The Relevance of Nonsymbolic Cognition to Husserl's Fifth Meditation

Abstract

In his Cartesian Meditations at the outset of the Fifth Meditation, Edmund Husserl proposes to sketch an account of how the meaning "other person" comes to be bestowed on certain items encountered in the perceived surrounding world. As he states the matter, he proposes to "discover in what intentionalities, syntheses, motivations, the sense `other ego' becomes fashioned."1 An account of the constitution of such a sense is a necessary step in an account of how objects in the world come to have the sense "there for others." The latter demonstration is itself, of course, a necessary step in the larger phenomenological project of showing how the perceived world comes to have the sense it has in the natural attitude of everyday adult life. In introducing his projected account of sense constitution, Husserl presents it as an answer to the general charge that phenomenology entails transcendental solipsism. He judges, and rightly so, that the introduction of the sense "other" adds a dimension of meaning that converts the perceived world into a common world, with the result that all apparent support is withdrawn from the accusation that phenomenology is transcendental solipsism. Unfortunately, his placing of an allusion to solipsism at the beginning rather than at the conclusion of his account (or better still, in a footnote), has often led to a construal of that account as an attempt to answer the philosophical problem of solipsism. Such an interpretation is clearly mistaken. Sense constitution is an exercise in semantics, and not in ontology. Consequently, the account can hardly be intended as a refutation of solipsism, much less a refutation via a demonstration of the existence of other persons. Admittedly, the situation is somewhat apt to engender confusion. An account of semantic constitution traces out the nature of the evidential situation grounding the constituted sense, and hence closely parallels an epistemological account of knowledge constitution. In addition, Husserl claims in his discussion of skepticism in Ideas I that an appreciation of the evidential situation suffices to reveal "the countersense" committed by those skeptical theses that view essential peculiarities of evidence as deficiencies.2 As a result, it is inevitable that the account of semantic constitution should contain, implicitly at least, a rebuttal of certain solipsistic theses, namely those committing a countersense of the sort noted by Husserl. Be this as it may, the solipsistic theses affected could not include the classical solipsistic thesis that questions the existence of other minds, where "a mind"' has the sense of "a private world of representations." The reason is simply that the sense, "private world of representations," can only be a subsequent addition to the sense "other person" being constituted in Husserl's account, and hence a sense available for solipsistic maneuvers only on the later occasion of its constitution. The present essay proposes to answer two sorts of objections commonly raised against the constitution of the sense "other" sketched in the Fifth Meditation. One sort features the claim that the sense constituted in Husserl's account is not the genuine sense of "other subject"--that the proper sense includes essential dimensions ignored in the account, dimensions such as the person's social status and function,3 or the person's radical irreducibility to another person's possible acts of consciousness.4 The second sort of objection centers on the claim that the proposed derivation is circular, that is, that it must presuppose what it sets out to constitute. Here some elaboration is in order. Objections of the second sort readily grant that Husserl is right in his estimation of the nature of the task, that to avoid circularity the projected constitution of the sense "other subject" must begin at a semantic level that contains no trace of that sense--a level Husserl terms "the sphere of ownness. …