The Puzzle of Empty Formal Indications: On the 'Deferred' Meaning of Heidegger's Language

Heidegger's notion of philosophical concepts as "formal indications" is rightly viewed as a crucial development. The idea of formal indication is partly intended to answer concerns that phenomenology objectivizes conscious life. Formal indication responds-in what would become a signature feature of much of Heidegger's early work-by setting up a unique dependency of the meaning of phenomenological concepts on their "enactment" in the first-personal life of the investigator or reader. Commentators have appropriately wondered whether this move succeeds. Yet relatively little emphasis has been placed on the potential problem of underdetermination: whether this model of deferring meaning to "enactment" leaves the reader with a sufficient understanding of the term that they know what to enact and (hopefully) gain some positive self-understanding through it. This problem becomes more or less acute depending on how we model the "deferred meaning" of formal indication. Here I study candidate models of "deferred meaning," including those prominent in the literature, to determine whether any are suitable to model the meaning-structure of formal indication and stave off the underdetermination problem.