Being truthful

Steven Crowell

pp. 17-37

in: John Drummond, James G. Hart (eds), The truthful and the good, Berlin, Springer, 1996

Abstract

Edmund Husserl's account of truth, elaborated in Logical Investigations VI (on the "Elements of a Phenomenological Elucidation of Knowledge"), is one of his most fertile contributions to philosophy. Untangling the phenomenon we have in view in speaking of the adæquatio rei et intellectus, Husserl's fourfold analysis ties truth as correctness of judgment to truth as the very presence of the object in the cognitive situation, which, as "fullness," constitutes the telos of knowledge. It thereby avoids the scepticism that threatens all representationalist, or picture (Abbild), theories. Equally decisive is his careful redescription of the tired, yet indispensable, correspondence-concept in terms of a process of fulfillment and synthesis of identification.¹ Recognizing thereby that the structure of truth is implicated in the extremely diverse interweavings of signitive and intuitive acts, and that by a specific act of identification the latter can be explicitly experienced as fulfilling the former—thus constituting a grasp of truth (identity)—Husserl undermines the narrow neo-Kantian equation between truth and the validity of scientific propositions. In its place he reveals how something very much like being toward truth pervades the whole of conscious life.

Cited authors

Husserl Edmund