The Art and Science of Indirect Sense
The Art and Science of Indirect Sense
This chapter shows how Merleau-Ponty’s notion of indirect sense contributes to understanding the disclosive function of linguistic signs within the Heideggerian framework and explicates the notion of presentational sense. It focuses first on Merleau-Ponty’s appropriation of Saussure’s conception of signs to clarify the structure and preconceptual intelligibility of indirect sense. It then considers Merleau-Ponty’s use of modern painting as an analogy, which highlights the importance of embodiment in providing an innovative model for the presentational (‘pointing out’) function of linguistic signs and the intelligence involved in embodied deliberation. Having clarified how these accounts complement each other as descriptions of prepredicative intelligence, as characterized in chapter 2, the chapter concludes by showing how they fill out and improve Heidegger’s view of the disclosive function of linguistic signs in a phenomenologically convincing way.
Keywords: Merleau-Ponty, disclosive function, embodiment, indirect sense, Saussure, painting, prepredicative, presentational sense, Heideggerian framework
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