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.J.N.Findlay, ed.Dermot Moran (New York:Routledge, 2001), volume 2, Investigation VI, §64, p.315.46Ibid., §40, p.272.47Ibid.48Ibid., §42, p.276.49Ibid., §43, p.278.For the passage from Bickerton, see note 17, to this chapter. 46 The Form of Thinkingtoward things in their absence.The absence in question might be the kindfound in perception, such as the other side of the building or the inside ofa closed box, or it might be a higher-level, articulated, categorial object,something we might be talking about that is a thousand miles away ora thousand years off in the future or the past.50 The treatment of absenceis one of the most important themes in phenomenology, which sees theability to deal with the absent as one of the essential features of humanreason.Phenomenology also explores the many different kinds of absence:the kind found in memory, the kind proper to spatial distance, theabsence of the future and the past, the absence proper to misunder-standing and confusion, the kind that occurs in pictures, the kind thatprompts desire or fear.The ability to think off-line opens up a whole rangeof specifically human phenomena such as hope and anxiety that areintimately associated with language and human reason.Still another important theme in Husserl that has parallels in Bickertonis nominalization.An example of this phenomenon is the following.Suppose I say, Harriet will be coming home tomorrow. This is an artic-ulated assertion with its parts all spread out.It is the object of what Husserlcalls a many-rayed intention. 51 But I can compress what it asserts andmake it into the object of a single-rayed intention. I can say, It is goodthat Harriet will be coming home tomorrow, or I am glad that she iscoming home, or Because Harriet is coming home tomorrow, we mustchange our plans. I nominalize what is stated and make it part of a largerstatement.Such nominalization exemplifies the Chinese-box embeddingthat Bickerton describes as one of the essential features of syntax andlanguage.One phrase can be nested within another phrase, and thehierarchic stacking of such components of language is what makes humanspeech different from protolanguage.In Logical Investigations, Husserl begins with an analysis of language, buthe goes beyond it and describes the syntactic or categorial structure ofthinking as well as that of speech.He goes from linguistic grammar to50The theme of presence and absence in treated in Logical Investigations under the rubric offilled and empty intentions and the interweaving of identity and evidencing that goes onbetween them.Husserl treats this topic in regard to both sensory perception andintellectual intending.The entire Sixth Investigation discusses the issue, and it is alsotreated briefly in the First Investigation, §§9 21.51Husserl discusses the transformation of the complex object of a polythetic act intothe object of a monothetic act in Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans.W.R.Boyce Gibson (New York: Macmillan, 1931), §119, p.336: Every such many-rayed(polythetic) constitution of synthetic objectivities which are essentially such that originally we can be aware of them only synthetically possesses the essential law-conforming possibility of transforming the many-rayed object of awareness into one that issimply one-rayed. The topic is also treated in Logical Investigations, Investigation V, §§34 36,and Investigation VI, §49. Linguistic Syntax and Human Reason 47intellectual activity.He also studies the relation of categorial thinking tothe perception out of which it arises and the verification that it makespossible.I think that Husserl places categoriality or syntax into a richerphilosophical context than Bickerton does, but Bickerton has more to sayabout the biological foundation for language, and he examines linguisticphenomena in greater detail. 4The Person as the Agent of SyntaxPredicationIt is a traditional doctrine in philosophy that predication or judgment is thecentral activity of reason.Aristotle calls it apophansis, and describes it withthe cryptic phrase ti kata tinos legetai, something is said of something. 1 InKant s writings the term is Urteil, judgment; all acts of the understanding canbe reduced to judgment.Bickerton agrees with this consensus and relatespredication to syntax.He says, If nouns and verbs are the most basicelements of syntax, then predication is its most basic act. 2 The most basicact in syntax, the most fundamental thing done in it and that without whichnothing else can be done, is predication.Syntax is, of course, immenselyrich and varied.There are in the world s languages untold forms ofsubordination, conjunction, correlation, reciprocity, reflexives and posses-sives, tenses and cases, adjectives and adverbs, infinitives and gerunds, butunderlying all of them is the never-absent form of predication, in whichsomething is said of something else.All the other forms dangle from this orcrowd around it.The heart of syntax is predication.Bickerton adds the further refinement that, in his linguistic theory, thesubject and predicate themselves should be considered not as singlewords but as explicit or implicit phrases.3 This is an interesting claim, andit would imply that even single words are latent combinations, hencesyntactically structured in principle.Bickerton also says that each predica-tion can give rise to further subdivisions and subpredications within each ofits parts: these further articulations yield the Russian-doll, hierarchic cascadeof phrases that constitutes language and rational articulation.He says that1Ernst Tugendhat stresses the centrality of predication in Aristotle s metaphysics.He usesAristotle s phrase as the title of his book: Ti kata tinos: Eine Untersuchung zu Struktur undUrsprung Aristotelischer Grundbegriffe (Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber, 1958), 5 6
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