The open I
Keywords: objectivity
Wittgenstein
Anscombe
Mu‘tazilite
phenomenology
intentional objects
empty terms
intentional identity
first-person
idealism
perception
subjectivity
intentionality
nonexistents
direct objects
non-existents
existence
non-existence
Husserl
objects of thought
subjects of thought
transcendental idealism
nonexistence

This essay brings together insights from Edmund Husserl in the phenomenological tradition and from Elizabeth Anscombe in the ‘ordinary language’ philosophical tradition, to resolve a puzzle of how it is that we can think of non-existents.
This involves distinguishing two senses of ‘to think of—’, and arguing that each has a distinctive sort of object. Their distinction is conceptually related to our capacity to be fallible or infallible about things, and our status as subjects of thought, irreducible to any physical object, but not equivalent to a special non-physical substance. To be a subject of thought is to be presented in mind with things about which one’s infallible. But the subject as such is not a ‘thing’. It is that which is individuated by which objects are presented infallibly to it, rather than by a substance with whom these or other objects come into material contact.
An entity that doesn’t exist is not simply ‘nothing’. It has features determined either by what someone would say infallibly, granting honesty and correct use of terms, in answer to, “What are you thinking of?”, or by reference to a text, like a fictional story. Both routes are a matter of sentences determining what it is correct or incorrect to say in answer to, “What is it?” questions, which therefore determine what descriptions of the thing (e.g. as a tree or something else) are true or false. Existent things are those entities facts about which are determined by what would be perceptually experienced infallibly given a certain position in the physical environment.
This implies, I argue, that the world in the broadest sense (to include both what is real and unreal) is inherently capable of being thought of. What is objectively the case isn’t hidden from us, but given only through subjective experience. So there is nothing that is ‘beyond’ experience, even if many things exist about which we’ve not yet thought or which we cannot, given our perceptual apparatus, personally experience except as the objects of other beings’ experience. This is consistent with Husserl’s version of transcendental idealism.
The means by which I come to the conclusions I do involves a close reading of Anscombe’s paper, “The Intentionality of Sensation”. This involves distinguishing objects of thought that are things (real or unreal) from objects of thought that aren’t ‘things’ in really any sense at all. I call these simply ‘individuals as such’. They can only be individuated by reference to special types of question in which they count as ‘given’ by one’s describing not them directly but things and objects which non-identical with one another and non-equivalent to the individual they ‘are’.
This idea of individuals through questions is brought together with Husserl’s methodological strategy of drawing ‘brackets’ round a certain attitude to the world, in order to reflect on the conditions of possibility for our taking such an attitude and having objective knowledge by way of it at all. That strategy and the notion of a ‘pure’ individual, together indicate a way of thinking about thoughts, thinkers and what is thought of that puts immersion into shared practices with language, particularly with questions, at the heart of philosophical method.