Abstract

Cobb-Stevens recognizes that Husserl's phenomenology and the so-called analytic tradition beginning with Frege are fundamentally similar in their rejection of modern philosophy's identification of the content of our experiences with representations in the mind. He also, however, identifies a cardinal difference between analytic and Husserlian philosophies in their characterizations of the relation between perception and predication. He develops this point by showing first that the project of the analytic tradition fails insofar as it cannot establish a sufficiently strong connection between word and world. He argues that Frege sharply distinguished psychological representations from objective senses so as to free semantics from psychology and epistemology. However, classic epistemological and ontological issues about appearances and reality refused to disappear. Frege attempted to confront these problems in his account of the relation between a sense and its truth-conditions and in his characterization of sense as a mode of presentation referring to objects, but his critique of psychologism barred any appeal to our intuitions of objects and their intelligible forms. Truth and falsity, for Frege, had to be properties of propositions considered in themselves apart from our intuitive grasp of worldly states of affairs.