ABSTRACT
We have so far considered ‘the well-understood expression’ as a concrete experience. Instead of considering its two types of factor, the expression’s appearance and the sense-conferring or sense-fulfilling experience, we wish to consider what is, in a certain fashion, given ‘in’ these: the expression itself, its sense and its objective correlate. We turn therefore from the real relation of acts to the ideal relation of their objects or contents. A subjective treatment yields to one that is objective. The ideality of the relationship between expression and meaning is at once plain in regard to both its sides, inasmuch as, when we ask for the meaning of an expression, e.g. ‘quadratic remainder’, we are naturally not referring to the sound-pattern uttered here and now (hic et nunc), the vanishing noise that can never recur identically: we mean the expression in specie. ‘Quadratic remainder’ is the same expression by whomsoever uttered. The same holds of talk about the expression’s meaning, which naturally does not refer to some meaning-conferring experience.
