1

Der Gedanke, dieses seltsame Wesenaber er kommt uns nicht seltsam vor, wenn wir denken. Der Gedanke
kommt uns nicht geheimnisvoll vor, whrend wir denken, sondern nur, wenn wir gleichsam retrospektiv sagen:
Wie war das mglich? Wie war es mglich, da der Gedanke von diesem Gegenstand selbst handelte? Es scheint
uns, als htten wir mit ihm die Realitt eingefangen.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
1


1. The space of reasons
2
is a provocative metaphor for thinking about the nature of
meaning: What belongs in that space and how does it get there? What, if anything, constrains it
from the outside? How is it connected to the world? Handling these problems well requires an
adequate grasp of the relationship between perception and thought. One question of particular
importance is: how do looks get their logic? As Wittgenstein observes, the link between seeing
and saying does not ordinarily strike us, yet it tends to resist philosophical analysis.
John McDowell is perhaps the most distinguished analytic philosopher working on these
questions. His work on one side tries avoid what Wilfrid Sellars named The Myth of the
Given, and its nave foundationalism. The idea of the Myth, as McDowell puts it, is the idea
that sensibility by itself could make things available for the sort of cognition that draws on the
subjects rational powers.
3
On the other hand, McDowell wants to avoid coherentism, a
variation on the theme of idealism. In this essay I assess McDowells attempt to achieve this
balancing act, taking Edmund Husserls Logical Investigations as a guide. Husserl handles the

1
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. Elizabeth Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker, and
Joachim Schulte (Alden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 428. A thoughtwhat a strange thing!but it does not
strike us as strange when we are thinking. A thought does not strike us as mysterious while we are thinking, but only
when we say, as it were retrospectively, How was that possible? How was it possible for a thought to deal with this
very object? It seems to us as if we had captured reality with the thought.

2
Wilfrid Sellars coined this phrase. Steven Galt Crowell writes that this metaphor signal[s] an interest in
distinguishing between explanations that also provide justifications (reasons) and those that do not (causes). Cf.
Steven Galt Crowell, Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning: Paths Toward Transcendental
Phenomenology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 3. Crowells treatment is more influential on
my essay than the footnotes testify. He links the space of reasons to Wittgenstein (logical space), early neo-Kantians
(Geltungsbereich), and Husserl and Heidegger (roughly, transcendental consciousness or world). His work is a
valuable contribution towards thinking about the convergences and divergences between analytic and
phenomenological approaches in a fruitful way.

3
John McDowell, Avoiding the Myth of the Given, Having the World in View: Essays on Kant, Hegel,
and Sellars (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 257.
2
same issues that trouble McDowell, but his phenomenological approach affords him the
resources for rethinking the entire problematic of logic and looks.
4

The paper is divided in the following manner: I first recount briefly the historical context
of Wilfrid Sellarss essay Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind and his famous argument
against the Myth ( 2). Next, I analyze one of McDowells recent essays, Avoiding the Myth of
the Given, in which he develops a more nuanced position than the one he held in Mind and
World.
5
Attending to these nuances will uncover the affinity between his concerns and the issues
in Logical Investigations, while also establishing differences in the way Husserl and McDowell
formulate and approach the problem ( 3-5). Then I turn directly to Husserl. I argue that his
unique diagnosis of the problem of seeing and saying allows him to expand the too-narrow
notion of intuition in modern epistemology, and to relieve judgment of its undue burden in the
Kantian paradigm ( 6-7). My thesis is that Husserls notion of categorial intuition allows him
to account for the possibility of formally saturated seeing, so that it is the identity of the things
themselves, and not the synthetic effort of judgment, which constitutes the bridge between seeing
and saying, between looks and their logic.

2. Both Gottlob Frege and Edmund Husserl, each a distinguished mathematician in his own
right, were interested in the issue of the normative status of logic. They argued that the
intellectual domain, the space of reasons ruled by logic, cannot coherently be sunk into the

4
Crowell, The Space of Meaning, 15. Crowell makes a similar point in comparing McDowell to the neo-
Kantian Emil Lask: For both, then, epistemological dilemmas are to be overcome through the recognition that
meaning spans the traditional divide between perception and conception. Yet to work out the difficulties facing such
a view requires a phenomenological perspective that remains largely absent in both Lask and McDowell.

5
John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).

3
merely psychological.
6
Despite their radically divergent histories, the analytic and continental
schools of thoughtor, at least their respective foundershad a common enemy in
psychologism, at the beginning.
Still, their differences should not be downplayed. While Husserl directly attacks the
epistemology motivating psychologism, Frege tends to avoid epistemology altogether.
7
Since
Frege ignores modern empiricism, rather than uprooting it, the analytic philosophy following
him grew some rotten branches, particularly the Vienna Circle and logical positivism. The core
tenet of logical positivism is its verificationism, which states, roughly, that any meaningful
proposition requires the reduction of its content to observational reports.
8
In other words, all
purportedly logical sayings must reduce to seeings. But this idea raises a problem: if seeing that
something is the case (i.e. seeing infused with logic) is reducible to a psychological phenomena
(seeing as an impingement of raw data on the eyes), then how can it be the foundation for
science, or for the normative life of the mind at all? Are we then back to psychologism?
9

Wilfrid Sellars offers a forceful exposition of this problem in Empiricism and the
Philosophy of Mind.
10
The title of his seminal essay connotes a reckoning; he forces the

6
Cf. Edmund Husserl, Prolegomena of Pure Logic in Logical Investigations Vol. 1, trans. J.N. Findlay
(London: Routledge, 2001). The sinking formulation here comes from one of Robert Sokolowskis lectures. For a
good treatment of Frege and psychologism, cf. Psychologism and Logical Analysis, in Richard Cobb-Stevens,
Husserl and Analytic Philosophy (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990), 7-27.

7
Cobb-Stevens, Husserl and Analytic Philosophy, 9. Husserl derive[s his] position from the principle of
intentionality, arguing that the empiricist account of mind fails to distinguish between mental processes and their
intentional accusatives, but Frege bases his argument entirely on the claim that meanings have nothing
psychological whatever about them. Frege rules out description because he thinks it amounts to psychologism.

8
Cf. A.J. Ayer ed., Logical Positivism (New York: The Free Press, 1959), 11: the meaning of a
proposition is its method of verification. Cf. also several essays in this collection, particularly the ones by Moritz
Schlick and Rudolf Carnap.

9
Willard Quine famously opted for the psychologizing of knowledge. Cf. Willard Quine, Epistemology
Naturalized, Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 69-90.

10
William DeVries and Timm Tripplett eds., Knowledge, Mind, and the Given: Reading Wilfrid Sellarss
Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2000).
4
analytic tradition to come to terms with its troubled empiricist past.
11
Sellars criticizes the
chimerical notion of sense-data that is central to empiricism. He thinks it is absurd that a
supposedly brute sense is at the same time a data, something given to the knower that figures
into propositional claims.
12
Sense-data is a chimera because it has a sensation for a body but a
proposition for a head.
This incoherent conception of sense-data is the reason why Sellars thinks the Given is a
Myth. He argues as follows: If sense-data is to function as the foundation of our knowledge
claimsclaims that place us in the space of reasonsthen it must first of all be (a) epistemically
independent, not founded on other knowledge claims; and (b) epistemically efficacious, i.e.,
capable of justifying other claims in the space of reasons. If sense-data were both (a) and (b),
then it would truly constitute a Given, and Sellarss attack would be unwarranted. But, this
Given must be either (c) propositional, or (d) non-propositional. If it is (c) then it cannot be (a),
and if it is (d) then it cannot be (b).
13
That is to say, sense-data cannot be both an independent,
pure seeing, without logical form, and a justificatory (efficacious) seeing, which is always
already propositionally structured. The thought that sense-data could perform this double duty is
only a myth of the empiricist tradition. Sensory experiences, unlike judgments, do not have a
propositional form. Looks do not come prepackaged with logic. This Sellarsian framework sets
the stage for McDowell.



11
There is not a consensus on Sellarss view of empiricism. Robert Brandom thinks he pronounced it to be
anathema, while McDowell holds that Sellars only wanted to reform it. Cf. Why is Sellarss Essay Called
Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind? in McDowell, Having the World in View, 221-24.

12
Wilfrid Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, 7.

13
DeVries and Tripplett, Knowledge, Mind, and the Given, xxx-xxxii. My own formulation of the argument
is greatly indebted to the authors observation that the tension between epistemic independence and propositional
form is the crux of Sellarss attack on the Given.
5
3. One of John McDowells goals in his book Mind and World is to provide an adequate
account of the way concepts mediate the relation between minds and the world,
14
or, to do
epistemology without falling into the Myth. We are tempted by the Given, he says, because we
want reality to have some bearing or constraint on our thought; we do not want the operations
of spontaneity, the faculty of understanding, to amount to nothing more than frictionless
spinning in a void.
15
McDowell offers a neat summary of the dilemma:
[We have] a tendency to oscillate between a pair of unsatisfying positions: on the one
side a coherentism that threatens to disconnect thought from reality, and on the other side
a vain appeal to the Given, in the sense of bare presences that are supposed to constitute
the ultimate grounds of empirical judgments. I suggested that in order to escape the
oscillation, we need to recognize that experiences themselves are states or occurrences
that inextricably combine receptivity and spontaneity.
16


The words receptive and spontaneous belong the philosophical vocabulary of Immanuel
Kant: he characterizes intuition or sensibility (the power of sensation) as the receptive faculty,
and thinking or understanding (the power of discursivity) as the spontaneous faculty. McDowell
avoids the Myth by arguing that, in experience, spontaneity is inextricably implicated in
deliverances of receptivity.
17
The idea that we could separate the receptivity of seeing from the
spontaneity of saying in the first place is the Myth of the Given. As Kant writes, Thoughts
without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind.
18

Before looking more closely at McDowells proposal, it is worth noting that Husserl sees
his work in the Logical Investigations as a corrective to this vague Kantian paradigm:

14
John McDowell, Mind and World, 3.

15
Ibid., 11. McDowell attributes the coherentist position to Donald Davidson.

16
Ibid., 24.

17
Ibid., 40-41. He continues: We must not suppose that receptivity makes an even notionally separable
contribution to its co-operation with spontaneity.

18
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Smith (Macmillan: London, 1929), A51/B75.
6
The old epistemological contrast between sensibility and understanding achieves a much-
needed clarity through a distinction between straightforward or sensuous, and founded or
categorial intuition. The same is true of the contrast between thinking and seeing
(intuiting), which confuses philosophical parlance by confounding the relations of
signification to fulfilling intuition, on the one hand, with the relations of sensuous and
categorial acts, on the other.
19


Husserl argues that the dualistic scheme of understanding and sensibility is not the right
distinction, and neither is the dualism between thought and intuition. The old epistemological
contrast, which we find in Kant but which has its roots in empiricism, holds that signitive
intending is to intuitive intending as sensuous acts are to categorial acts. The problem with this
parallelism according to Husserl is that it sets up a contrast between the perceptual domain and
the formal one.
20
And this contrast has two infelicitous consequences. First of all, intuition is
construed too narrowly, in too close of a relationship to the signitive act. That is why in the First
Investigation Husserl establishes that the meaning a word expresses is constituted by a signitive
act, which expresses not a concept, but rather the content of the fulfilled act of intuition. Thus
meaning is not reducible to perception, nor is perception reducible to meaning.
21
Identifying the
signitive with the sensuous leads to the error of reducing meaning to perception, or vice-versa.
Instead, the signitive act and the intuitive act are distinct.
The second infelicitous consequence of the Kantian parallelism is that it denies the
capacity for categorial intuition, and therefore for formal saturation. For Kant and McDowell,
judgment bears the entire burden of categoriality. One of Husserls tasks in Investigation VI is to
redirect this emphasis on judgment by showing how we can categorial intuit things. We might

19
Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations Vol. II, trans. J.N. Findlay (London: Routledge, 2001), 186. For
citations of this text I will provide the roman numeral of the investigation followed by the paragraph number(s) and
pages from this edition.

20
I first grasped this improper parallelism thanks to Robert Sokolowskis lecture notes on Husserls
Logical Investigations.

21
Husserl, VI, 1-4. ###-###.
7
be tempted to think that categorial intuition is just as much of a chimera as the sense-data of
givenism, since it combines the logical domain (categorial) with the looking domain (intuition).
This view is wrong in a very interesting way, but for now let us keep it open as a possible
objection while we return to McDowells solution to the link between seeing and saying.

4. Although Kant uses the privative language of blindness and emptiness, we can articulate
his dictum in two positive theses:
Formal Imposition Thesis: Intuitions see only with concepts.
Material Saturation Thesis: Thoughts are filled only with content.
McDowell spends most of his energy in Mind and World defending the formal imposition thesis,
arguing that the spontaneity of understanding, and the concepts it generates, must be at work all
the way out, so to speak. Concepts have an unbounded role to play in cognition and even in
perception.
22
The advantage of the formal imposition thesis is that it avoids the Myth by
dispatching the notion that intuition could be non-conceptual.
Now the obvious objection to the formal imposition thesis is that it slippers the slope
toward the conflation of concepts and content. That is why McDowell needs the material
saturation thesis if he wishes to avoid coherentism, the position that thinking has no connection
to the world, no constraint from the outside. While defending the material saturation thesis,
McDowell offers a distinction to preserve the gap between thought and content:
Thought can mean the act of thinking; but it can also mean the content of a piece of
thinking: what someone thinks. Now if we are to give due acknowledgement to the
independence of reality, what we need is a constraint from outside thinking and judging,
our exercises of spontaneity. The constraint does not need to be from outside thinkable
contents.
23


22
McDowell, Mind and World, Lecture II: The Unboundedness of the Conceptual, 24-45.

23
Ibid., 28. McDowells italics.
8

With this distinction McDowell intends to dispel some of the ambiguities in the material
saturation thesis. On the one hand, thought refers to thinking, the agents act. Alternatively,
thought refers to the content, the object of the agents act. We can envision McDowell drawing
the boundaries between thought-as-act and thought-as-content in a way apparently avoids
givenism as well as coherentism:
The Givenist View: [Act] [Content] [Reality]
McDowells View: [Act] [Content/Reality]
The Coherentist View: [Act/Content]
24

When McDowell says there is nothing outside thought, he does not mean there is nothing outside
the act of thinking, but that there is nothing outside the content of the thought. The coherentist
view denies the material saturation thesis (so reality gets swallowed by thinking), while the
givenist view denies the formal imposition thesis (so reality becomes opaque, content-less). With
his own view, McDowell tries to make good on both sides of the Kantian dictum: the content of
thought ensures its fulfillment, its commerce with the world, while the unbounded conceptual
reaches all the way into the world, via those thinkable (conceptual) contents.

5. McDowell had wondered in Mind and World, Why can we not acknowledge that the
relations between experience and judgments have to be rational, and therefore within the scope
of spontaneity, without being thereby committed to a concession about experience itself?
25
This

24
A givenist is one who endorses the Myth. There is a interesting parallel between these three views and
the three conceptions of constitution as treated by John Haugeland: counting-as (givenism), creating
(coherentism), and letting-be (transcendentalism). Haugeland endorses the letting-be view of constitution,
which places him in the phenomenological camp with the likes Heidegger, although he also attributes that view to
Kant. Cf. John Haugeland, Truth and Rule-Following, in Having Thought: Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 305-360.

25
McDowell, Mind and World, 53N7.
9
question was relegated to the footnotes in those lectures, but in his essay Avoiding the Myth
McDowell addresses some ambiguities in the notion of content to try to preserve the autonomy
of both experience and judgment while trying to preserve a connection between them. While he
still holds the basic thesis from Mind and Worldthat experience is the actualization of
conceptual capacities in receptivityMcDowell no longer endorses the uniformity of content: I
used to assume that to conceive experiences as actualizations of conceptual capacities, we would
need to credit experiences with propositional content, the sort of content judgments have.
26
The
uniformity of content thesis holds that all content is discursive or propositional. McDowell now
says, what we need is a concept of content that is not propositional but intuitional.
27
This is an
intriguing proposal, but is it a live option in Kantianism? Propositional contents are discursive,
and thus legitimate dwellers in the space of reasons. Intuitional content, on the other hand, is
non-propositional and thus non-discursive. What, then, makes propositional and intuitional
contents species of the same genus?
McDowells answer is that content is conceptual. On his position, seeing paper-being-
white or gold-being-yellow, or, to use Sokolowskis preferred example, car-being-dented, are
meaningful only because and insofar as we form the requisite judgment: The paper is white,
The car is dented, etc.
28
In judging we say that such-and-such is the case, and thus in
experience we see that things are thus-and-so. Saying that belongs to understanding, which is
the faculty of judgment. Seeing that belongs to the receptivity of intuition, but it gets its
content from its propositional form, indicated by the word that. McDowell writes, We should

26
McDowell, Avoiding the Myth, 258.

27
Ibid., 260.

28
I borrow the examples of white paper and yellow gold from Husserls Logical Investigations, and the
dented car example from Robert Sokolowskis class lectures.

10
center our idea of the conceptual on the content of discursive activity. Now, intuiting is not
discursive, even in the extended sense in which judging is. Discursive content is articulated.
Intuitional content is not.
29
We can, in other words, only have meaningful content in intuiting
the white paper, because we can form the judgment: the paper is white.
The direction of priority between saying and seeing indicates a primacy of judgment in
Kant and McDowell: understanding provides the unity of content in propositions and in
intuitions.
30
Judgment is the fulcrum of all knowledge, and all content is conceptual. This
conclusion is interesting, because while McDowell agrees with Husserl in recognizing the need
for intuitional in addition to propositional content, he takes this insight in the opposite direction:
It is right to say the content unified in intuitions is of the same kind as the content unified
in judgments: that is, conceptual content. We could not have intuitions, with their specific
form of unity, if we could not make judgments, with their corresponding forms of unity.
We can even say that the unity-providing function is essentially a faculty for discursive
activity, a power to judge. But its operation in providing for the unity of intuitions is not
itself a case of discursive activity.
31


McDowell locates the unity of truth in judgment. According to this view, the distinguishing mark
of content is that it is conceptual, for, otherwise, the only live option seems to be givenism. The
only option left, given the formal imposition and the material saturation thesis, is that
understanding (the discursive faculty), has the power of judgment, which provides the unity of
the content in its propositional and its intuitional varieties. McDowell and Kant have no formal
saturation thesis. Thus, the primacy of judgment in their philosophy leads to the view that we
cannot categorially intuit things.

29
Ibid., 262.

30
McDowell, Avoiding the Myth, 260. McDowell quotes Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A79/B104-5:
The same function which gives unity to the various representations in a judgment also gives unity to the mere
synthesis of various representations in an intuition; and this unity, in its most general expression, we entitle the pure
concepts of the understanding.

31
Ibid., 264. My italics.
11
In short, McDowell reverses the priority of saying and seeing. He argues: if we didnt
have the logical concept, we could not find the thing when we look in the world. This thesis is a
reversal of Husserls position, as we will now see. He argues precisely the opposite: we lean on
the unity given in perception in order to articulate the object, to clothe it with syntax and
welcome it inside the space of reasons.
32
Attending to this difference is important, because critics
of Husserl often accuse him of trying to pull off a Cartesian project, building outward from mind
to world. Nothing could be further from the truth.

6. As I mentioned earlier (3), Husserl thought the Kantian paradigm was confused because
it arranged a parallel between the formal domain and the perceptual domain. The dominant
question in that paradigm is: How is logic (saying) imposed on looks (seeing)? Husserl asks a
different question. Following up on the results established in LI I, he notes that when we come to
the question of what sorts of acts that can [ . . . ] function in meaning we face a problem:
But when we seek to tackle this question we at once encounter [ . . . ] the relation
between meaning-intention and meaning-fulfillment, or to speak traditionally, and in fact
ambiguously, the relation between concept and thought on the one hand, understood
as mere meaning without intuitive fulfillment, and corresponding intuition, on the
other.
33


In LI I, Husserl replaced talk of concepts with a treatment of the signitive intention that
constitutes an act of meaning. Correspondingly, in LI VI he widens the notion of intuition,
addressing it as a fulfilling act, which presents a presence that fills (or contradicts) what the
signitive act absently expressed. Husserl replaces the Kantian dichotomy of concept/thought
and intuition with the contrast between meaning-intention and meaning-fulfillment. His
answer to the question about how looks get their logic lurks in his phenomenological description

32
Husserl, VI : the name seems to clothe the thing, like a garment ###.

33
Edmund Husserl, VI, 184.
12
of the transition from empty to filled intending, and then from the fulfillment of sensuous
intuition to the fulfillment of categorial intuition.
In the sixth chapter of LI VI, Sensuous and Categorial Intuitions, Husserl tries to work
out this transition: if words clothe the thing, like a garment, that is, if they find fulfillment in a
percept, then what does syntax clothe? Or, in Husserls words, What may and can furnish
fulfillment for those aspects of meaning which make up propositional form as such, the aspects
of categorial form to which, e.g., the copula belongs?
34
How is it that the whole sense of the
statement finds fulfillment through our underlying percept,
35
syntax and all?
I have argued so far that Husserl moves out of the Kantian paradigm by drawing a
distinction between sensuous and categorial acts, and their corresponding fulfillments. The
difference between sensuous and categorial intuition for Husserl is that sensuous intuition
directly gives the intended object, but without an act of identification.
36
There is performed
identification without articulated identity.
37
In the distinction between unthematized and
articulated identity, Husserl prepares the grounds for widening the notion of intuition: If we are
asked what it means to say that categorially structured meanings find fulfillment, confirm
themselves in perception, we can be reply: it means only that they relate to the object itself in its
categorial structure.
38
This distinction is important because the categorial aspect of the
intending does not relate to the bare object of sense-perception but rather to the categorial

34
Husserl, Logical Investigations, 271.

35
Ibid., 271.

36
Ibid., 285.

37
Ibid., 285. An act means something, an act of identification means identity, presents it. In our case [the
case of sense-perception] an act an identification is performed, but no identity is meant.

38
Husserl, Logical Investigations, 280.

13
presentation of the object. At the same time, the categorial structure belongs to the object itself,
not to the discursive imposition of judgment.
39

This point returns us to the possible objection that Husserl is trafficking with the Myth. It
is not surprising that the notion of categorial intuition would make an anti-givenist like
McDowell suspicious. Its very name (categorial intuition) combines the formal and perceptual
domains, transgressing a line that forms the very basis of Kants philosophy.
Yet Husserl manifests his own distaste for the givenist position throughout the Sixth
Investigation. He does not think it is true that saying collapses into seeing, or that logic is
ontologically identical to descriptions, which in turn are reducible to looks. He insists on the
falsity of the claim that meaning has its seat in perception,
40
and argues the concept sensuous
object (real object) cannot arise through reflection on perception, since this could only yield us
the concept perception.
41
Husserl speaks here very much in the spirit of an anti-givenist; he is
aware of the contribution of subjectivity to knowing, and consequently of the fact that
syntactically articulated (logical) statements do not find a corresponding percept in mere
sensation.
But now the real difference between McDowells and Husserls anti-givenism emerges.
Husserls response to psychologism, as we saw earlier ( 2), is not to retreat to logical analysis,
but rather to widen the notion of intuition. It is true, Husserl says, that we perceive states-of-
affairsbut this perception is not the kind that the givenists suppose and the anti-givenists
suspect: As the sensible object stands to sense-perception so the state of affairs stands to the

39
Husserl, Logical Investigations, 289: The working of synthetic thought, of intellection, has done
something to [the presentations], has shaped them anew, although, being a categorial function, it has done this in
categorial fashion, so that the sensuous content of the apparent object has not been altered. The object does not
appear before us with new real (realen) properties; it stands before us as this same object, but in a new manner.

40
Husserl, Investigation VI, 272.

41
Husserl, Investigation VI, 279.
14
becoming aware in which it is (more or less adequately) givenwe should like to say simply:
so the state of affairs stands to the perception of it.
42
Husserl avoids the Myth of the Given
because he holds that states-of-affairs are not sensuously intuited. Rather, they are categorically
intuited. Categorial intuition sets up the articulation of the thing, which before we had just
straightforwardly (sensuously) perceived. Thus, identity is not imposed on objects of perception
by the synthetic unifying work of the understanding; it is articulated by the subject but from the
thing, in such a way that the things categorial structure emerges: Our act of identification is in
sober fact a new awareness of objectivity, which causes a new object to appear to us, an object
that can only be apprehended or given in its very selfhood in a founded act of this sort.
43

Husserl draws attention to the fact that the categorial act gives a new object, because it has
thematized the objects identity, but also that this new object does not change the object of mere
sense-perception; rather, it is founded upon it.
44

Once this insight is clear, we have gone beyond Kants axiom: it is no longer a
parallelism between the meaning-intentions of expressions and the mere percepts which
correspond to them: it is a parallelism between meaning-intentions and the above mentioned
perceptually founded acts.
45
The idea is that we have a fulfillment of intention already in
perceptions sensuous presentation, and categorial intuition is founded on this pre-categorial
intuition. The mark of categoriality is articulation; it thematizes the identity of the object.
46

That categorial acts are founded acts is a crucial feature in Husserls account of link

42
Husserl, Logical Investigations, 279.

43
Husserl, Logical Investigations, 285.

44
Founded acts are acts that cannot take place without an anchoring, founding act.

45
Husserl, Logical Investigations VI, 273.

46
Thank you to Dr. Michele Averchi for helping me on this point. Cf. Robert Sokolowski.

15
between seeing and saying: the categorial intuition sets up an object prepped for predication but
founded on the sensuous percept. Therefore syntax, the syncategorematical components of
sentences, also find fulfillment in perception, taken in the wider sense. The widening of intuition
makes the work of putting judgment in its placethe second taskmuch easier.

7. In order to destroy the judgment paradigm in Kantianism, Husserl extends the logic of the
argument against the Givenno state-of-affairs from sensation or reflection upon itto the
phenomenon of judgment as well:
As the concept Sensuous Object (Real Object) cannot arise through reflection upon
perception, since this could only yield us the concept Perception (or a concept of certain
real constituents of Perception), the concept of state of affairs cannot arise of reflection
on judgments, since this could only yield us concepts of judgments or of real constituents
of judgments.
47


Husserl reasons that, just as reflection on mere sensation could not yield its proper object, so a
reflection on judgment could not yield the proper object of a judgment (state-of-affairs) either.
He flips the anti-givenist logic against the anti-givenist. The givenists suppose that syntax finds
fulfillment when we reflect on our sensations, and Sellars and McDowell rightly note that such a
fruit of reflection is incoherent. But, Husserl argues, it is also incoherent to suppose that a
reflection on our judgments yields the concept state-of-affairs. Syntax finds fulfillment while
we are world-directed, before we reflect on our acts. In that way, categorial structure is not the
outcome of judgment; it is the condition of the possibility of judgment.
We can return to our examples to make sense of this move. For Husserl, gold-being-
yellow and car-being-dented are manifested to us. They found the articulation of the
sentences The gold is yellow or the car is dented. In saying this, Husserl admits Kant is both
on and off target: being can only be apprehended through judging, but this does not at all mean

47
Husserl, Logical, 279.
16
that the concept of being must be arrived at through reflection on certain judgments.
48
Kant is
on target in trying to accommodate the contribution of the knower, but in focusing on the acts of
the knowerbetter, in not recognizing them as intentional (world-directed) actsKant
precludes the possibility of manifestation; all the work belongs to the knower. Judgment,
however, is not the wellspring of identity, and therefore cannot be the locus of truth.
49
Being,
identity, and truth are experienced, and only on that ground is any kind of judgment possible.
Husserl distributes the work of knowing between the knower and the known.
Husserls big target is not Kant but reflective epistemology itself, the view that the
logical categories such as being and non-being, unity, plurality, totality, number, ground,
consequence etc. arise through reflection upon certain mental acts, and so fall in the sphere of
inner sense, of inner perception.
50
The common error of the empiricists and Kant is that they
place all the burden of knowing on reflection, whether the reflection targets the material
saturation (seeing) or the formal imposition (saying) of our knowledge. Husserl attributes this
reflexitivity to epistemological empiricists, especially Locke,
51
but the turn also is the source of
the undue burden on judgment in Kants philosophy. Husserl provides a nice dictum to counter
the Kantian view:
Not in reflection upon judgments, nor even [in reflection] upon fulfillments of judgments,
but the fulfillments themselves lies the true source of the concepts state-of-affairs and
being (in the copulative sense). Not in these acts as objects, but in the objects of these
acts, do we have the abstractive basis which enables us to realize the concepts in

48
Husserl, Logical Investigations VI, 279.

49
Heidegger capitalizes on this coup detat of judgment, when he argues that the apophantical as is
founded on the hermeneutical as. Cf. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward
Robinson (New York: Harper, 1962), 31-33.

50
Husserl, Logical Investigations, 278.

51
Where does Husserl talk about Locke?

17
question.
52


Husserls focus on intentionality, the directedness of our acts towards objects, allows him to
overcome reflective epistemology, by shifting the focus away from acts as objects, and towards
the objects of those acts.
Robert Sokolowski has a good treatment of the kind of philosophical work that Husserl
has made possible with this critique of reflective epistemology. He writes that we must guard
against what we could call the bubble theory of judgment, which takes facts and judgments as
two separate arrangements subsequently united in the mind. While it is true that facts are not
like vegetables just waiting to be picked (that is the Givenism error), it is also true that judgments
are not an arsenal of propositions ready for employment in our mental cabinet (that is the
Kantian error). In bubble theory, [the judgmental] domain is like the bubble of discourse in
comic strips, and our misleading picture would take the bubble of discourse as a mundane part
of the world around the comic strip characters.
53
Viewed this way, judgment tends to be taken
as the locus of the achievement of truth, rather than as a reflection upon achieved truth.
Consequently we assume either that a judgment is the same thing as a fact intended in the
absence of its perceptual ingredients,
54
which is roughly what the Vienna Circle held, or,
alternatively, that it is the same thing as categorial articulation, rather then categorial
articulation which is taken as supposed.
55
The second error is the downfall of Kants axiom and
McDowells proposal. They collapse what Sokolowski calls the fact as registered and the

52
Husserl, Logical Investigations VI, 279 (44).

53
Robert Sokolowski, Husserlian Meditations, 43.

54
Sokolowski, Meditations, 47.

55
Ibid., 49.

18
judgment, or, the fact as supposed.
56
Collapsing these two moments of the fact precludes the
possibility of categorial intuition, and opens up a gap between the mind and the world that
generates reflective epistemology in the first place.
57

Husserls notion of categorial intuition thus relieves the undue burden Kant and
McDowell place on judgment. As human beings we do not externally impose logical binders on
opaque data of sensibility. Instead we have the possibility to (categorically) articulate the
(categorial) structure that belongs to the manifestation of things. This is another way of saying
correct question to ask is not about the connection between the domain of perception and the
domain of logic or form, but rather about the correlation between formal meaning and formal
saturation.
58
Husserl begins with the fulfillment of an intuition in sense-perception. He then asks
how fulfillment works in cases where categoriality, and therefore logic, is involved with looks.
Husserls notion of categoriality allows him to accomplish the two-fold task of widening
intuition and putting judgment in its proper place.

8. I began the essay with a quote from Wittgenstein. His question about the possibility of
thought capturing reality is a question about constitution, or as Haugeland says, making sense of
things.
59
We saw that McDowells Kantian axiom for dealing with constitution is thoughts
without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind. Husserls own axiom is Not
in these acts as objects, but in the objects of these acts, do we have the abstractive basis which

56
Ibid., 52.

57
Ibid., 53. Epistemologies sometimes consider these two states as independent wholesas pieces instead
of moments. Then they ask how one of these pieces can be made to match the other: how can propositions
or judgments or opinions be made to fit facts or states of affairs or things? How can a whole in the mind
be made to match a whole in the world? They cannot this question, and so the insoluble problem of
knowledge arises.

58
Sokolowski makes this point in his lecture notes on Husserl. Unpublished transcript, 54.

59
John Haugeland, Truth and Rule-Following, 353.
19
enables us to realize the concepts in question. Husserls approach lets him formulate the notion
of categorial intuition, and therefore the thesis of formal saturation, which can find no place in
the Kantian dichotomy of formal imposition and material saturation. Kants axiom was
influential in helping us overcome the Myth of the Given; since intuitions without concepts are
blind, we cannot assume that a sense-perception will give us an articulated object. But Husserls
account of the givenness of objects, and the requisite act of the subject to let those objects, be
fills in a lacuna overlooked in Kant: since thoughts without content are empty, we cannot assume
that a judgment gives us an articulated object either. This final point determines the differing
solutions to the problem of seeing and saying in Husserl and McDowell (our Kantian
representative): for McDowell, the unity of experience must be provided, imposed, by the
synthetic-spontaneous activity of understanding. Husserl thinks instead that the acts by which
identity is given (both the unthematized kind in straightforward perception, and articulated kind
in categorial intuition) need to be phenomenologically described. Husserl recognizes that
judgment is the wrong place to look for the identity of an object or even the unity of a state-of-
affairs.








Bilbiography
20
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