HUSSERL’S SEMANTICS: MENDING HUSSERL WITH HUSSERL
HORST RUTHROFABSTRACT. The paper argues for a way of bringing Husserl’s semantics in Logical Investigations up to date by drawing on a variety of critical tools gleaned from his later writings. My argument proceeds in two steps. (1) I offer a summary of the main ingredients of Husserl’s theorization of natural language, with an emphasis on his description of linguistic meaning as a Platonic ideal species. (2) The paper gathers a number of concepts from Husserl’s later works up to Experience and Judgment for the kind of repair work that could make his semantics once more a competitive candidate in the arena of natural language semantics. I do so by reformulating Husserl’s approach in terms of a ‘semantics of imaginability’. pp. 11–41
Keywords: essentially occasional expressions, modality, non-verbal mental materials, non-essential typifications, imaginability, linguistic linkage compulsion
