## 1. Marty as a Follower of Brentano



Marty's career can be best viewed from the perspective of his
relationship to Brentano. Already in 1867, before Marty began to study
at a university, he had written a prize winning essay "St.
Thomas' Doctrine of Abstraction of Supersensory Ideas from
Sensory Images, with an Exposition and Critique of Other Theories of
Knowledge", in which he cited Brentano's recently
published works on Aristotle (Brentano 1862 and Brentano 1867). He was
so inspired by these works that he requested permission from his
bishop to study in Wurzburg, where Brentano, also at the time a
Catholic priest, had just been appointed lecturer after triumphantly
engaging in a formal disputation with a disciple of Schelling. One of
the theses that Brentano defended in this disputation was: "The
true method of philosophy is none other than that of the natural
sciences" (Brentano, [ed.] Kraus 1929, 147). In the autumn of
1868 Marty began attending Brentano's lectures in which this
thesis was applied to various areas of philosophy. He and Carl Stumpf,
who had already been studying in Wurzburg, became friends with
each other and disciples of Brentano in the renewal of philosophy and
religion (Stumpf 1919, 88 ff.). In such a renewal all the speculative
excesses of German Idealism from earlier in the century had to be
purged and replaced with rigor and clarity of thought, not to mention
a relentless adherence to the empirical source of knowledge.



In 1869 Marty became a teacher in a secondary school in his home town
and received higher orders the next year, though he continued to stay
in contact with Brentano. Marty was hardly aware, however, that
Brentano was having misgivings about his Catholic faith, especially in
the light of the doctrine of infallibility that was declared in 1870.
Though Brentano became a professor in Wurzburg in 1872, he
resigned from this position and left the church in the following year.
Both Stumpf and Marty were soon to follow him in abandoning their
pursuit of a profession as clergymen. This was not as damaging to
Stumpf, who had never been ordained, as it was to Marty. As a
consequence, he never married in order to avoid disappointing his
family more than he already had done. His circumstances thus allowed
him little choice but to pursue an academic career, as he did by
receiving a doctorate in Gottingen with Rudolf Hermann Lotze as
his dissertation advisor (as Stumpf had also done). An expanded
version of the resulting work (Marty 1875) was subsequently published
and he took a position at the newly established university in
Czernowitz.



Brentano in the meantime had become a professor in 1874 in Vienna,
where he continued to develop his philosophical views in the same
spirit as he did in Wurzburg, with no other method but that of
the natural sciences. An important distinction that Brentano came to
make in his lectures in Vienna, however, was that between two branches
of psychology (Brentano, [eds.] Baumgartner and Chisholm 1982). One of
these was descriptive psychology, also called descriptive
phenomenology or psychognosy, and was concerned with analyzing
consciousness into its elements and specifying their modes of
combination. The other branch, genetic psychology, was to be concerned
with causal explanations of mental phenomena. Though Brentano
maintained that the latter branch required physiological
investigations and also that physiology was not yet developed enough
to deal with matters in genetic psychology, he thought that he had
already contributed to descriptive psychology in his *Psychology
from an Empirical Standpoint* (Brentano 1874) and continued making
further elaborations in this area through his lectures.



As Brentano characterized philosophy as including all the disciplines
which involve descriptive psychology, Marty did the same as the rector
of the University of Prague in his inaugural address in 1897 (Marty,
[eds.] Eisenmeier et al., 69-93). On this view, philosophy
encompasses at least three practical disciplines, namely logic
(concerned with what judgments should be made), aesthetics (concerned
with what ideas or, as we shall say, presentations we should have),
and ethics (concerned with what to love and what to hate). As regards
the theoretical branches of philosophy, Brentano and Marty considered
them to be descriptive psychology itself and also metaphysics. While
it may seem unacceptable to characterize metaphysics as involving
psychological concepts, Marty says:



> 
> A closer consideration, however, yields the result that also
> metaphysics and psychology, in spite of the difference of their
> subject matters, closely belong together from a heuristic viewpoint
> and that the psychologist is the very one, more than any other
> researcher, who appears to be suited to formulate and solve
> metaphysical problems. Already with Kant, it is asked whether we have
> besides analytic judgments also synthetic ones *a priori*, and
> whether the latter are perhaps, like the former, everywhere necessary
> for scientific progress. In contrast to leaving them empty and void
> upon leaving the phenomenal sphere, however, it is clear that only
> psychological investigation can decide this matter. It is a question
> whose answer is a prerequisite for every ontological and cosmological
> investigation. Psychological experience and analysis is accordingly
> also that which leads to the source and the true sense of the most
> important metaphysical concepts such as those of causality and of
> substance. And as regards that problem which occupied Aristotle,
> Descartes, and Leibniz so intensely, the question whether an analogue
> of the understanding and the tactical will forms the last hidden cause
> of all being and occurrence, it is obvious that this could not arise
> on any other basis but a psychological one. The concepts of the
> understanding and the will are themselves taken from the domain of
> mind. What Aristotle says here is confirmed, that what is the first
> and earliest by nature is for our knowledge the last, for the area of
> psychology, in which the greatest complication and dependence obtains
> with regard to its processes, is for us the starting point for the
> investigation of what is most simple and independent. (Marty, [eds.]
> Eisenmeier et al. 1916, 79 f.)
> 



Thus we see Marty defending the Brentanian conception of philosophy in
general and metaphysics in particular, with an appeal to Aristotle,
who was indeed Brentano's life-long guide through the labyrinth
of philosophy. Moreover, though Marty's publications were mainly
concerned with applying Brentanian descriptive psychology to the study
of language, he lectured on all the branches of philosophy, both
theoretical and practical, as well as history of philosophy. (See
Bokhove and Raynaud 1990, 247-250.) It will be seen further
below that metaphysics was indeed a very important concern of his.



As regards some of the particulars of Brentano's descriptive
psychology, most important for understanding Marty's philosophy
of language are 1) Brentano's thesis that mental phenomena (or
acts of consciousness) are intentionally directed (as consciousness
*of* an object), 2) his classification of mental phenomena into
three basic groups: presentations (*Vorstellungen*), judgments
(*Urteile*), and phenomena of love (*Liebe*) and hate
(*Hass*), as already indicated in the division of
practical philosophy into three corresponding disciplines, 3) his
characterization of all judgments as instances of acceptance or
rejection which can be formulated in existential statements ("A
exists", "A does not exist"), and 4) his view that
every act of consciousness is inwardly perceived (*innerlich
wahrgenommen*), though never inwardly observed (*innerlich
beobachtet*)in the sense of being an object of attention. In
addition, 5) an important ontological position held by Brentano in his
Vienna period should be mentioned here, namely his distinction between
reality and existence. While he held that existence corresponds to
truth in all cases, reality is limited to substances and everything
that pertains to substances (i.e. whatever belongs to the Aristotelian
categories). Accordingly anything that can be accepted in a true
judgment can correctly be said to exist, including possibilities and
impossibilities, whereas not everything that exists in this sense is
real. During this time Brentano allowed for a host of
*irrealia*, such as a lack, a possibility, an impossibility,
etc.



After publishing his work on the perception of color (Marty 1879),
Marty became a professor in Prague, where some of his students (such
as Oskar Kraus, Alfred Kastil, Hugo Bergmann, and even for a brief
period Franz Kafka) also came to be followers of Brentano. In the
following year Brentano had to resign as a professor in Vienna because
he got married. Since he had earlier received holy orders, including
of course the vow of celibacy, his marriage was not acceptable in
Austria, where there was no institution of civil marriage and
Catholicism was dominant. Nevertheless, Brentano continued to lecture
in Vienna until his full resignation in 1895. In the later nineteenth
century and early in the twentieth century Brentano developed a
philosophical standpoint which Marty found objectionable. This was the
view that only real things are conceivable and only real things can
exist. Brentano therefore spent much of his philosophical effort
during his retirement analyzing away all the talk of
*irrealia*, which he had accepted in his Vienna period. Marty,
by contrast, retained the *irrealia*, though with certain
revisions in light of his correspondence with Brentano. Marty also
corresponded with other students of Brentano, such as Stumpf and
Edmund Husserl (see Schuhmann [ed.] 1994, 69-96), and of course
with others in the wider philosophical and scientific community. Still
the fact remains that Brentano was the dominant philosopher in his
career.



Marty's writings often contain very extensive polemics against
his opponents and those of Brentano. Sometimes these polemics resulted
in bitter animosity, as in his interchange with Christoph Sigwart (see
e.g. Marty 1884 and Sigwart 1889). Sometimes Marty's criticisms
were received in good humor, as in the case of his very thorough-going
and penetrating review of William James' *Principles of
Psychology* (Marty 1892b). Whatever effects Marty's
polemical style had on his contemporaries, the great misfortune from a
present-day standpoint is that his own positive views become
overshadowed by his criticisms of the views of others. With patience,
however, it is possible to sift out from such criticisms his positive
views on a number of philosophical issues. The extent to which these
views are original cannot be fully assessed until Brentano's
literary remains are more adequately edited and published. Many of the
views which were developed in his later work nonetheless diverged from
Brentano's earlier positions (as well as his own), but also from
Brentano's later positions.


## 2. Color Names and the Development of Color Perception



One of Marty's early works (Marty 1879) is concerned with a
problem that differs from the ones he treats in his other writings. In
the work under consideration he addresses the question whether the
usage of color names in ancient Greek literature, especially Homer,
provides us with reasons to assume that human color perception has
evolved in the last couple of thousand years. Homer sometimes clearly
uses one and the same color term for very different colors and
sometimes describes colors of everyday objects in a way which is
surprisingly incompatible with our contemporary color descriptions.
The description of the color of the sea as "wine dark" and
many other such instances in Homer, as has had been pointed out
(Gladstone 1858, vol. III, 457 ff.), can be taken as a strong
indication that the ancient Greeks perceived colors in a way that
differs from our color perception. Some of Marty's
contemporaries thought that this is not only the case (Wenning 1990),
but also that the evidence suggested that the evolution of color
perception starts with dark and bright and proceeds through the color
spectrum. This would mean that the ancient Greeks could see red and
perhaps yellow, though probably not green, blue, and violet. On the
basis of the physiological work of Ewald Hering on color perception
(Hering 1878), Marty argued that such a development could not take
place. For it was a result of Hering's work that the perception
of red and green was the result of the same neural system and that of
the perception of blue and yellow was the result of a distinct one.
Blindness to red consequently goes together with blindness to green,
as does blindness to blue with blindness to yellow. Moreover, Marty
argues from various data, most notably ancient paintings, that the
ancient Greeks perceived all the colors that we do. However, if
ancient Greeks perceived the same colors as we do, how do we explain
the great difference between Homer's and our usage of color
terms? Marty gives various reasons, but two seem to be specially
important. Firstly, Marty insists that the proponents of the evolution
of color perception fail to distinguish between color sensation and
judgments in which colors are classified. They also forget to take
into account that language is primarily a means for communication, not
a tool for isolated theoretical descriptions. When people feel no
special need to communicate about certain colors, they feel no need to
classify them with special terms. One term can therefore cover a wider
area of color sensations (Marty 1879, 97 ff., see also Funke 1924,
14). Secondly, Marty brings the poetic function of language and its
poetic inner form into focus (Marty 1879, 78-94). The main goal
of Homer's poetry was not to communicate exact observations, but
to evoke powerful and aesthetically pleasing presentations with the
help of metaphor and metonymy. This leads to a surprising and unusual
poetic use of color terms employed in comparisons and presentation
through relations. The fact that Marty elaborates on such distinctions
is of particular significance because it already exemplifies how
Brentanian descriptive psychology was being applied in his early work.
This was of course to be done more elaborately and systematically in
his later writings, especially his main work (Marty 1908a).


## 3. Language



Marty's philosophy of language deserves our attention for at
least two reasons. First of all, while his predecessors and
contemporaries were for the most part concerned with the development
of language through history, e.g. phonological and semantic change,
Marty devoted much more attention to language as it is. In his own
terms, his investigations concerning language were primarily
descriptive rather than genetic. In contemporary terms, his focus was
synchronic rather than diachronic. In this regard he was a precursor
of structuralism (Kiesow 1990). The second reason why Marty's
philosophy of language is worth examining lies in the fact that in
contrast to many others, who approached language as a product of
either an alleged supra-human intelligence or lower psychological and
physiological mechanisms such as association and reflex, he
investigated language as something that arises from individual human
minds as intentionally directed to objects. Not only does
intentionality in the usual sense of consciousness *of*
something become focal in Marty's philosophy of language; he is
also concerned first and foremost with language "in the sense of
the *purposeful manifestation* of inner life through certain
signs, especially through sounds and in particular those which -
like most words of our spoken languages - are not intrinsically
intelligible, but owe their significant power to custom and
tradition" (Marty 1908a, 3). His emphasis here on purposeful
manifestation (*absichtliche Kundgabe*) not only involves
intention in the sense of the speaker's communicative goal of
evoking similar psychical phenomena as those expressed by linguistic
signs in the hearer, but is also intention in the narrow sense of
directedness toward intentional contents of expressed psychical
phenomena (Formigari 2004, 162ff.; Cesalli & Mulligan 2017, 259
ff.). In this regard Marty was a precursor of yet another later
movement in the study of language, namely intentional semantics
(Liedtke 1990).



As already indicated, Marty conceives of philosophy just as Brentano
did, namely as a discipline involving psychological considerations in
all of its branches, both theoretical and practical. Philosophy of
language is accordingly restricted by him to that domain of linguistic
inquiry which is tied up with the science of mind or consciousness.
Those areas of linguistics which can be investigated independently of
psychology, e.g. phonology, are no part of philosophy of language. It
is altogether unacceptable to Marty to regard philosophy of language
as distinct from the science of language, as if they were two
endeavors concerned with one and the same subject matter and yet
differing in their methods (Marty 1908a: 4 f.). In this regard he
never swayed from Brentano's precept that the true method of
philosophy is no different from that of the natural sciences.



Though Marty's psychological approach differs from that of many
other philosophers of language in the late nineteenth century as well
as the early twentieth, one of the reasons why his work has been
neglected by philosophers lies in their turn away from psychological
considerations, as this can already be seen in Husserl's
critique of "psychologism" (Husserl 1900) and also in
Frege's anti-psychologistic work on logic and language, which
has had an especially profound effect on a good many philosophers in
the twentieth century and into the present one. (As regards the
possibility of related charges of "mentalism" and
"introspectionism", see Rollinger 2008: 73-86.)
During his lifetime he had already been under suspicion from the
Neo-Kantian camp as a proponent of psychologism, though he vehemently
insisted that he did not succumb to such a tendency in any invidious
sense such as the one formulated by Husserl (Marty 1908a, 6-18).
Above all, it must be remembered that for Husserl psychologism
entailed relativism. Both Marty and Brentano pointed out that their
applications of psychology in philosophy in no way involved relativism
(Brentano 1925, 179-183). In view of the fact that consciousness
and specific cognitive operations, particularly with an interest in
intentionality, have become thematic in recent decades, it seems to be
quite in order to take a new look at Marty's philosophy of
language as not entirely unrelated to the philosophical landscape of
our times.


### 3.1 The Origin of Language



Though Marty did, as already indicated, focus much of his work on the
description of language as it is, his first book *On the Origin of
Language* (Marty 1875) was concerned with its origin. In this
book, Marty already applies some of the main ideas of his later
descriptive semasiology (see the following section) to refute two
opposing views on the origin of language - nativism and
empiricism - and to establish his own alternative, more
teologically oriented explanation of the beginnings of language.
"Nativism" was represented especially by Heymann
Steinthal, Moritz Lazarus, and Wilhelm Wundt, (See also the lengthy
appendix against Wundt in Marty 1908a, 543-738) - and goes
back to Wilhelm Humboldt's concept of unconscious and inborn
language instinct and to his view of the essential relation of
thinking to speaking. Nativism claims that language develops out of
sound-producing reflexes and associations of these sounds with certain
sensations and images. Thus, on the nativist view, language as the
purposeful manifestation of inner life arose from behavior which was
originally altogether unintended (Marty 1875, 19). In other words,
language is originally "native" and not something created
or "invented" in human conscious activity.
"Empiricism", represented by Herbart, Grimm, Lotze, and
Whitney, denies necessary connection of thinking to speaking as well
as all inborn relations between certain thoughts and certain
articulated sounds (Marty 1875, 44-45). Marty cannot accept
nativism for the complete lack of empirical evidence in its favor and
discusses many conceptual confusions on its part (Marty 1875,
18-43). While he feels much more at home in the camp of
empiricism and shares its critical stance toward nativism, he insists
that language is teleological in character rather than mechanistic and
is of course supported by the psychology of intentionality. Marty
maintains that language originated from the basic human need to
communicate and cooperate and was purposeful from the outset. This
need motivated conscious, but unplanned and unreflected formation of
syntactic forms and lexical means for purposeful externalization of
inner life through articulated signs. Moreover, he uses associative
mechanisms to explain origins of syntactic forms of language and to
describe how new syntactic forms and vocabulary were suggested and
brought about by using already established meanings of expressions in
new contexts (see also the explanation of Marty's concept of
inner form below). Marty later published a series of ten articles
"On Speech Reflex, Nativism, and Purposeful Formation of
Language" (Marty 1884b, Marty 1886, Marty 1889, Marty 1890,
Marty 1891, Marty 1892a) in which he continued to defend his this view
and engaged in extensive polemics against new formulations of the
opposing views. These views were in large measure developed out of
Herbartian psychological theories and also meshed in with the whole
program of a "psychology of peoples"
(*Volkerpsychologie*). Much of the psychology, including
alleged observations of children and so-called primitive people, used
to support nativism is on his view highly erroneous. Marty's
defense of his theory in opposition to nativism involves descriptive
semasiology, which was to be developed more fully in his subsequent
writings, especially his main work, and is indeed the center piece of
his philosophical endeavors.


### 3.2 Descriptive Semasiology



In the nineteenth century the term "semasiology"
(*Semasiologie*) was often used in reference to linguistic
investigations concerning meaning. Marty often uses this term in order
to designate his philosophical investigations concerning language
which are indeed by and large concerned with meaning. Other terms
which are used by him more or less synonymously are
"semantics" (*Semantik*) and "universal
grammar" (*allgemeine Grammatik*), especially in
reference to his synchronic undertaking. Among Marty's
contemporaries Husserl spoke of "pure grammar" (*reine
Grammatik*), which was, however, conceived of as part of formal
logic (Husserl 1901, 286-321). Insofar as Marty's
universal grammar is a semasiology developed in the framework of
Brentanian descriptive psychology and with a look to universal forms
underlying communicative intention, Marty thinks that his endeavor is
quite distinct from - and of greater philosophical significance
than - Husserl's foray into the grammatical domain which
attempts to single out and describe pure logical grammar *a
priori* and in abstraction from the communicative function of
language (Husserl 1901, Marty 1908a, 56-63, Seron 2017,
309-324, Leblanc 2017, 325-344).



A crucial distinction in Marty's descriptive semasiology is that
between those expressions which have meaning independently and those
which do not (Marty 1908a, 205 ff.). He calls the former
"autosemantic expressions" (*autosemantische
Ausdrucke*) or simply "autosemantica"
(*Autosemantika*), as exemplified by names and sentences of
various kinds, whereas he calls the latter "synsemantic
expressions" (*synsemantische Ausdrucke*) or simply
"synsemantica" (*Synsemantika*), as exemplified by
particles ("and", "if", etc.) as well as
inflected nouns and verbs.



It is also of importance here to understand Marty's concept of
inner linguistic form. This concept had been introduced by Wilhelm von
Humboldt in order to designate the total worldview
(*Weltanschauung*) of a people who speaks the language in
question and even tied with the notion of the spirit of a people
(*Volksgeist*), but also with imagery that occurs in the usage
of a language. While such notions as worldview and the spirit of a
people play no role in Marty's descriptive semasiology, he still
finds it appropriate to designate the inner linguistic form (or
"etymon"), understood as "a presentation which
serves as a link of association between the outwardly perceivable sign
and its meaning" (Marty 1884: 298), whether it be autosemantic
or synsemantic. Outstanding examples of inner linguistic form are
provided by the ideas behind various figurative expressions which are
built into a language, e.g. "to give hand" and "to
sweep an opinion aside". Here images are called to mind, as can
readily be confirmed by inner perception, and are useful in making us
understand what is meant, without resorting to more complex
expressions. In his later work Marty differentiated the figurative
inner form of expression, as this has just been indicated, from the
constructive inner form (Marty 1908, 144-150). Since our
understanding of utterances in communication is a gradual process,
outer expression of uncompleted utterances bring about certain
accessory presentations which build expectation with regard to the
whole meaning of the not yet finished utterances. Different languages,
or, for example, different rhetorical styles and artistic means of
expression use different typical forms of preparatory constructions of
meanings. These preparatory presentations (inner constructive forms)
bound with outer forms of partial expressions cannot be equated with
the meaning of the utterance which appertains only to the whole
expression once its utterance is finished. Though Marty was by no
means unique among the linguists and philosophers of language after
von Humboldt in making use of such a concept, he was also critical of
many of his contemporaries, especially the nativists, who were, on his
view, conflating the inner linguistic forms of expressions and their
meanings. Such a conflation, he maintains, was already made by von
Humboldt, for the worldview of a people who speaks a given language is
more accurately identified with the meanings conveyed by applications
of language and not with images or other inner forms which link these
expressions with the meanings. Moreover, Marty finds some of his
contemporaries, such as Berthold Delbruck, to be involved in a
confusion between inner and outer linguistic form (i.e. the
perceivable part of linguistic sign). This last point is also related
to Marty's efforts to argue that there is a distinction between
a linguistic expression and its meaning. As obvious as this may be at
present, some of Marty's contemporaries wished to identify the
two - perhaps as an after-effect of Schelling's
"identity philosophy" which Brentano had already laid to
rest in Wurzburg. Accordingly Marty's semasiology is
concerned with the *complex unity* (not identity) of
"linguistic expression - inner linguistic form -
meaning".



As already noted, Marty's approach to language differs from that
of many others insofar as he makes the notion of intentionality
central in his investigations. In his earlier work he followed
Brentano in adopting an immanentist version of this notion. That is to
say, for the early Marty the thesis that every mental phenomenon
intentionally refers to an object is equivalent to saying that there
is an object (content) immanent to every phenomenon of mind. In his
letter to Husserl (reprinted in Schuhmann 1994, 71-74, English
translation in Mulligan 1990, 228-232), Marty points out the
problem of non-existing objects as the main motivation of this theory.
Intention, as any proper relation, requires the existence of its
terms. If an intention exists, its intentional object must exist as
well. However, the actual object of the intentional presenting does
not always exist. Therefore the actually non-existing presented object
does not exist really but only intentionally and immanently
"in" the presentation. While the transcendent object of
presentation sometimes exist and sometimes does not, the immanent
object (or immanent content as it was also called) of presentation
always exists. Furthermore, judgments and phenomena of love and hate
have their own immanent contents - the judged as such (the being
or non-being of the presented object) and the loved and hated as such
(the positive or negative value of the presented object). Marty was of
consequently critical of other philosophers, such as William James (in
connection with the thesis that an idea never occurs twice in
consciousness, as stated in James 1890, especially Chapter XII), for
failing to distinguish between the object immanent to an act of
consciousness and the real object allegedly external to consciousness
(Marty 1916a, 139 ff.). As the immanentist understanding of
intentionality was eventually abandoned by Brentano and other students
of his (see for example posthumously published collection of
Brentano's texts, Brentano 1966), Marty is no exception in this
regard. In his main work he accordingly attempted another formulation
of the notion of intentionality. The consciousness of an object is
taken by Marty to be a similarity (*Ahnlichkeit*),
"similarizing" (*Verahnlichung*), likeness
(*Gleichheit*), conformity (*Konformitat*), or
adequation (*Adaquation*) between the mental act and its
object, though he stresses that this similarity (to use one of his
terms) is purely mind-dependent (*ideell*) and indeed
altogether unique to these phenomena (Marty 1908a, 333, 406 ff.,
413-418, 423 ff., 430, 444, 453, 481, 487). As stated, the ideal
similarity or ideal (*Ahnlichkeit*),
"similarizing" appertains to the intentional act, not to
the immanent object, for there are no immanent objects. These are now
viewed by Marty as linguistic fictions suggested by the inner form of
such expressions as "presented object", "judged
object", "loved object" etc. Marty's
alternative concept of intentionality as similarity is, without a
doubt, one of the most difficult aspects of his descriptive
psychology. Ideal similarity is for him in no way the same as the
similarity to be found among physical objects (Marty 1908a, 408).
While similarity in the ordinary sense has a negative character and
allows for degrees of more and less, ideal similarity holding between
the act and its object lacks these features (Marty 1908a). However,
the fact that ideal and ordinary similarity are both grounded
relations and that in both cases we find a relative determination next
to a correlation (Marty 1908a, 413) makes it possible to use the word
"similarity" in an analogical way to characterize
"intentional directedness" of mental phenomena (for
further explanations see Chrudzimski 2001, Cesalli & Taieb 2013,
Cesalli 2017b, Majolino 2017). It should be noted that correlation of
the act and its object is now formulated by Marty in counterfactual
terms: if the object of the mental act existed, it would necessarily
be the correlate of that act. Therefore the intentional being of the
in-existing immanent object is not required for the act to count as
intentional. Marty is very critical of philosophers who make
intentionality central in their treatment of mind and yet fail to take
into account mind-dependent likeness. Such a philosopher, according to
Marty, is Husserl, who allegedly construes intentionality in terms of
the relation of sign to signified object and thereby falls into an
unacceptable semanticism (*Semantizismus*) (Marty 1908a, 762;
for a discussion of Marty and Husserl, see Rollinger 1999,
209-244). It is, however, fortunate that a good deal of what he
says of mind and language does not require an understanding of this
concept.



It is difficult to state Marty's theory of meaning for two
reasons. First of all, he speaks of meaning in at least two different
senses. In the "narrower" sense, Marty regards the
contents of mental acts as the meaning of an expression. In the second
sense, which might be called the meaning in the wider sense (Marty
1908a, 291-292), he also considers the meaning of an expression
to be its communicative function. In this wider sense the meaning of a
statement, for instance, is not merely something contained in the
consciousness of the speaker who makes the statement or even some sort
of entity that exists outside of his or her consciousness. The meaning
of the statement can rather only be formulated by saying that the
interlocutor intends to evoke a like judgment on the side of the
hearer - what he or she judges should be accepted. This is the
so called primary communicative intention of the speaker. Moreover, by
uttering a statement the speaker secondarily manifests that he or she
judges that such and such is the case. This manifestation of the act
of judging is the so called secondary communicative intention of the
speaker, which serves as means for attaining the primary goal (Marty
1908a, 284n.; Cesalli & Mulligan 2017, 260; Janousek 2017,
243). Here, however, we confront the second reason why it is difficult
to shortly state Marty's theory of meaning in general terms. The
primary communicative function of an expression will vary according to
the type of expression in question. It is thus indispensable to
elaborate on meaning as communicative function by examining its
variety. This will be done here with respect to the autosemantica, as
indeed Marty does at length in his main work.



It is in the classification of autosemantica where Brentanian
descriptive psychology especially comes into play in Marty's
descriptive semasiology. While Brentano had maintained that every act
of the mind belongs to one of three classes, namely presentations,
judgments, and acts of love and hate, Marty says that autosemantica
likewise fall into three classes, namely names
(*Vorstellungssuggestive*), statements (*Aussagen*) and
expressions of interest (*Emotive*), each one corresponding to
a class of mental phenomena. In the elaboration of his view he opposes
three alternative views concerning the division of such phenomena held
by certain predecessors and contemporaries: 1) the prevailing view of
the nineteenth century in the German speaking world, namely that the
phenomena of mind are to be divided into thinking, feeling, and
willing, 2) the view attributed to Herbart as well as other
philosophers, namely that the mind consists only of presentations (or,
as one might also say, ideas), and 3) the view of Meinong and his
followers in the Graz school, that there is a class of mental
phenomena, called "assumptions" (*Annahmen*), which
lies "between" presentations and judgments (see Meinong
1902, Marty 1905, Meinong 1906, Meinong 1910). We will begin with a
brief discussion of Marty's treatment of statements, then we
will briefly address emotives and conclude with names.



Statements (*Aussagen*) make up the autosemantica which express
judgments. This class of expressions received considerable attention
from Marty in his early work (Marty 1884), especially with regard to
the problem of statements which apparently have no subject, so-called
"impersonals" (*Impersonalien*). While statements
of this kind were a grave embarrassment to the traditional conception
of judgment as predication, Marty argued at length, in opposition to
the views of many philosophers, psychologists, and linguists, that the
impersonals are best understood as expressing judgments in which
something is accepted or rejected or, as one may alternatively
formulate his view, regarded as existent or non-existent. If, for
instance, the impersonal "It is raining" is under
consideration, there is no need to theorize about a mysterious entity
to which "it" refers, for this statement only expresses
the judgment that there exists the event of raining within the
speakers vicinity. Such an approach to impersonals had already been
advanced by a specialist in the Slavic languages (Miklosich 1883; cf.
Brentano 1889: 109-133). Marty cites this philological work with
approval, but it is clear that the main inspiration behind his
approach is Brentano.



In his attempt to defend the Brentanian theory of judgment in the
linguistic domain Marty makes an effort to reformulate various
statements in order to show that they are actually instances of
accepting or rejecting. As Brentano maintained that the judgments in
the traditional square of opposition are to be exhibited by construing
the universal ones as negative ("Every *A* is
*B*" = "There is no *A* which is not
*B*", "No *A* is *B*" =
"There is no *A* which is *B*") and the
particular ones as affirmative ("Some *A* is
*B*" = "There is an *A* which is
*B*", "Some *A* is not *B*" =
"There is an *A* which is not *B*"), Marty
finds such reformulations acceptable. Moreover, he identifies a class
of judgments such as "This tree is green" or "This
tree is not green" as double judgments (*Doppelurteile*),
which is again a notion he explicitly takes from Brentano (Marty 1897:
179 ff.). What is peculiar about double judgments is that the subject
term, e.g. "this tree", already expresses an instance of
acceptance (the tree is) and there is another affirmation or rejection
(*Zuerkennen, Aberkennen*) of "Being-so" expressed
by the grammar form of a predicate, e.g. "is green", built
upon this acceptance. The double judgment then, according to Marty,
could be formulated as having the form " the green-being of the
[already existentially affirmed] tree is" for the predicative
affirmation and " the green-being of the [already existentially
affirmed] tree is not" for the predicative negation (Marty 1895,
263f., see also Chrudzimski 2009). It follows that for Marty all
predication of "Being-so" involves existential affirmation
of the subject. While the statements which belong to the four classes
identified in the traditional square of opposition are regarded as
"pseudo-categorical" (i.e. having the appearance of being
predicative without actually being so) because they are better
expressed in the existential form rather than the predicative one,
double judgments on Marty's view are to be considered
categorical because they cannot be properly expressed without the
subject-predicate grammar form. Moreover, he also identifies certain
statements as "categoroid", namely those disjunctive and
hypothetical statements which do not express double judgments.
Marty's attempt to regard these as instances of acceptance and
rejection, which can ultimately be reformulated existentially,
involves him in some rather intricate considerations.



While Marty ascribes to statements the communicative function (and
thus in one, normatively viewed, sense the meaning) "that one
should judge as the speaker does", he points out that a demand
on the interlocutor's will is not thereby made as it is in the
case of certain other linguistic expressions, e.g. commands. A
statement is, by contrast to these, only "a suggestive of
judging" (*ein* *Suggestiv zum Urteilen*) (Marty
1908a 288). Moreover, there are certain aspects of the judgment which
cannot be communicated in a statement, namely whether the judgment is
evident or blind and whether it is apodictic or assertoric (Marty
1908a 289 ff.). As Marty further elaborates, he says:



> 
> In a narrower sense, however, we call ... something in addition
> the meaning of a statement. Whoever states, "*A*
> is", provided that he himself judges so, treats *A* as an
> entity and asks of the interlocutor as well that he, with trust in
> this externalized conduct of the speaker, should treat *A* as
> an entity. In this regard we say also that the statement makes known
> the being of *A* and aims at making it known or believes that
> it is doing so and *means* it in this sense. And since we often
> also designate the being of *A* or that *A* is, also
> *A*'s being-*B* or that *A* is *B*,
> as the content of the judgment "*A* is" or
> "*A* is *B*" and again designate the
> non-being of *A* and *A*'s not-being-*B* as
> the content of the judgment "*A* is not" or
> "*A* is not *B*", we can also say: the
> statement makes known the content of judgment and *means* it in
> this sense. (Marty 1908a: 292)
> 



When Marty speaks of the meaning of a statement as the content of the
judgment which is thereby expressed, he is well aware of opening the
possibility of comparisons with similar concepts in the work of
various philosophers, e.g. the proposition in itself (*Satz an
sich*) (Bolzano), the state of affairs (*Sachverhalt*)
(Stumpf and Husserl), and the objective (*Objektiv*) (Meinong).
Accordingly he faces the same difficulty that these others also had to
face, i.e. determining the ontological status of such a thing (or
non-thing). It is Marty's view that contents of judgment exist
in the sense that it is correct to accept them and are furthermore
non-real. What it means to be real for the mature Marty is to be
involved in a causal nexus. (On his earlier view, real was whatever
could be subsumed under the Aristotelian categories.) While he regards
physical and mental things or events as real, he maintains that
contents of judgment, i.e. the meanings of statements "in the
narrower sense", have only a co-becoming (*Mitwerden*),
which does not allow them to be characterized as real. Thus, in
working out a descriptive semasiology of statements Marty puts forward
a very important ontological thesis.



The ontological thesis that there are in addition to real objects also
non-real ones such as contents of judgment was for Marty an important
departure from Brentanian doctrine. Though Brentano and the early
Marty had allowed for *irrealia* strictly as objects immanent
to consciousness, Brentano came to reject this theory in favor of
saying that the non-real consists only of linguistic fictions. Marty
himself came to have misgivings about the notion of immanent objects
and his term "content of judgment" in his main work must
not be taken as an indication of something that actually or
"intentionally" exists in consciousness. However, Marty,
who never accepted Brentano's explanation of truth in terms of
evidence, kept the mind-independent contents of judgments to ground
his theory of the correctness or objectivity of judgments. A judgment
is correct when it is ideally adequate to the judgment content, that
is to the state of affairs (Marty 1916, 155-156, see also Smith
1995, Chrudzimski 2014, Cesalli & Mulligan, 2017). When we
apprehend judgment as being evident we co-apprehend its ideal adequacy
with the content judgment Marty 1908, 314), or in other words, in
evidence correctness of judgments manifests itself (Marty 1916, 157).
It should be noted that Marty's contents of judgment must not be
construed as ideal universal objects, such as meanings according to
Husserl's view in the *Logical Investigations*. While
Husserl maintains that meanings are species (of meaning-giving acts or
of certain parts of such acts) and are as such timeless (Husserl 1901:
23-105), Marty ascribes to them a co-becoming which of course
involves temporality and certainly does not characterize them as
self-subsisting species, but rather as founded or supervenient
entities. Contents of judgment and other non-real entities, as Marty
understands them, do not include universals of any kind, whether these
be genera or species. In short, Husserl's view on such matters
is closer to some sort of Platonism than Marty's is. There
remains a very definite alliance with Aristotle in Marty's
ontology (Marty 1908a, 337 f.).



As Marty regards statements as autosemantica which manifest judgments
and communicate to the interlocutor that he or she is to judge in the
same way, he characterizes emotives or interest-demanding expressions
(*interesseheischende Ausdrucke*) as those autosemantic
which manifest not only emotions, but also volitions (which for him
and Brentano belong to one and the same class), and communicate to the
interlocutor that he or she is to feel or will in the same way. The
analogy between statements and judgments is upheld by Marty to great
lengths.



In view of this analogy the following passage is of particular
interest:



> 
> Is an analogue of the judgment-content really missing in the realm of
> interest? I don't believe it is. To be sure, a thoroughly
> *subjectivistic* and in this sense erroneously
> "psychologistic" view is very widespread, which does not
> accept the distinction between what is merely loveable as a matter of
> fact and what is worthy of love and between a blind compulsion and an
> "ought" in the sense of a norm of correctness in this
> realm. However, even though it calls itself "value
> theory", it is still unable to give a satisfactory account of
> the concept of value and disvalue just as the analogous psychologistic
> doctrine in the realm of epistemology is unable to give such an
> account of the concept of the true and the false. Only if value and
> disvalue are truly analogues of the true and the false ... can
> there also be in the realm of interest an analogue of correctness and
> incorrectness, and both are possible only if there is something
> independent of the subjective phenomenon of loving and hating and in
> this sense objective that establishes that correctness of mental
> conduct, just as the being of the object is the objective foundation
> for the correctness of the acceptance thereof, its non-being for the
> rejection thereof. Without such a firm basis and standard all talk of
> value and disvalue, good and evil, and also of what is in accordance
> with duty and what is against it, etc. would be without natural
> justification and sanction (Marty 1908, 370).
> 



Thus we see that in his descriptive semasiology of emotives Marty puts
forward a very important axiological thesis. Certain acts of love and
hate can be correct as well. This correctness manifests itself in
evident acts of love and hate and consists in their ideal adequacy to
the value and disvalue of the object, or a state of values
(*Wertverhalt*) as Marty sometimes calls these contents. The
mention of epistemology in the passage quoted should also not go
unnoticed. There is accordingly a very strong sense in which
Marty's descriptive semasiology involves a very forcefully
stated anti-psychologism in all domains of philosophy. The price of
this anti-psychologism, however, is an ontology that allows for
non-real entities, whether they be the objective correlates of
judgments or interest.



The final class of autosemantica for Marty consists of names and other
expressions which serve to express presentations. He calls these
"presentational suggestives"
(*Vorstellungssuggestive*) and devotes a very extensive chapter
of his main work to the treatment of them. (See Marty 1908,
383-489). He ascribes to these a communicative function just as
he did to the other autosemantica. "As the direct purpose of a
statement is to evoke in the interlocutor a certain judgment",
says Marty, "a presentational suggestive also and especially a
name primarily in its proper usage aims at awakening in him a certain
presentation, and as that primary intention is ultimately designated
as the meaning of a statement, the analogue is called the meaning of
the name" (Marty 1908a, 384 f.). The autosemantica which have
such function (meaning in the wider sense) and are everywhere
acknowledged as being able to stand as subjects in a predicative
connection are called "names", as exemplified by "a
triangle", "a rectangle", "an equilateral
triangle", "a human being who has committed a
crime", "something red", "something
round", "a red thing that is round", and also
infinitives such as "to get up early" and "to have
one's hands full". As regards the presentational
suggestives which are not names, Marty points out the usage of
language in poetry and fiction (Marty 1908, 474 ff.). While the
sentences used in such instances may resemble statements, for the most
part they have the function of expressing and evoking presentations
and are not actually statements. However, these whole sentences are
peculiar insofar as the relevant presentations have contents of
judgment as their objects. Such presentations of contents of judgment
are on Marty's view the acts of consciousness which Meinong
erroneously identified as assumptions (Marty 1905).



While it is thus possible to present contents of judgment and
presentational suggestives also have a communicative function that is
analogous to that of statements and emotives, the question arises as
to whether there are also contents (i.e. special objects) of
presentation analogous to the contents (states of affairs, states of
values) in the other two cases of mental acts. In this regard Marty
undertakes to criticize his older view that there are indeed such
contents under the heading of "immanent objects" (Marty
1908a 384-406). He no longer holds this view in his later
writings and also rejects the notion of a thorough-going analogy
between presentations and mental acts of the other two classes. As
regards the old thesis that consciousness is always the consciousness
of something, he endeavors to preserve this by appealing to the
already mentioned notion of mind-dependent conformity to an object,
which may be either actually or potentially named by the
presentational suggestive (Marty 1908a 407-431). Thus Marty
differs the meaning (*Bedeutung*) in the sense of the
conceptual presentation to be evoked and the reference of names
(*das Gennante*). He further offers interesting discussions of
the differences concerning reference of general and singular names
(definite descriptions and proper names). General names refer via
their conceptual presentative content (mediantibus conceptibus -
Marty 1908, 436) to indefinitely many objects of the extension fixed
by the conceptual presentation. Singular descriptions are for Marty
names which name via their complex conceptual concept definitely, but
essentially incompletely, since a concept, however complex it is, can
never "exhaust" the individuality of the object. Therefore
various complex concepts can be used for one individual -
"for example, teacher of Alexander the Great and founder of the
peripatetic School for Aristotle" (Marty 1908, 438). Proper
names refer definitely, but they leave completely undecided what
objects is to be named by them and even what individual presentation
is to be evoked by their use (Marty 1908, 439). The reference is fixed
in the context of their introduction and the individual presentation
evoked by the name can never be considered as the meaning of the
proper name (Landgrebe 1934, 83-90, Gabriel 1990). Finally, it
is also noteworthy that the autosemantic character of names does not
stand on an equal footing with the autosemantic character of fictive
statements, actual statements and emotives. To form an actual or
fictive (merely presented) speech, which both are for Marty practical
autosemantic expressions (*praktische Autosemantica*), we never
use names in isolation. However even when used in isolation, names
still have a certain kind of complete meaning in contrast to, for
instance, mere particles or flexed substantives - due to this
completeness Marty views names as theoretical autosemantic expressions
(*theoretische Autosemantica*). (Marty 1908, 476-477,
Funke 1924, 23) Moreover, he continues to uphold the thesis, as
already found in Brentano's work, that all mental acts which are
not themselves presentations are founded on presentations (Marty
1908a: 479-489).


## 4. Space and Time



Though Marty's publications are almost exclusively concerned
with linguistic matters, he lectured extensively in all areas of
philosophy. Most of his literary remains have indeed been left
unpublished. (See the catalogue in Bokhove and Raynaud 1990:
250-264.) The extensive correspondence with Brentano, most of
which is also unpublished, is of course of great interest in
connection with both of these philosophers. No ultimate assessment of
Marty's philosophical accomplishment will be possible until this
material, including lecture notes, letters, and other manuscripts of
interest, becomes accessible. A couple of years after his death,
however, a work by him on space and time was published (Marty, [eds.]
Eisenmeier et al. 1916c). This work gives us a rare look into
Marty's mature ontology. Though the resulting ontology of space
and time is very much in line with Newtonian physics, it should be
noted that Marty's work on space and time was published
posthumously in the same year in which Einstein's celebrated
paper on general relativity appeared (Einstein 1916). Unlike Brentano,
he did not have the advantage of living long enough to have the chance
of responding to the new concept of space-time that won the day in
physics (Brentano, [ed.] Korner and Chisholm 1976: 29 f.). The
work may nonetheless prove of to be of value at least insofar as it
contains criticisms of the views of such outstanding philosophers as
Leibniz, Berkeley, Kant, and Lotze.



In the work under consideration Marty argues for the thesis that space
and time exist objectively as non-real entities. This thesis is
maintained in opposition not only to the various philosophical systems
in which space or time is regarded as subjective, e.g. as an *a
priori* form of intuition, but also in opposition to
Brentano's later view, according to which space and time is to
be regarded as a linguistic fiction used to describe real things in
their various modes. While it is indeed a misfortune that Marty is
relying on a discarded view from the standpoint of physics, his thesis
that space and time are non-real entities and his defense of a
container conception of space (Johansson 2019, 99) must be
distinguished from his Newtonian presuppositions. Just as followers of
Kant have managed to adhere to his views on space and time in spite of
emergence of non-Euclidean geometries and the theory of relativity,
Marty's basic ontological view on these matters can be
considered apart from such developments, however important they may be
(for a contemporary defense of Marty's conception of space see
Johansson 2019).


## 5. Marty's Legacy



As a professor in Prague Marty managed to exercise considerable
influence, though this influence in many cases amounted to winning
converts to Brentano's philosophy, even on points where he and
Brentano diverged. Among these converts were Oskar Kraus, Alfred
Kastil, and Hugo Bergmann. The former two were of course very active
in editing Brentano's writings, many of which were taken from
his literary remains. Though the resulting editions were not done
according to the standards of critical editing and will ultimately
have to be replaced, they served for a long time to keep
Brentano's thought alive. Marty was accordingly very important
in the continued interest among philosophers in Brentano through two
world wars and an ever-changing philosophical climate that has not
always been entirely conducive to the intellectual orientation of
Brentano, Marty, or other students of Brentano.



As regards the reception of Marty's own philosophical views,
this can be found in the case of the Prague Linguistic Circle which
arose after his death (Leska 1995) and also to some extent in
Polish philosophy (Wolenski 1990). Moreover, Marty was by no
means unknown among the Munich phenomenologists (Schuhmann 1990) and
may well, with his emphasis on communicative function, have had a hand
in their theories of speech acts. The most salient case of the
reception of Marty, however, is that of Karl Buhler's
theory of language, in which Marty's contribution is explicitly
acknowledged (Buhler 1934). Be this as it may, Marty's
views still await further examination and possibly further absorption
into the continuing developments of linguistics and philosophy of
language. The lament which was expressed more than eighty years ago
(Funke 1924), that Marty's work had not been sufficiently
appreciated by the linguists of that time, can still very well be
expressed today. The main obstacle here, aside from the already
mentioned charge of psychologism, is the difficulty involved in
reading his writings. While Meinong and Husserl wrote sentences which
seem to go on forever, the polemics that Marty incessantly conducts
make his works even less palatable than theirs for many a reader,
especially since the targets of his polemics are in many cases authors
who are either forgotten or known by less than a handful of
specialists. It is thus no wonder that no extensive philosophical text
of his has been translated into English until recently (Marty
2010a-2010d). Nevertheless, a case can be made, as this has
briefly been indicated in the foregoing discussion, that the voice of
Marty was unique in philosophy of mind and especially in philosophy of
language and perhaps in ontology as well. By no means have the
possibilities of drawing philosophical sustenance from his work been
exhausted.