Husserl continues his Logical Investigations with a long critical discussion of the then-current tendency to reduce logic to psychological “laws” of mental operations, which are in turn supposed to be reducible to empirically discoverable facts. He then begins to discuss what a pure logic ought to be. “We are rather interested in what makes science science, which is certainly not its psychology, nor any real context into which acts of thought are fitted, but a certain objective or ideal interconnection which gives these acts a unitary relevance, and, in such unitary relevance, an ideal validity” (p. 225).

To do this, we need to look at both things and truths from the point of view of their interconnections. In his famous phrase, we need to go “to the things themselves”. As Aristotle emphasized before, we need to look carefully at distinctions of meaning.

Expressive meanings are not the same thing as indicative signs. Meaning for Husserl is not reducible to what it refers to; it originates in a kind of act, though it is not to be identified with the act, either. Verbal expressions have an “intimating” function. “To understand an intimation is not to have conceptual knowledge of it… it consists simply in the fact that the hearer intuitively takes the speaker to be a person who is expressing this or that” (p. 277). “Mutual understanding demands a certain correlation among the acts mutually unfolded in intimation…, but not at all in their exact resemblance” (p. 278). “In virtue of such acts, the expression is more than a sounded word. It means something, and insofar as it means something, it relates to what is objective” (p. 280). “The function of a word… is to awaken a sense-conferring act in ourselves” (p. 282).

“Our interest, our intention, our thought — mere synonyms if taken in sufficiently wide senses — point exclusively to the thing meant in the sense-giving act” (p. 283). “[A]ll objects and relations among objects only are what they are for us, through acts of thought essentially different from them, in which they become present to us, in which they stand before us as unitary items that we mean” (ibid).

“Each expression not merely says something, but says it of something: it not only has a meaning, but refers to certain objects” (p. 287). “Two names can differ in meaning but can name the same object” (ibid). “It can happen, conversely, that two expressions have the same meaning but a different objective reference” (p. 288). “[A]n expression only refers to an objective correlate because it means something, it can rightly be said to signify or name the object through its meaning” (p. 289). “[T]he essence of an expression lies solely in its meaning” (ibid).

“Expressions and their meaning-intentions do not take their measure, in contexts of thought and knowledge, from mere intuition — I mean phenomena of external or internal sensibility — but from the varying intellectual forms through which intuited objects first become intelligibly determined, mutually related objects” (ibid). Meanings do not have to do with mental images.

“It should be quite clear that over most of the range both of ordinary, relaxed thought and the strict thought of science, illustrative imagery plays a small part or no part at all…. Signs are in fact not objects of our thought at all, even surrogatively; we rather live entirely in the consciousness of meaning, of understanding, which does not lapse when accompanying imagery does so” (p. 304). “[A]ny grasp is in a sense an understanding and an interpretation” (p. 309).

“Pure logic, wherever it deals with concepts, judgments, and syllogisms, is exclusively concerned with the ideal unities that we here call ‘meanings'” (p. 322). “[L]ogic is the science of meanings as such, of their essential sorts and differences, as also of the ideal laws which rest purely on the latter” (p. 323). “Propositions are not constructed out of mental acts of presentation or belief: when not constructed out of other propositions, they ultimately point back to concepts…. The relation of necessary consequence in which the form of an inference consists, is not an empirical-psychological connection among judgements as experiences, but an ideal relation among possible statement-meanings” (p. 324).

“Though the scientific investigator may have no reason to draw express distinctions between words and symbols, on the one hand, and meaningful thought-objects, on the other, he well knows that expressions are contingent, and that the thought, the ideally selfsame meaning, is what is essential. He knows, too, that he does not make the objective validity of thoughts and thought-connections, … but that he sees them, discovers them” (p. 325).

“All theoretical science consists, in its objective content, of one homogeneous stuff: it is an ideal fabric of meanings” (ibid). “[M]eaning, rather than the act of meaning, concept and proposition, rather than idea and judgement, are what is essential and germane in science” (ibid). “The essence of meaning is seen by us, not in the meaning-conferring experience, but in its ‘content'” (p. 327).