Volume 2013, Issue 194 - Semiotics of the ideal: Ideality between reality and fiction Semiotics and ontology: Roman Ingarden

Abstract objects are widely held to pose a formidable epistemological challenge. It has seemed mysterious to many how we can have access to such strange and intangible entities. The article considers five influential ways to meet the challenge: Transcendental arguments, the indispensability argument, insisting that we just are able to grasp abstract objects and that no further explanation is needed, abstractionist accounts, and ontological reduction. None of these approaches is by itself sufficient or completely convincing, but together they make out a strong cumulative case for the accessibility of abstract objects.

The paper takes its departure from Ingarden's distinctions between four different main modes of being: absolute, extratemporal, real, and purely intentional. It introduces a distinction between two kinds of ideal entities: impurely ideal and purely ideal. Of the former kind are universals, and of the latter numbers; Ingarden regards both as existing in the extratemporal mode. It is then discussed whether Ingarden, and many others, has fallen prey to a mode illusion; and that, in fact, the impurely ideal entities exist in the real mode and the purely ideal in the purely intentional mode of being. The answers are weakly affirmative. On these presuppositions a concept of “mixed intentional object” is introduced. It seems to be of importance for how to understand numerical scales and the development of science.

How is linguistic communication possible? How do we come to share the same meanings of words and utterances? One classical position holds that human beings share a transcendental “platonic” ideality independent of individual cognition and language use (Frege 1948). Another stresses immanent linguistic relations (Saussure 1959), and yet another basic embodied structures as the ground for invariant aspects of meaning (Lakoff and Johnson 1999). Here we propose an alternative account in which the possibility for sharing meaning is motivated by four sources of structural stability: 1) the physical constraints and affordances of our surrounding material environment, 2) biological constraints of our human bodies, 3) social normative constraints of culture and society, and 4) the local history of social interactions. These structures and constraints interact in dynamical ways in actual language usage situations: local dialogical and social dynamics motivate and stabilize the profiling of a conceptual space already highly structured by our shared biology, culture, and environment. We will substantiate this perspective with reference to recent studies in experimental pragmatics and semiotics in which participants interact linguistically to solve cooperative tasks. Three main cases will be considered: The dynamic grounding of linguistic categories, the construction of conceptual models to relate entities in a scene, and the construction of shared conceptual scales for assessing and appraising subjective experiences.

A putative example (not Kant-style) of the “synthetic a priori” is examined with a view to, not establishing whether or not it truly belongs to that category but to drawing a philosophical lesson from the fact that it, or a similar proposition, is no longer indisputably empirically true. The example is “No surface is at the same time and for the same observer red all over and green.” An example is provided of how philosophy could deal with such recalcitrant evidence as may crop up and contradict such seemingly self-evident “synthetic a priori.”

The aim of this paper is to make a concise presentation and comparison of classical anti-psychologism in the semiotics of Peirce and Husserl in order to actualize anti-psychologism for current semiotic studies. A reason why this seems again necessary is the introduction of cognitive science and the neurosciences in semiotics. This is not to claim that this development necessarily leads to psychologism. The important study of the relations between semiotics and cognition and the many investigations of how the brain and mind process sign use form central and important parts of actual semiotics; yet, the oblivion of anti-psychologism may, in some cases, lead researchers to assume untenable dreams of the complete reduction of things semiotic to psychology, thereby unknowingly repeating late nineteenth century cul-de-sacs of psychologism and leading to erroneous or exaggerated interpretations of experimental findings.

I argue that we can clarify an important form of focalization or narrative perspective by the structure of perspective in sensory imagination. Understanding focalization in this way enables us to see why one particular form of focalization has to do with the representation of perceptual perspective in the narrative world, and to explain why there is a strict functional distinction between voice and perceptual focalization, why all forms of perceptual focalization are internal to the world of the narrated events, and why this does not prevent the narrator from “seeing” what is happening in the narrated world. Explaining perceptual focalization as a material counterpart of the perspective in sensory imagination enables us to see the role played by the narrative representation of perspective in the reader's understanding of in the narrative as well as the reader's emotional response to the narrative.

The paper presents Ingarden's views on what he calls “modes of being” (“ways of existence”) and “existential moments”; the latter being constitutive parts of the former. Mainstream analytic philosophy has been dominated by the view that “existence” can mean only existence simpliciter. Ingarden, on the other hand, discerns four possible modes of being, one of which is of special interest to semiotics: purely intentional being. It is of relevance for the ontological understanding not only of texts, but also of pictures and other sign-related entities. At the end, an extrapolated Ingardenian semiotic triangle is presented.

In the movie Pulp Fiction by Quentin Tarantino, Harvey Keitel plays the role of “The Wolf,” a man who “solves problems.” He is brought in at a late point where the two protagonists, Vincent and Jules, find themselves in a truly messy situation, having by accident killed an associate in their car by shooting him in the head. In this paper, we must also face a messy situation; not one, however, involving blood and brain mass, but one that concerns the semiotics of the sentences we find in narrative fiction. How should we regard the utterance act behind them and how should we regard their meaning? The roles of Jules and Vincent are played by the narratologists Dorrit Cohn and Gerard Genette. The accident in the car is John R. Searle's pretense-theory of fiction, which Cohn and Genette do not really know how to approach. Actually they disagree fundamentally as to the correct understanding thereof. As there are indeed some areas in Searle's theory that are not easily cleaned up, we find ourselves in the need of a real problem solver. In a late entry, Roman Ingarden is cast in the role of The Wolf.

Roman Ingarden (1973a, 1973b) developed an ontology of the literary artwork with implications for a theory of reader experience. An upshot of the fact that narratives represent only incompletely determined states of affairs, endowed with “spots of indeterminacy,” is that readers fill out the blanks left by the author. Filling-out is therefore considered a quasi perceptual act leading to the constitution of a full object in the reader's experience. In this paper, I challenge the degree to which readers' concretization of texts depends on such completing acts. I point to the fact that perception itself is schematic, and that the analogy to perception would rather imply that concretization does not imply full filling-out. On the contrary, there seems to be a correspondence between the standard level of descriptive granularity in literature and the schematic coarse-grainedness of perception. To corroborate this claim, I show how deviations from that descriptive baseline produce a variety of meaning effects.

This paper proposes a classification of entities that are introduced in various theories of intentionality under the label “intentional objects.” Franz Brentano's immanent objects, Alexius Meinong's entities “beyond being and non-being” and Roman Ingarden's purely intentional objects can serve as examples of such entities. They all have in common that they have been introduced in order to extensionalize so-called “intentional contexts.” Not all such objects, however, deserve the name of intentional objects. In particular, neither Frege's senses nor mental contents of the early Husserl are to be classified as intentional objects in my sense. Roughly speaking, to be called “an intentional object,” a postulated entity must be supposed to function as a target of the subject's intention: intentional objects are supposed to stand “before the subject's mind” so that they “replace” the common sense objects of reference. The intentional objects that were introduced in the history of philosophy make up groups that, ontologically, are very heterogeneous. It is, however, possible to formulate certain systematic criteria for classifying them.

In this article I develop the ontological category of Ideal Possibilities to account for the special existence of the aesthetic object. In Roman Ingarden's aesthetics, he makes a distinction between the work of art and the aesthetic object because the aesthetic object is dependent on the individual observer, whereas the work of art remains the same for all observers. But if the aesthetic object is only a part of the observer's experience, it would make aesthetics a study for psychology. In order to understand the aesthetic object's relation to the observer, and to the work of art, I will introduce Ingarden's ontological dependence relations in order to account for the mode of being of both the work of art and the aesthetic object. This is where I propose a new category within the ideal mode of being, which I call Ideal Possibility. I do this by expanding on the dependence relation of heteronomy, which will allow for a continuous conception of Ingarden's otherwise isolated modes of being.