Steven Crowell at the Phenomenology Workshop

Steve Crowell gave a paper entitled ‘Making Meaning Thematic: Phenomenology, Normativity, and Transcendental Philosophy’. In it he identified the distinctive contribution phenomenology makes to the transcendental tradition inaugurated by Kant: its broadening of the scope of transcendental reflection from reflection on the conditions of possibility of experience to reflection on the question of how meaning or intelligibility itself is possible. Phenomenology rejects Kant’s narrow focus on conditions of possible knowledge, yet retains his concern with the normative: it investigates the conditions of possibility of all intentional phenomena.

According to Steve, phenomenology investigates how objects are given to consciousness as being such and such, that is, it investigates how an intentional relation between consciousness and objects is possible. This is a fundamentally normative relation. However, Steve argued against viewing the correlates of intentional acts (noema) as intentional objects intermediary between subjects and objects. They are rather to be viewed as the objects themselves in their various modes of ‘self-givenness’. So a table can be given in certain ways, that is, perceiving a table is a normative activity because possible perceptions of the table have certain valid conditions of possible satisfaction. One mode of givenness ‘implies’ another and the consciousness of such implications itself constitutes experience of the object given in these ways. Such norm-governed perceptions allow for valid and invalid claims to be made of an object of experience; a perception of a three dimensional object that does not fulfil the expectation that the object has a back – an expectation ‘implied’ by its appearing three-dimensionally – will not prove to be a ‘valid’ perception. The phenomenological reduction thus allows us to focus on such ‘meaning constituting’ norms operative in intentional attitudes.

Steve finished by bringing out how Heidegger gives the meaning constituting norms of intentional attitudes an existential twist. Heidegger does this by arguing that Dasein, as a bearer of intentionality, is so only because it is a locus of commitment, that is, a self understood as committed in some way or other to an understanding of being. This self understanding ‘as a project’ is for Heidegger the transcendental condition of possibility of all meaning. Other beings are thus only understood for Heidegger because Dasein has 'always already' committed itself to certain constitutive rules that govern the practices in which those beings are presented as something.

There was a lot of discussion, but here are the main points that came up. It was suggested that Steve might be unfairly representing Kant by arguing that the latter had no concern with intentional attitudes beyond the narrow scope of empirical knowledge. It was also questioned why phenomenology is to be preferred to Kant’s theoretical approach simply because it begins with what is given in consciousness. Another question concerned why we must see the perception of a table (for example) as normative. Finally, it was suggested that the idea that for Husserl the valid modes of presentation of an object are nothing more than the modes of givenness of the object itself, is suspect. For a ‘mode of presentation’ is a property of consciousness, not of objects.