Truth Within Phenomenological Speech

Abstract

The problem of truth within phenomenology is the problem of how we can mean anything after we have carried out Husserl’s transcendental reduction, and how we can verify our meanings. How can we talk philosophically after we suspend our natural assertion of the world as an assumed, real background of experience? Can we talk at all after we disengage this underlying belief which is the condition for all our speech about things in the world? Is there anything left to say, and if so, how are we to decide whether what is said is true or not? Within philosophy, within the transcendental reduction, do meaning and truth work the same way they do in ordinary, non-philosophical consciousness? To ask about philosophical discourse in Husserl is therefore to ask about the transcendental reduction, which we will interpret as Husserl’s way of showing how we can speak philosophically about consciousness, and how we can speak about the world from a philosophical point of view.