As Kaplan’s ‘Quantifying In’ is a series of reflections prompted by Quine’s ‘Quantifiers and Propositional Attitudes’, so this paper is a series of reflections prompted by Kaplan’s ‘Quantifying In’ together with Hintikka’s ‘Semantics for Propositional Attitudes’ and ‘On the Logic of Perception’. The general perspective I adopt here includes much that is developed in an extended project with Ronald McIntyre, from which I have benefited greatly, our book Intentionality and Intensions: Husserl’s Phenomenology and the Semantics of Intentional Modalities. I rely especially on details of my specific contributions thereto on the modes of aboutness of de re belief, which appear in Chapter VIII. I also rely, sparingly, on some results of my own more recent studies on perception and its ‘demonstrative’ content, indicated here in the bibliography.

The philosophy of Husserl -to be explicit, phenomenology - is best understood as a particular kind of approach to the problem of intentionality. It was Brentano who brought to vogue the view that "acts" of consciousness-perceivings, believings, hopings, desirings, and so on-are intentional, i.e., directed toward objects. This view has been enshrined in the slogan, "Consciousness is consciousness of something." Phenomenol- ogy is an attempt to provide a theory of intentionality, explaining the nature of this property of consciousness. Husserl's explanation is characterized by its dependence on the postulation of a class of abstract entities called "noemata." Roughly, Husserl's theory of intentionality is that there is bound up with every act a certain "meaning," or "noema," in virtue of which the act is directed, or intentional. Our purpose will be to examine the nature of noemata and their role in the intentionality of acts. WATe shall argue that there is a remarkably strong connection between Husserl's notion of noema, or act-meaning, and the more familiar concept of sense, or linguistic meaning. In fact, we argue, noemata are best understood as just the sort of intensional entities that have been both widely acclaimed and maligned among post-Fregean analytic philosophers.

Perhaps the strongest case to be made for indeteminacy of translation is the plethora of emerging interpretations of Quine's work. In the belief that Quine is not so inscrutable as all that, we should like to try to separate and develop one important strand in the extant Quine - that which is properly called the indeterminacy of translation - and consider its role in Quine's case against linguistics. A translation is a theory that the sentences of a given language map in a specified way onto sentences of a home language under a certain relation called synonymy. Given a translation, classical semantics would posit for each translation relation a meaning or idea shared by the alien sentence and its home translate. Now, three distinct theses appear in Quine regarding translation and meaning: (1) Applying all the canons of good scientific methodology, the totality of possible evidence supports equally well more than one translation of a given language. (2) There are no translation relations except relative to a given manual of translation, or translation theory. (3) There are no translation relations, period. (Thus there is nothing there, no fact of the matter, for translation to be right or wrong about.)

In Husserl’s idiom, the volition is a “moment”, or dependent part, of the action as a whole. Where successful, the action being in accord with the volition, the “act” of will is thus a part of the action that could not occur apart from the action. Husserl distinguished the “real” or temporally flowing content of an “act” of consciousness from the “ideal” meaning content entertained in the act. A particular account of phenomenological structure follows the “modal model” of consciousness. Husserl developed in effect a feedback loop as his analysis of the phenomenology of perception, judgment, and action both draws upon his formal ontology and grounds or justifies the ontology. The point should not be that the ontology is reduced to phenomenology, where being is reduced to appearance.