Between Facts and Norms - Contributions to a ... - Blogs Unpad

12Chapter l-------- --------·meaning of a term and its various expressions. What distinguishesa symbolically expressed thought as something general, identicalwith itself, and publicly accessible-as something transcending theindividual consciousness-from the always particular, episodic,and only privately accessible, hence consciousness-immanent representationsis the ideal status of linguistic signs and grammaticalrules. These rules are what lend linguistic events-at the phonetic,syntactic, and semantic levels-their determinate form, which isconstant and recognizable throughout all their variations.1.1.3The ideal character inherent in the generality of concepts andthoughts is interwoven with an idealization of a wholly differentsort. Every complete thought has a specific propositional contentthat can be expressed by an assertoric sentence. But beyond thepropositional content, every thought calls for a further determination:it demands an answer to whether it is true or false. Thinkingand speaking subjects can take a position on each thought with a"yes" or a "no"; hence, the mere having of a thought is complementedby an act of judgment. Only the affirmed thought or thetrue sentence expresses a fact. The affirmation of a thought or theassertoric sense of a statement brings into play a further momentof ideality, one connected with the validity of the judgment orsentence.The semantic critique of representational thinking holds that thesentence "This ball is red" does not express a particular representationof a thing, that is, a red ball. Rather, it is the linguisticrepresentation of the fact that the ball is red. This means that aspeaker who utters 'p' in an assertoric mode does not refer with heraffirmation to the existence of an object but rather to the correspondingstate of affairs. As soon as one expands 'p' into thesentence "There is at least one object that is a ball, of which it is truethat it is red," one sees that the truth of 'p' and the being-the-caseof a corresponding state of affairs or circumstance must not beunderstood by analogy to a thing's existence. Veridical being orbeing-the-case must not be confused with the existence of anobject.8 Otherwise one is misled, along with Frege, Husser}, andlater even Popper, to a Platonic conception of meaning, according