ABSTRACT
In our discussions up to this point we have repeatedly and strongly felt a large gap. It had to do with the categorial objective forms, or with the synthetic functions in the sphere of objectifying acts through which these objective forms come to be constituted, through which they may come to ‘intuition’ and thereby also to ‘knowledge’. We shall now attempt to some extent to fill in this gap, taking our point of departure from the investigation of our first chapter; this was concerned with one limited aim of epistemological clarification: the relation of a meaning-intention as the thing to be expressed, with an expressed sensuous intuition. We shall for the time being again build on the simplest cases of perceptual and other intuitive statements, and shall use them to shed light on the theme of our next treatments, in the following manner:
In the case of a perceptual statement, not only the inwrought nominal presentations are fulfilled: the whole sense of the statement finds fulfilment through our underlying percept. We say likewise that the whole statement gives utterance to our percept: we do not merely say ‘I see this paper, an inkpot, several books’, and so on, but also ‘I see that the paper has been written on, that there is a bronze inkpot standing here, that several books are lying open’, and so on. If a man thinks the fulfilment of nominal meanings clear enough, we shall ask him how we are to understand the fulfilment of total statements, especially as regards that side of them that stretches beyond their ‘matter’, in this case beyond their nominal terms. What may and can furnish fulfilment for those aspects of meaning which make up propositional form as such, the aspects of ‘categorial form’ to which, e.g., the copula belongs?
