Hey there! I hope the phenomenologists among you can help me with my question about the Prolegomena to Pure Logic (i.e., the first part of Husserl's Logical Investigations), Chapter 8, §49-§51. I am reading Findlay's translation published by Routledge in 2001 and reprinted afterwards. I apologise for the length of the post, this isn't something I could explained in less words.

The three sections concern the third prejudice of the psychologist (as in psychologism). According to this prejudice, the "peculiar feeling which guarantees the truth of the judgement to which it attaches" (p 115), i.e., inner/inward evidence, must be guided by the logical laws which are by definition concerned with the truth. That is, we know when we judge correctly. There is a peculiar feeling to it. And since logic examines the truth, it must be involved in this mental act. Logical laws tell us what form must a judgement have to be inwardly evident. Therefore, logical laws are of psychological nature: they are natural, empirical laws.

Since Husserl is an anti-psychologist, he argues against this on two levels. Firstly (§50), he simply says that yes, logical laws ("A is true") can be transformed into propositions determining the form, or maybe just saying something about this form, of an inwardly evident judgement ("It is possible for anyone to judge A to be true in an inwardly evident manner"). But this does not make the proposition per se empirical, it is still an ideal, logical truth. Although the logical law has a certain psychological utility, it is still logical.

I somewhat understand this but what follows (§51) is really confusing for me. Essentially, Husserl emphasises the fundamental difference between the real and the ideal. To this, he adds an analysis of the feeling of inner evidence. He says that the inward evidence is by no means a feature or an object of an experience, it is the experience per se. That is, an inwardly evident correct judgement is the experience of truth...? It is a mental, empirical apprehension of...? And here I got lost. At one point, he says that "Truth is an Ideal, whose particular case is an actual experience in the inwardly evidence judgement" or "inward evidence is nothing but the experience of truth" (p 121). A few lines later, he adds that "the experience of agreement between meaning and what is itself present, meant, between the actual sense of an assertion and the self-given state of affairs, is inward evidence: the Idea of this agreement is truth [notice no capital T], whose ideality is also its objectivity." So what is actually inner evidence? Is it an experience of truth (or Truth) or an experience of an agreement between the sense of an assertion and the state of affairs? If the latter, where is the truth in all this? Is it somewhat emergent from the agreement of an assertion and the state of affairs? Or is it the content of the assertion? The object of the assertion? The meaning of the assertion?

I have a very vague feeling of understanding, but I am far from grasping this part completely. I would appreciate any comments on this part! Just writing it down helped me to understand a bit so any further discussion will surely help even more.