and “full” are no more than theoretical, limiting cases. (2005, 177, 207) Husserl refers to the first as “gegenstandslose”, that is, empty Leerintentionen, to the second as “saturated”, by which an “imagining consciousness … now takes over the function of meaning”. (2005, 325) In successful, saturated meaning acts, the word sound functions as a means for Zielmeinen (target meaning) which has at its core the actual Bedeutung. (2005, 106)

It is only via Husserl’s exploration of Wortbedeutungsbewusstsein that we are able to locate his distinction between Bedeutung and Sinn. The former is conceived as merely verbal or logical, allowing minimal Vorstellung; it primarily provides “exclusive directionality” by way of inter-grammaticality. (Husserl 2000, 282f.) Introduced as early as in the Logical Investigations, “exclusive directionality” remains the red line of guaranteeing minimal identification of aboutness. Even where Husserl retreats from strict conceptuality to the relative fuzziness of “fluid-type concepts” in order to allow for meaning as approximation, (2005, 3, 439; 2012, 230) exclusive directionality as the this-here, not the that-there remains the guarantor of communicability. This is how Husserl reconciles the demand for meaning retention in verbal communication with the “fluid transitions” (fliessende Übergänge) typical of linguistic reality. (2005, 339) After all, “in the world of intuition”, he writes, “there is only approximation”. (2012, 71) What secures the conveyance of sameness of meaning, then, is the exclusive directionality of Bedeutung. As such, Husserl’s Bedeutung can be said to be close to Frege’s definitional sense as pure thought.

In stark contrast, Sinn is conceived as “meaning fulfilment”, covering a semantic spectrum from minimally to highly schematized imaginable scenarios which “animate” or flesh out the merely skeletal function of Bedeutung. (2005, 126) As such, Sinn always transcends verbal elaboration, as provided by a dictionary. Rather, Sinn is both an intersemiotic and heterosemiotic fulfilment of Bedeutung. It is in Sinn that meaning fulfilment is conceived as semantic saturation. (2002b, 67; 2005, 136, 205, 364) Which clarifies that Bedeutung and Sinn have clearly separated functions even though they are inseparable in actual acts of comprehension. As heterosemiotic saturation of Bedeutung, Husserl’s Sinn includes, but is not exhausted by, Frege’s reference in placing Bedeutung in a larger meaning context beyond Frege’s scientifically delimited concept. For one, Sinn is not restricted only to a rich form of aboutness, it also includes its modification by tone of voice.

Two of Husserl’s Nachlass volumes are indispensable if we wish to appreciate the fundamentals of the complex relation between the various components which make up his conception of natural language, Logische Untersuchungen. Ergänzungsband. Erster Teil. Entwürfe Zur Umarbeitung der VI. Untersuchung und zur Vorrede für die Neuauflage der.

Logischen Untersuchungen (2002b) and Logische Untersuchungen. Ergänzungsband. Zweiter Teil. Texte für die Neufassung der VI. Untersuchung. Zur Phänomenologie des Ausdrucks und der Erkenntnis. (2005) As their subtitles tell us, the two volumes offer supplementary materials to what Husserl has to say about language in his Logical Investigations, insights for which he could not find the time to insert into a revised version of the original publication of 1900/1901. In particular, and in contrast with Husserl’s logical interests in signification, they foreground the importance of “more or less” in language, what makes it anschaulich, that is, vividly imaginable, and the significance of tone, as well as the genetic role of categorial intuitions and such core forms as substantivity and adjectivity.¹¹ In addition, Husserl is keenly aware of the difference between idealized notions and empirical concepts conceived as “fliessende Typenbegriffe”. (2012, 230) More pertinently, as early as in the Logical Investigations are Husserl’s exploration of meaning ideality and meaning identity contested by his interest in the “correlation among the mental acts mutually unfolded in intimation” where we cannot “at all” assume “exact resemblance”. (2000, p. 278; my emphasis) So we can justify paying special attention to these features on the grounds that they strongly support their lesser prominence in Husserl’s published work and so suggests a more balanced and comprehensive reading of his overall position on natural language. (Cf. Zahavi and Stjernfelt 2002; Mattens 2008; Ruthrof 2021) More to the point, it is Husserl himself who supports this emphasis on his Notes when he writes that he is “now” (some 14 years after the publication of the Logische Untersuchungen) “in a position” to “rectify errors” (ausmerzen) and “clean up problems” (reinigen) in his earlier writings on language. (2005, 23) One such error Husserl now regrets is that he earlier failed to recognize soliloquy as always already social. As he ruefully remarks, “Da hab ich einen schoenen Fehler gemacht” (I nice blunder I made there). Against this background, it makes sense to address the question of how each of the components of Husserl’s extended meaning chain is affected differently by the linguistic Sollenstendenz conceived as imposition.

2. LLC and the components of Husserl’s expanded meaning chain

In contrast with Frege’s reduction of natural language to what he regarded to be its essential features as sense, or pure, definitional thought, and reference, conceived of as scientifically secured observation of actuality, Husserl’s holistic meaning chain stretches from meaning intention via its verbal displacement as having Bedeutung to the reversal of displacement in the graded saturation of meaning fulfilment of Sinn. While Frege’s approach emerges from the assumption that language functions in principle like geometry, Husserl’s picture of language is the result of a meticulous description of the acts of consciousness which we cannot but perform when we engage in linguistic communication. As a result, Husserl’s meaning chain is a great deal more complex than the conception of linguistic meaning offered in the Fregean minimalist scheme. Indeed, and contrary to some prominent voices to the contrary, (Føllesdal 1969, 1990; Kusch 1989) the two approaches are diametrically opposed to one another and, in their opposition, constitute two fundamentally different and incommensurate paradigms in the philosophy of language. Above all else, Husserl vehemently opposes any explanation via “static congruence” (statische Deckung) in the meaning process. (2005, 3) Instead, Husserl follows Kant in accepting the “essentially teleological structure of consciousness” and its consequences of a “gradual” appearance of intentional acts. (2005, 23) If we wish to pinpoint how precisely LLC affects linguistic meaning in the Husserlian language paradigm, we need to clarify what role LLC plays in each of the components of his revised meaning chain, which is metaphorically described as a movement from left to “right” towards the “imagining act”. (2005, 135n2) So, it is useful to distinguish first between the temporal extension of the meaning process and what Husserl refers to as “Stufenbau” (stepped construction). (2005, 439)

Stufenbau in the Meaning Chain

Central to meaning constitution in Husserl’s semantic chain are acts of “cognition” of linguistic expressions as a reconstruction of a meaning intention. He refers to this form of cognition as “a peculiar act of the belief sphere” (Glaubenssphäre). In accordance with Husserl’s concept of Stufenbau, meaning constitution accrues not only horizontally along the temporal extension from Bedeutung to Sinn, but also vertically in three separate moments: as (1) “simple perceiving” (schlichtes Wahrnehmen); (2) the “modalization” of simple acts and then their categorial acts; and (3) “modalizations of disposition and will”, viewed by Husserl as “Gemütsmodalisierungen und Willensmodalisierungen”. (2005, 439) As such, Stufenbau shows itself in alternative act options at every moment of the meaning chain. In this sense, Husserl’s way of looking at meaning constitution exhibits a structural homology with the Saussurean distinction between syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations, the former characterizing the axis of syntactic sequencing, the latter indicating signifier choices made on the axis of selection. In Husserl, however, Stufenbau complicates the extended meaning chain by adding to its forward dimension his differentiation of act Schichten (layers). We could add here the two layers of aboutness, Husserl’s Worüber, and tone, which affect all utterances and their comprehension. As he remarks, speech is always about something and “always has its tone”. Which includes both the habitual tone indicating the kind of sentence and “specific tonal characteristics which are grasped in their quality and so guide our understanding”. (2005, 102f.) From the perspective of the Husserlian language paradigm, the relegation of tone to pragmatics amounts to an illegitimate reduction of natural language to the semantics of aboutness. The relationship of Husserl’s temporal extension and the Stufenbau of each of its components was to be brought to elaborate methodological application much later in Roman Ingarden’s ontology of the literary work of art and general aesthetics. (1973a; 1973b; 1989)

Meaning Intention

Early in Husserl’s career, the concept of “meaning intention” is presented as a set of intentional acts preceding the acts of conveying “inner experiences” and the “intimation of mental states”. As imaginable scenarios, meaning intentions are sharply marked off from any “expression”, as well as its Bedeutung and Sinn. (2000, 277f., 283) As Husserl describes them much later, meaning intentions can be viewed as pre-verbal “modes of combinative forming of categorial objectivities”. (1969, 301) In the Nachlass, he speaks of the “lively Vorstellungen” of meaning intentions which “burst out” in word sounds and gestures. (2005, 104n1) In which case meaning intentions have been realized in linguistic “meaning-conferring acts”, which require the selection of word sequences appropriate for the utterance of what is intended to be expressed. It should not be surprising then that meaning intentions conceived as intentional, imaginable scenarios demand reconstructive, interpretive labour in acts of linguistic comprehension. (Cf. Lohmar 2015) Here, Husserl employs transcendental reasoning in the strict Kantian sense of establishing meaning intentions in terms of necessary conditions of the possibility of verbal meaning. The empirical basis on which this reconstruction occurs is provided by the actuality of utterances. Following the linguist Charles Hockett, we can call the transition from meaning intention to utterance intentive acts of displacement, (Hockett 1960; 1966) a transformation which, according to Husserl, cannot occur unless it is instantiated by a “signifying consciousness” (signitives Bewusstsein). (2005, 73) If so, then all meaning acts involve “intention and fulfilment”. (2005, 7) Yet not all meaning intentions result in speech. When they do, they are driven by an act of “Redenwollen” (vouloir dire), in which case we cannot but deal with their displacement by linguistic expressions. (2005, 49) As Husserl views the displacement of meaning intention by natural language, when “I search for a word, I am focused on it (daraufgerichtet), I find it” and “adopt” the “normal attitude by which meaning is performed” according to its coexistence with the word. (2005, 105)¹²

Verbal Displacement

When meaning conferring acts transform linguistic meaning intentions into expressions, they displace nonverbal mental materials of Vorstellung into verbal signifying strings fixing the word sounds shared and sanctioned by a speech community. Displacement, then, is an intersemiotic and heterosemiotic transformation from nonverbal acts of Vorstellung into verbal expressions. (Hockett 1960; 1966) Acts of visual, olfactory, tactile, emotional and other nonverbal configurations are displaced by verbal equivalents resulting in linguistic signification. Expressed phenomenologically, before we can replace any such acts by a verbal analogy, we must have formed an intentional object together with an intention of a “pointing beyond” (Hinausweisung). Only then are we in a position to select an appropriate, equivalent verbal expression in an act of “word consciousness” (Wortbewusstsein). (2005, 101, 135n2) Husserl identifies the immediate and minimal, semantic side of such signification as mere Bedeutung, reminiscent of Frege’s sense.

Expressions

Verbal signifying strings in their community-sanctioned, standard order are termed expressions which, in Husserl, present an “objective correlate meant by a meaning” in distinction from an actual something. (2000, 287) Complicating matters, however, Husserl later views all expressions as displaying a double intentionality, or “dual strata”, their aboutness and at the same time its modification by voice. (2005, 102f.) Importantly, Husserl, from the very outset, rejects the empiricist claim that “an expression expresses its meaning”. (2000, 281) Expressions on their own do nothing, except to serve as the material basis on which the speaker of a language performs acts of comprehension, the initial minimal version of which Husserl discusses under the heading of Bedeutung, the minimal response in acts of comprehension following an act of word sound consciousness (Wortlautbewusstsein), to be sharply distinguished from Wortbedeutungsbewusstsein, that is, acts of word meaning consciousness. (2005, 207) The two distinct acts involved here also always result in linguistic expressions being comprehended in terms of their Sachlage and its formulation, its “specific categorial Fassung” in which it is “meant”. Accordingly, Husserl distinguishes “judgment consciousness” from “expression consciousness” (Urteils- und Aussagebewusstsein). (2005, 11f.) Unknown words are typically provided with an “indicative tendency” via a dictionary. (2005, 187) At the habitual level of linguistic expressions, word strings also produce “expectation intentions” (Erwartungsintentionen) which find their immediate match in acts of Bedeutung. (2005, 168)

Bedeutung

“The sounding word, the ink and paper word is not the word”, writes Husserl. It functions as word only once it has been transformed into Bedeutung. (2005, 113) This is what happens in habitual speech (Sprachüblichkeit), (2002b, 83) when the sounds of linguistic expressions “awaken” their “familiar significations”, which Husserl takes to be “given passively” as acts of “reactivating” linguistic meanings. (1970, 361; cf. 2001, 121–145) In reading, we transform the written signs into “acoustic words” which are the primary carriers of understanding. (2005, 114) As elaborated in the Nachlass, both “passively understanding” and conscious meaning reactivation are subject to the Sollenstendenz of language, its “tendency of an ought”. (2005, 57, 74f., 104, 170) The immediate semantic response to linguistic expressions as sound sequences in Husserl is characterized by the term Bedeutung. Yet acts of recognition as Bedeutung are restricted by Husserl to merely verbal or logical comprehension and minimal Vorstellung in contrast with saturating, “meaning-fulfilling acts” in the constitution of Sinn. (2000, 281ff.) In this restricted sense, Bedeutung is a transient moment, consisting of no more than “transitional acts of consciousness” (Durchgangsbewusstsein). (Husserl 2002b, 38; 2005, 105f.,134f., 151, 205, 207) It generates semantic orientation “in the manner of a directional intention”. (2002b, 38) We can see here how Husserl in the Nachlass is refining and strengthening his early formulation of “exclusive directionality” introduced in the Logical Investigations. (2000, 282f.) In this more specified form, Bedeutung guarantees the “congruence” (Deckung) of what is said with what is meant, even if it does so only in a minimal sense. (2005, 43) This is so, says Husserl, because the Bedeutung preserves what he terms the “indicative tendency” (Hinweistendenz) toward “the thing meant”.¹³ (2005, 43, 153) It does so in a dual manner, by a verbal, or merely logical, parallelism and by minimal acts of schematized Vorstellung. In this way, Bedeutung functions as the all-important “hold for understanding”. (2005, 289) Only once this “hold” is achieved can Bedeutung be gradually transformed into Sinn by a reversal of the verbal displacement of meaning intentions. During the phase of Bedeutung, then, LLC is in decisive control of our meaning constituting acts.

Reversal of Displacement

Notwithstanding the semantic anchoring function of Bedeutung, without the reconstruction of the kind of imaginable nonverbal situation that gave rise in the first place to our choice of specific expressions, no rich meaning fulfilment can occur. A necessary condition of such a reconstruction is the reversal of verbal displacement via intersemiotic and heterosemiotic, nonverbal imaginability. The difference between displacement and its reversal is their opposite directionality, in the first case from schematized Vorstellung to words, in the second from words to degrees of nonverbal schematization. (Ruthrof 2021, 52, 121, 130f.) That the process of the reversal of displacement occurs at camera-shutter speed must not deter us from carefully distinguishing the different kinds of acts involved. (Ruthrof 2014) Husserl conceives this transformation as a process of semantic “saturation” (Sättigung). As he puts it, “in meaning fulfilment what is intended ‘satisfies’ itself, ‘saturates’ itself”. (2005, 136) Furthermore, semantic saturation involves acts of intimation, introjection, and apperceptive “empathy” (Einfühlung) into the “psychic life of the other” (das fremde psychische Leben). (2005, 68) If so, what then does the resulting Sinn consist in?

Sinn

For Husserl, Sinn as meaning constitution in and by natural language occurs as a consequence of saturating acts placing Bedeutung in larger verbal and, above all, nonverbal contexts. In Sinn as “fulfilment” what is intended is “satisfied” (befriedigt) and “saturates itself” (sättigt sich). As such, “what is intended is the ‘same’ as” the meaning intention “but in the mode (Modus) of saturation”. (2005, 136) Coming to know something via language is the “fortschreitende Sich-Erfüllen” (progressive fulfilling itself) of not yet saturated intentional acts. (2005, 364) In this conception of linguistic meaning, Sinn is always more elaborate than Bedeutung but never complete, allowing as it does for the ever further accruement of supplementary verbal and nonverbal acts of comprehension. In this way, the very same meaning intention identified minimally in the comprehension of Bedeutung is now elaborated in a kind of semantic, stepped construction (Stufenbau) with increased “gradations of clarity” and “gradation of fulness” culminating in different “degrees of completeness” and “gradations of vividness of the entire Vorstellung” (Graduationen der Lebendigkeit der ganzen Vorstellung). (2002b, 240, 129f.; 2005, 439) The idea of gradual saturation also informs Husserl’s chapter “The Gradation of Objectivation” in his published work on passive and active synthesis. (2001, 337–355) In the linguistic meaning event, Sinn has the function of “redeeming fulfilment” (einlösende Erfüllung) of Bedeutung. (2005, 43) It is in Sinn then that we grasp linguistic meaning as a “becoming imaginable” (Anschaulichwerden), that is, as “Veranschaulichung”. (2005, 143f.; 1980)

Yet neither Husserl’s Bedeutung nor his conception of Sinn can be regarded as actual moments of linguistic meaning. Rather, they are strictly defined as idealized limiting cases between which actual verbal meaning events occur. The limit notion of Bedeutung provides no more than “exclusive directionality” guaranteeing Husserl’s semantic essence to the extent that the “sense of the sentence should remain identical”. (Husserl 2000, 282f., 285, 290) Sinn as the theoretical limit of meaning fulfilment, by contrast, indicates the range of semantic gradations constituting the epistemic essence of linguistic comprehension. (2000, 745) The opposition between two limiting cases, “non-imaginable” (unanschauliche Bedeutung) on the one hand and meaning fulfilment, on the other, is that the former is always “demanding fulfilment” (erfüllungsbedürftig). (Husserl 2005, 2, 4). Its empty theoretical limit Husserl terms Leerbewusstsein. (2002b, 4.n3; 2005, 187) In every meaning event of natural language “the empty consciousness is superseded then by what is imaginable”, that is, anschaulich. (2005, 151)

In natural language, the limiting case of Bedeutung as Leervorstellung (empty conception) can never be realized as pure emptiness in linguistic practice, just as the idea of a full Sinn is an unrealistic epistemic option. All that can be accomplished in the performance of acts of Sinn is a degree of “intuitive saturation” (intuitive Sättigung). (2002b, 67) Conversely, no matter how limited such meaning saturation may be in semantic actuality, in Sinn “the Anschauung as a whole can never vanish altogether”. (2005, 298) This is where Derrida’s critique of Husserl’s alleged presence as plenitude is simply wrong. (Derrida 1973) There is no semantic plenitude in Husserl’s phenomenology. Rather, “empty essences as the domain of pure logic” are juxtaposed to the idea of “typical essence” (typisches Wesen) of what is merely approximate (ein Ungefähres) as “apperceptive generalities” of the mere “congruence of similarities” (Deckung von Ähnlichem) in a “circle of similarity” (Ähnlichkeitskreis), or “milieu of similarity” (Ähnlichkeitsmilieu). (Husserl 2012, 42f., 63f., 71ff., 106f., 109ff., 236f.) For Husserl, actual linguistic practice occurs between the two polarities as the “more or less” of meaning “approximation” towards “the aim of cognition” (Annäherung an das Erkenntnisziel). (Husserl 2012, 71, 234; 2005, 139) It makes good sense, then, that Husserl here would replace pure logical concepts by “fluid type concepts” (fliessende Typenbegriffe). (Husserl 2005, 279; 2012, 230)

That Sinn then cannot possibly be identical with either meaning intention or Bedeutung should be obvious. After all, Sinn involves acts of recollection, of imaginable aboutness typically qualified, and sometimes radically so, by the interpretation of voice, to be addressed below. So important is the latter in Husserl’s Nachlass revisions that it adds a second “layer” (Schicht) to every linguistic expression, demanding the modification of our acts of Bedeutung. (2005, 103) In any case, our acts of Sinn are temporally distant, however minimally, from those of Bedeutung and so what is “merely thought” in the “symbolic act” of Bedeutung is “made intuitively present” in the saturating “Anschauung” of Sinn. (2002b, 38) And although our fulfilling Vorstellungen advance from “verworrenen” (confused) ones to always new and “deutlichen” (distinct) ones, we are compelled by the LLC to “retain the Bedeutung as identical”. (2005, 345) Which confirms that the aboutness of Sinn does not differ in an important sense from that of Bedeutung. As in the latter, in “Sinn, the word is congruent with the thing as equivalent to its Sinn” (Das Wort in seinem Sinn deckt sich mit der Sache als Sinn entsprechende). (2005, 146) On the other hand, what is decisively different between these two kinds of meaning-endowing acts is that Sinn as intentional projection involves what Husserl calls the “Lebendigkeit der ganzen Vorstellung”. (2002b, 240) In Sinn, “the intentional essence of the act of Anschauung” appears to “conform, more or less perfectly” to “the meaning essence of the expressing act”. (2002b, 44, 38) In Husserl’s extended meaning chain from meaning intention through Bedeutung to Sinn, what remains constant is exclusive directionality. (Husserl 2000, 282f., 285, 290) Although the addressee’s semantically “realizing consciousness is a continuously flowing one”, (2005, 65) we are still dealing with one and the same meant objectivity even if it is constituted in each case by a different set of intentional acts.

The question then arises in what form semantic “gradation” is thinkable. (Husserl 1997, 193) The Kantian answer was via schematizations,¹⁴ which make both Anschauung and Vorstellung possible in the first place.¹⁵ (CPR A140ff./B179f.) Husserl’s seemingly different answer is typifications. But what is the difference between the two? As Dieter Lohmar has cogently argued, apart from their different genesis, Kantian schemata and Husserlian typifications fundamentally fulfil the same function in replacing empirical specificity by the principle of flexible schematization according to need of comprehension. (Lohmar 2003) Which facilitates the levelling of the peaks and troughs of individual meaning constructions in linguistic communication, the fundamental function of natural language in Husserl’s eidetic language paradigm.¹⁶ (Ruthrof 2021, 39–55) A high degree of schematization is characteristic of the kind of Sinn Husserl finds appropriate for such expressions as “General White”, where meaning fulfilment lacks “anschauliche Vorstellung” (vivid imaginability). (2005, 329) Accordingly, Husserl distinguishes highly “apprehensive” from merely “conceptive” Vorstellungen. (2005, 336) If Sinn is well characterized, then, by Husserl’s accent on its “gradations of fullness and series of enhancement of fulfilment”, (2002b, 129) it follows that LLC here plays a different role if compared to its function in Bedeutung. The degree of coercion exerted on the speakers of a language by LLC diminishes from the enforcement of Husserl’s exclusive directionality to a gradually decreasing imposition on our combination of word sound and meaning. While in habitual speech this decrease in Zumutung is minimal and hardly noticeable, in thoughtful interpretation it produces increasingly idiosyncratic semantic saturations within the limits of meaning sufficiency.¹⁷ Cases transgressing this boundary mark the failure of linguistic communication.

Meaning Sufficiency

We must also address the question how Husserl’s picture of meaning sufficiency squares with the need to avoid communicative chaos. (Ruthrof 2021, 101–117; Ruthrof 2015b) Meaning sufficiency can be defined within the Husserlian framework as the retention of “exclusive directionality” in Sinn, notwithstanding its enrichment by various degrees of saturation via vivid nonverbal Anschauung beyond Bedeutung. As such, meaning sufficiency guarantees the necessary and sufficient conditions of communication in natural language. But how is standard linguistic communication not only possible but in fact efficient? This is where LLC plays its key communal role. At each point in the Husserlian broadened meaning chain LLC fulfils a somewhat different function. In the transition from nonverbal schematized, imaginable scenarios to the selection of verbal strings, Husserl’s meaning intention (Bedeutungsintention), LLC effects the linkage of imagined situation with what the speech community regards as an appropriate choice of diction. At the stage of Bedeutung, an at least adequate re-enactment of this linkage is rigorously binding. This is where LLC fulfils its central function of guaranteeing Husserl’s exclusive directionality of sense.

As pointed out in the Introduction, during the moment of the cognition of the sound of the expression “yellow sports car” we are not in the position of imagining any alternative sound sequence and its sense. During the span of about 250 ms of comprehension we are entirely under the imposition of language as the result of communal pedagogy, that is, the coercive Abrichtung by the speech community, conceived as our “we-horizon” and “a community of those who can reciprocally express themselves”. (Husserl 1970, 359) Comprehension at this crucial moment consists of a liminal intentional act of semantic repetition. And although in the subsequent reconstruction of meaning intention in the act of meaning fulfilment as Sinn the linkage between word sound and Husserl’s epistemic essence of nonverbal schematization allows for semantic latitude beyond Bedeutung, the coercive principle of the LLC is still operative. Thus, we can regard LLC as a coercive rule reflecting an “encompassing communal consciousness” (übergreifendes Gemeinschaftsbewusstsein) and the “unity of the supra-personal consciousness” (Einheit des überpersonalen Bewusstseins). (Husserl 1973b 101; 1973c, 199) In the three Nachlass volumes on intersubjectivity Husserl sums up his conception of the speech community as defined by four distinct forms of being, as being-apart-from-one -another (Auseinandersein), being-with-one-another (Miteinandersein), being-for-one-another (Füreinandersein) and being-within-one-another (Ineinandersein).¹⁸ (1973c, 268ff.) It is this last form of social being as inexorable Ineinandersein which is indispensable in gauging the degree of coercion in the presentational mode, or tone, of any utterance.

Tone as Sollenstendenz

When “I speak in a contemptuous tone, in a lively tone, in an icy tone”, I cannot but impose specifically different varieties of coercion on the way my addressees comprehend what I am saying. This is so because “the unity of the word has two layers (Schichten) which are expressed simultaneously”. (Husserl 2005, 102f.) One is tone, the other aboutness, the former modifying the latter. Not only do Husserl’s comments mark a shift away from his ideal of natural language as conveying meaning identity, they also foreground a fundamentally new and decisive conception of language in the Nachlass. No longer does he embrace the idea of the presence of “essentially subjective and occasional expressions”, (2000, 313f.) the entire body of a natural language now displays tone as a second “layer” (Schicht) which qualifies every “sentence, statement, interrogative sentence, expression wish”, etc. (2005, 102) In addition, any word can be uttered in an a peculiar, individual tone, resulting in a modification of its aboutness, such a “‘Göttingen’” spoken in a tone of “relief”, or “disappointment”, etc. (2005, 382) Voice as tone, then, complicates the aboutness of linguistic expressions, Husserl’s Worüber. (2005, 401, 456) Husserl’s double-layer conception of natural language is significant in that it re-incorporates utterance within the scope of semantics, rather than relegating it to the separate domain of pragmatics.

This shift, however, is still entirely commensurate with Husserl’s base line of language as communication, conceived as “a reciprocal ‘getting along’ with others” whereby I “enter into particular modes of community with them, and then know, in a habitual way, of my being so related”. (1970, 358) Husserl’s commitment to communication in this sense was announced early in the Logical Investigations and never reneged on. (2000, 276f.) But how does the new emphasis on tone in the Nachlass relate to LLC? It does so quite profoundly in all cases where tone significantly affects aboutness. Two conspicuous cases are verbal irony and other utterances where the manner of presentation decisively alters their propositional content. While irony is a well-trodden case of such reversals of aboutness, other cases can be illustrated by the example of the utterance “May I help you”, the meaning construction of which will vary from a kind offer of assistance to the expression of aggressive hostility by someone objecting to the presence of an unwelcome visitor. Here, tone or voice function as LLC in forcing us to transform a standard, positive meaning constitution into its opposite. Our responses to Bedeutung in Sinn via standard, imaginable schemata are replaced by schematizations appropriate to the tone of the utterance. Which, as already pointed out, is at the same time an indication of the failure of sentence-based semantics in a significant number of verbal expressions. The principles established in this respect can be generalized in the theorization of implicit deixis. (Ruthrof 2015a)

Conclusion: LLC in Light of Husserlian Intentionality

By way of Conclusion, a brief review of the role of LLC in Husserl’s extended meaning chain through the lens of intentionality appears appropriate. As argued, LLC reveals itself as an emerging intersubjective, intentional phenomenon in all linguistic meaning events. In Husserl’s writings, intentionality “characterizes consciousness in a pregnant sense”, by which he means to stress its somewhat “vague” character of “universality” prior to “more precise investigations”. Nevertheless, intentionality remains Husserl’s “comprehensive name for all-inclusive phenomenological structures”. As “consciousness of something”, intentionality needs to be “apprehended in its undetermined range, as we have apprehended it,” as “a wholly indispensable fundamental concept which is the starting point at the beginning of phenomenology”. (1998, 199ff.) Intentionality thus embraces the entire stream of acts of consciousness as a unifying, critical concept. So, it makes sense to ask in what way LLC relates to intentionality. As demonstrated, the different phases of Husserl’s extended linguistic meaning chain will demand somewhat different answers. But it is precisely the identification of these differences which will further strengthen the legitimacy of Husserl’s alternative paradigm of natural language. Having compared the varying function of LLC in the major steps of the meaning chain, we cannot but notice that the emerging differences reflect Husserl’s theorization of the relationship between passive and active intentional syntheses. (2001, 121–145)

In the phase of meaning intention, LLC can be shown to play a relatively flexible role in that the linkages between our imagined nonverbal scenarios and their categorial intuitions, (Husserl 1997, 221f.; 2005, 409f., 417, 439; Ruthrof 2021, 143f., 165) which we aim to put into words, can be expressed in a variety of ways by linguistic expressions with approximately similar meanings. If we feel that we have not quite hit the nail on the head with our choice of diction, we typically rephrase our vouloir dire until we are satisfied that our speech partners have been able to comprehend our speech intention. The degree of compulsion exerted here by the speech community operates within a “more or less” broad range of verbal options. Perhaps we could say that the more habitual our speech, the tighter are the communal constraints on our meaning intentions and their displacement by language.

The situation is substantially different in the case of Bedeutung, where the semantic latitude of our expressions is sharply reduced to Husserl’s exclusive directionality. (2000, 283) As a result, intentionality is shrunk to a minimum of what Husserl characterizes as an intentive act, both in its merely verbal linkage and minimal nonverbal grasp. Here, “awareness” and its “intentive moments”, understood in their noetic-noematic eidetic character, (1998, 205; 210) are minimized under the rules of the speech community. In the bulk of high-speed habitual exchanges of Bedeutung our egoic acts of comprehension are rigorously ruled by speech conventions according to the definition of Bedeutung as mandatory combination of word sound, alternative phrasing, and minimal Vorstellung, excluding semantic elaboration. During the split-second event of the recognition of the most minimal aboutness, all we can grasp is the this-here of something at the exclusion of other options. “This vase in front of you” as against “those books over there”, or “your uncle in the UK” versus “your aunt in Melbourne”. To this extent, Husserl’s meaning identity of aboutness is secured by the LLC as a forceful guidance of word sound consciousness (Wortlautbewusstsein) to be combined with a specific non-verbal schematization and/or a verbal synonym, characterized by Husserl as two forms of Wortbedeutungsbewusstsein. (2005, 177, 207) This is where LLC exerts it most coercive force over the standard linkage between the sounds of linguistic expressions and their logical, merely verbal and minimally imaginative construction of aboutness. As such, the kind of synthesis we are able to perform cannot be anything but passive.¹⁹ Husserl (2001, 121–145) Husserl addresses such operational intentionality in terms of unconscious sedimentation in the Nachlass volume Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie. (2014, 62ff.) Likewise, in the Crisis Husserl refers to such passive acts of synthesis as “‘unconscious’ intentionalities”. (1970, 237) During the high-speed passage from Bedeutung to Sinn passive intentionality gradually gives way to more consciously intentive meaning acts and an increasing awareness of Anschaulichkeit as a “picture-analogical parallelism”. (Lohmar 2008, 173; Husserl 2005, 658f.) Which is minimally the case in habitual language use and richly so in contemplative meaning practices, such as the reading of poetry.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Critique of Judgment §29; Allgemeine Anmerkung; §78.

2 That linguistic meaning can empirically be shown to take time and so must have the structure of an event establishes beyond doubt that theories viewing meanings as properties of language are untenable. Likewise, theories which argue the immediacy of linguistic meaning can no longer be sustained. In sharp contrast, Husserlian phenomenology as a method of intentional act description is well placed to explore the components that make up the linguistic meaning chain from meaning intention via Bedeutung to meaning fulfilment in Sinn.

3 The fact that during the high-speed event of habitual linguistic comprehension our intentional acts are passively attentive rather than active further strengthens Husserl’s rejection of psychologism and subjectivism.

4 From the Logical Investigations (1900/1) to the Crisis (1938), as well as in the Nachlass volumes, Husserl consistently views natural language holistically, that is, from the perspective of its central function of communication. As discussed below, this includes tone, which declares his overall enterprise a broadly conceived semantics including what other theories of language separate off as pragmatics. As such, Husserl’s theorization of natural language opposes the analytical paradigm of language philosophy and sentence-based linguistics as changing language into an objectivity which falsifies its mode of being (Seinsweise), as if we were dealing with “a patient etherized upon a table”. (Ruthrof 2021, 4)

5 Szlezák has also demonstrated, convincingly in my view, that Schleiermacher was misguided in declaring Plato’s criticism of written philosophy apocryphal. Having canvassed ancient Greek and Latin commentaries on Plato, Szlezák concludes that there is no evidence to support Schleiermacher’s claim.

6 The standard English translation of Wittgenstein’s original German ‘Abrichtung’ as ‘training’ does not capture the rich connotations of force involved in the Abrichtung of soldiers and circus animals.

7 Cf. Berhard Waldenfels, “Ethics in the Differend of Discourses”, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 32, 3 (2001): 242–256.

8 Here Husserl once more follows in the footsteps of Kant who declared meaning in natural language a matter of “linguistic usage”. (See Ruthrof 2022, Ch.4)

9 See note 3.

10 A position which could also be characterized, as it is by Dieter Lohmar, as a “similarity semantics” in “Language and Non-Linguistic Thinking”, in The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology, ed. D. Zahavi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 377–398; 395

11 Husserl’s “anschauliche Vergegenwärtigungen”, rendered as “representations” are discussed in terms of “ego-splitting” characteristic of the difference between actual cognitive and purely intentional acts or “pure phantasy” in Marco Cavallaro’s “The Phenomenon of Ego-Splitting in Husserl’s Phenomenology of Pure Phantasy”, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 48, 2 (2017): 162–177; 162.

12 According to the editor, Ullrich Melle, Husserl wrote “Das Verhältnis von Wort und Sache … ” in 1914. (2005, 105n1)

13 On Husserl’s Hinweisfunktion, Zhida Luo has alerted the reader to the distinction between mere indications (blosse Anzeichen) and genuine signs (echte Zeichen) in “Husserl’s Theory of Bodily Expressitivity and Its Revision: In view of the ‘1914 Texts’”. (Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 53, 3 (2022): 315–331.

14 Cf. Ch4 of Horst Ruthrof, The Roots of Hermeneutics in Kant’s Reflective-Teleological Judgment (2022) which attempts a reconstruction of Kant’s conception of natural language.

15 A combined Kantian and Husserlian account of natural language inevitably leads to some form of imaginability semantics, argued via two theses, one defining language as “set of social instructions for imagining, and communicatively acting in, a world”, (Ruthrof 2021, 192) the other describing linguistic meaning thus: “If I can imagine what you are talking about, including the manner in which you are, there is meaning. If not, not. And vice versa, if you imagine the aboutness of my expressions and its mode of presentation, there is meaning. If not, not”. (Ruthrof 2021, 2)

16 Nevertheless, any attempt at removing the subject as an essential ingredient from the theorization of natural language altogether is found to fail since individual consciousness is needed for the instantiation of natural language. Choric utterances as in liturgy or political slogans are an exception. As Jan Halák has argued, persuasively in my view, “the sedimented linguistic expressions must be adopted and actively recontextualised by individuals in their particular situations, or they become obsolete”. (“Gesturing in Language: Merleau-Ponty and Mukařovský at the Phenomenological Limits of Structuralism.” JBSP 53, 4 (2022): 415–439; 421)

17 In “Fundamental Ontology, Saturated Phenomena and Transcendental Drama”, Daniil Koloskov, with reference to Jean-Luc Marion’s In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena (New York: Fordham University Press), argues that the degree of “intuitive givenness” is “excessive with regard to the subject’s intention” (Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 53, 4 (2022): 395–414; 403). Which is useful in terms of my emphasis on degrees of saturation and degrees of schematization. (Ruthrof 2021, 6, 26, 130f., 188)

18 In declaring natural language “intersubjective from the very outset” (von vornherein intersubjektiv) Husserl is blunting the charge that phenomenology is guilty of claiming that linguistic meanings are to be located in the head. (Hua XVII, 8b-9a) Cf. Arkadiusz Chrudzimski in “Are Meanings in the Head? Ingarden’s Theory of Meaning”, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 30, 3 (1999): 306–326.

19 Paul Gyllenhammer’s paper “Three Dimensions of Objectivity in Husserl’s Account of Passive Synthesis” makes a useful contribution to answering the question “how intersubjective object-constitution is passively present in consciousness” by distinguishing three forms of passive synthesis: (1) a weak form limited by an “individual frame of reference”; (2) a strong version as part of “intersubjective” communication; and (3) a third option in the form of “cultural” objectivity. (Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 35, 2 (2004): 180–200) In habitual speech, the vast bulk of language use, Gyllenhammer’s third form is the one that best fits the description of LLC.