Arkadiusz Chrudzimski

The concept of a trope (understood as an individual property and not as a figure of speech) plays an important role in contemporary analytical metaphysics. It is, however, often far from clear what the logic of this concept really is. Indeed, there are two equally important intuitions underlying the concept of trope, two intuitions that generate two quite different conceptual frameworks. According to the first intuition, a trope is a particularised property – a property taken as an individual aspect of a particular object. A trope is thus the colour of this table or the shape of this sculpture. In the light of this conception tropes are, as it were, direct abstractions from concrete individuals. According to the second intuition a trope is still such an individual (and abstract) colour or such an individual (and abstract) shape, but now it is not only abstracted from the concrete individual of which it is a trope but also taken in abstraction from the very fact that it has been abstracted this way. We can imagine that the cognitive access to these tropes is obtained by a kind of a double abstraction. All this can sound puzzling at first blush, but in what follows I hope to make the matter a little clearer. Let us anticipate briefly. On the second view, tropes are construed not so much as abstractions from concrete individuals, but rather as primitive items of which the concrete individuals are composed. Tropes so construed are, as it were, metaphysically prior to concrete individuals. We will call tropes of this kind unstructured tropes, whereas tropes conceived as aspects of individual things will be called propositional tropes. This terminology is justified because tropes understood as aspects of things seem to involve something like propositional structure, a structure that tropes conceived as primitive “building blocks” of reality definitely lack. It is sometimes believed that these two concepts of trope are nearly equivalent, that the difference between them is for the most part verbal. Yet it will turn out that there is an important ontological difference here. Propositional tropes are non-trivially propositional and unstructured tropes are non-trivially deprived of such a structure (althought not necessarily deprived of any dependence-links with respect to other tropes). It will be argued that tropes are metaphysically interesting only on the second conception (i.e., as primitive, unstructured items), whereas only on the first conception (tropes as propositionally structured entities) can they function as semantically efficient truthmakers. The moral of the paper will be that our trust in tropes must be mitigated. A trope ontology could plausibly be viewed as a serious metaphysical alternative, but its semantical possibilities should not be exaggerated.

I propose a certain classification of entities which 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’, or Roman Ingarden’s purely intentional objects can serve as examples of suchentities. What they all have in common is that they have been introduced in order to extensionalise the so called ‘intentional contexts’ (‘intentional’ with ‘t’). But not all entities which function this way deserve the name of intentional objects. In particular, neither Frege’s senses nor mental contents of the early Husserl are tobe classified as intentional objects in my sense. Roughly speaking, to be properly called ‘an intentional object’ a postulated entity must be supposed to function as a quasi-target of the subject’s intention. In other words: intentional objects are supposed to stand ‘before the subject’s mind’, so that they, in a sense, ‘replace’ the common sense objects of reference. It turns out that the intentional objects that were introduced in the history of philosophy make up groups which,from the ontological point of view, are very heterogeneous. Nevertheless it is possible to formulate certain systematic criteria of classifying them.

Roman Ingarden (1893-1970) apparteneva a quegli allievi di Husserl che si designano come “fenomenologia di Gottinga”. Si tratta della prima generazione di fenomenologi, nella quale rientravano, fra gli altri, anche Adolf Reinach, Hedwig Conrad-Martius ed Edith Stein. I ricercatori di questo gruppo erano influenzati soprattutto dalle Ricerche logiche di Husserl e reagirono un po’ stupiti alla sua successiva svolta idealistica. Per quanto riguarda lo stesso Ingarden, egli incontrò Husserl solo dopo la pubblicazione delle Idee, tuttavia filosoficamente appartiene senza dubbio al periodo della prima fenomenologia “realistica”.

Das Buch ist eine analytische Darstellung der Hauptideen der Erkenntnistheorie Ingardens. Es basiert zum größten Teil auf dem bis vor kurzem noch unpublizierten bzw. ausschließlich in polnischer Sprache verfaßten Material und wendet sich vor allem an die Phänomenologen aber auch an die analytischen Philosophen, die sich für die Erkenntnistheorie und Ontologie der Intentionalität interessieren. Die Ingardensche Erkenntnistheorie, seine Theorie der Intentionalität und die Hauptzüge seiner Ontologie werden auf dem Hintergrund der Brentanoschen und Husserlschen Tradition präsentiert und mit den begrifflichen Werkzeugen der zeitgenössischen analytischen Philosophie analysiert. Die Erkenntnistheorie Ingardens bildet das Ergebnis einer Synthese der Husserlschen phänomenologischen Methode mit der ontologischen Präzision, die für die Schriften Ingardens so charakteristisch ist. Sie besteht aus zwei Disziplinen: der reinen und der angewandten Erkenntnistheorie. Die reine Erkenntnistheorie ist eine absolutistische, Cartesianische Disziplin. Sie formuliert die Definition der Erkenntnis und beruht auf einem besonderen, selbstreferierenden Bewußtseinszustand, den Ingarden Intuition des Durchlebens nennt. Die angewandte Erkenntnistheorie untersucht dagegen die konkreten Fälle der Erkenntnis und ist eine empirische, hypothetische und fehlbare Wissenschaft.

It was one of Brentano’s central ideas that all judgements are at bottom existential. In his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint he tried to show how all traditionally acknowledged judgement forms could be reinterpreted as existential statements. Existential propositions, therefore, were a central concern for the whole Brentano School. Kazimierz Twardowski, who also accepted this program, introduced the problem of the existential reduction to his Polish students, but not all of them found this idea plausible. In 1911 Stanisław Leśniewski published a paper under the title “A Contribution to the Analysis of Existential Propositions” where he criticised Brentano’s translation. According to Leśniewski the consequences of Brentano’s program would be absurd because according to Leśniewski all positive existential propositions are analytically true and all negative ones are contradictory. In his later works Leśniewski repudiated all his early writings (1911–1914) as philosophically immature and formally imprecise. “[…] I regret that they have appeared in print,” he writes, “and formally ‘repudiate’ them herewith […]”. But in spite of this severe assessment, these early papers are worth considering not only from a historical standpoint. As we will see, Leśniewski’s critique of Brentano is unsound, but it casts an interesting light on his understanding of certain basic metaphysical concepts.

The majority of Polish phenomenologists never found Husserl’s transcendental idealism attractive. In this paper I investigate the source of this rather surprising realist attitude. True enough the founder of Polish phenomenology was Roman Ingarden - one of the most severe critics of Husserl’s transcendental idealism, so it is initially tempting to reduce the whole issue to this sociological fact. However, I argue that there must be something more about Ingarden’s intellectual background that immunized him against Husserl’s transcendental argumentation, and that the same background made his students so sympathetic to his “naive” realism. My claim is thatthis “something” is Ingarden’s realist concept of truth that he learned (at least partially) from Tarski as opposed to Husserl’s epistemic construal that he took from Brentano.