Phenomenological Hermeneutics: Husserl's philosophical investigation of what then happens when the understanding takes place (an exploration of the first Logical Investigation)

This paper examines Husserl's account of what then happens when understanding takes place. The topics of his First Logical Investigation are familiar to the point of contempt: essential distinctions involving meaning-conferring and meaning-fulfilling acts and their contents, characterizations of meaning-conferring acts, the fluctuation of word meanings and the ideality of meaning unities, and the phenomenological and ideal contents of the experiences of meaning. Once the essential distinctions have been made, the investigation clears a straight path. It leads from mentally real acts of meaning and their subjectively fluctuating contents to logically ideal meanings and their objectively constant contents. Because it appears that Husserl's strategy for dealing with essentially occasional expressions and their apparently fluctuating meanings may work for pure logic, with its need for strictness of identity and determinacy of sense, but not for ordinary discourse, however, it seems that the First Logical Investigation cannot provide an account of understanding. Yet this paper attempts to show that Husserl presents a foundational hermeneutics in the First Logical Investigation and that it turns from linguistics to ontology, or from 'mere words' to 'things themselves'.