Dasein - Monoskop

40 PART II
truth.
In order to appreciate Husserl's conception of truth and selfevidence
it is useful to read it against the conception of the calculus
view of meaning. The central ingredient of this view is the accessibility
of meaning and truth. In Husserl this tenet takes the form
of seeking to explain that meaning and truth are accessible to the
individual in and through his acts or presentations, and to explain
how they are so accessible. From this epistemológica! vantage point
it is natural and plausible that Husserl sees self-evidence as prior to
truth. 124 Yet introducing the notion of self-evidence as prior to truth
brings forth the danger of relativism; the contradictory opposite of
what is self-evident to one person might be self-evident to another.
Now what Husserl thinks allows him both to maintain his epistemológica!
perspective and to oppose relativism, is his introduction of
the notion of idea! species: what makes a presentation token P true
with respect to its object token 0 is not one's evident feeling that
P corresponds to O. Rather, what makes P true is the ideal relation
between P and O as species or types. Put in a nutshell, it is the
ideality of meaning that enables Husserl to stick simultaneously to
the three central ingredients of the calculus conception already found
in this early work: to the denial of relativism, to the accessibility of
truth, and to truth as correspondence.
3. DEFENDING THE ACCESSIBILITY OF SEMANTICS
AGAINST PSYCHOLOGISTS RELATIVISM:
THE LOGICAL INVESTIGATIONS
In the last chapter we saw how the agenda for the Logical Investigations
emerged from Husserl's treatment of formalism. In this chapter,
I shall present an interpretation of this work from the vantage
point of the conception of language as calculus. As is well known to
every student of the Logical Investigations, Husserl's magnum opus
gives rise to numerous difficult interpretational problems. Of these
perhaps the most notorious problem concerns the question as to the
relationship between the critique of psychologism, presented in the
Prolegomena, and the descriptive psychology applied in the first,