Thank you so much for all your feedback. I particularly found helpful Jose’s discussion on “reaching the object”
One of the problems I think Husserl has with ‘traditional’ two-place meaning is that while it starts with something objective, a mark or a sound, and reaches the subject, in a mental state, it never returns the subject to the referent of the name. At this point, many of his earlier criticisms of psychologism become operative.
Jose perspicuously captures Husserl’s project by showing how the objects are known and expressed through the experience of subjects, but that the process does not end with subjective perception. The problem with the putative understanding of sign-meaning is—as Jose aptly points out—that it never returns to the object itself and ends analysis at the level of subjectivity. Its is only by breaking through this barrier and extending experience and knowledge beyond the subject and finally to its referent that psychologism can be defeated. Rather then reducing the content of experience to its subjective meaning, Husserl wishes to highlight the objective side of meaning hitherto omitted from discourse.
In light of these observations I would like to reformulate my former tripartite distinction with what now appear to me to be 4 concrete moments within the unity of the phenomenological experience. The first such moment (a) consists in the sign, i.e. the physical sound-complex that initiates the process of cognition. Taking hold of the sign in consciousness propels one to the second moment (b) the indicative presentation. It is through the presentation of the sign the the object first shows forth and offers the first window into its “sense.” Through its particular mental states, the subject senses and perceives the various facts underlying the sign in all their empirical inexactness. While the psychologistic line of through would take leave of the phenomenal experience at this point, Husserl continues forward moving past the subjective side of meaning to now consider the objective side of the phenomenal encounter. The third moment constitutes the (c) meaningful expression, whereby the intention of the sign (with respect to its object) is now duly recognized. It is only at this stage that meaning (as it relates to the object) can be adequately conferred, and if the phenomenological unity is achieved, fulfilled by uniting sign and object through shared subjective-objective meaning. This last moment fulfills the meaning of the expression in representing the essence of its (d) object.
Four Moments of Phenomenological Experience
(a) (b) (c) (d)
Sign → indicative presentation → meaningful expression → object
[(I) → ] V → (V)N → N(I) → I
Second level represents Zilbermanian symbols of modal logic which basically conote the basic modalities of (V) hypothetical, (N) impearative, and (I) assertoric which roughly correlate to (V) sign, (N) meaning, (I) object.
