Cognitive-System Phenomenology — A Critique of Husserl (Part Fourteen)

We continue our discussion of positing meanings (Legitimation). In the preceding sections, we mentioned that objects possess various kinds of meanings. Among these, the most extensive system of meanings consists of all the super-existential meanings of an object. Naturally, what we discussed earlier was primarily the content meanings of an object, and content meanings are themselves a subset of super-existential meanings. In the next few sections, we will examine another relatively common kind of super-existential meaning aside from content meaning. I call this sensory meaning, a meaning obtained through the operation of the sensory organs upon an object. What we posit here is precisely the sensory meaning of an object. We see an object through the intuitive operation of the eyes; we touch an object through the hands; we hear sounds through the ears; we smell odors through the nose; we taste flavors through the mouth. The sensory impact of an object thus arises through the eye, nose, mouth, ears, and hands. Through the operation of the senses, we are able to discover more properties of an object, and in this way we may gain a deeper understanding of it. In this section we focus mainly on the contribution of visual intuition to our apprehension of an object. We observe that the intuitive operation of the eyes not only provides us with content meanings, but also yields other sensory meanings—namely, the sensory meanings derived from intuition.