Wayne Martin at the Phenomenology Workshop

Wayne Martin gave a paper at the workshop entitled ‘Hermeneutic Conditions and Phenomenological Necessity’. In it he examined the logical form of the claims in Division I of Being and Time that purport to express necessary conditions of possibility of Dasein being the kind of being that it is. He did this by focussing on how we specify the semantics of the term Dasein; either extensionally or intensionally. According to an extensionalist semantics the meaning of the term is fixed by specifying its referents in terms of a coextensive term such as ‘human being’. This semantic approach faces the difficulty of justifying the inference from 'a is a human being' to 'All human beings are homogenous', if the move is to be made from the phenomenological description of particulars, to the universal generalizations that transcendental phenomenology propounds. According to an intensionalist semantics, the meaning of the term Dasein is fixed by a sense or implicit definition. This semantic approach has to justify the inference from ‘a is F’ to ‘All a’s are F’, that is, justify the belief that ‘a’ is a perfect exemplar of F.

In light of these difficulties Wayne proposed we fix the semantics of Dasein by adopting an ‘exemplar semantics’, whereby we fix the meaning of the term initially by pointing to a sample, rather like the way we fix the meaning of the natural kind term ‘Gold’. In the case of Dasein, we ourselves as (convinced) readers of Heidegger are the initial sample. It would then be a necessary truth that we as Heidegger’s readers are Dasein exemplars, and everything that pertains to our ontological constitution will be a necessary feature of Dasein. Anyone relevantly like us would then also necessarily possess the same ontological constitution.

It might be thought that exemplar semantics will not work in the context of transcendental phenomenology, because we still need a way of determining what counts as being ‘relevantly similar’ to the initial exemplar. Wayne suggested that we can do this if we remember that we identify an exemplar within a context of inquiry, which, in the case of Dasein, is the context of ontological inquiry.

The significant advantage of exemplarist semantics, according to Wayne, is that we don’t face the two problematic inferences that the extensionalist and intentionalist models faced. There is still however, a problem for the exemplarist approach; How do we distinguish the features that are part of the ontological character of Dasein, i.e. belong to Daseins necessarily? Wayne suggested this question does not now need to be answered by a necessity claim, but is rather an interpretative question about our ontological make-up.

A suggestion that came up in discussion was that perhaps Dasein is better individuated by (a not necessarily incompatible) indexicalist semantics? It was also suggested that Wayne was too quickly dismissing the intensionalist approach by focussing on empirical particulars rather than abstract universals as the referents of Dasein.

Another suggestion was that Heidegger is not interested in identifying necessary conditions simpliciter, but conditions that are necessary granted a certain context. Yet this suggestion was also questioned by others who complained that necessity relative to a context just ain’t necessity.