Youding Youding Shen (1908-1989) is a well-known philosopher and an expert in mathematic logic in modern China. He studied philosophy in Tsinghua University in China and then in Harvard University in USA; during 1931 and 1934 he visited and did research in Freiburg and Heidelberg in Germany. In his whole life Youding Shen never pretended to be a phenomenologist. Instead, nowadays he is widely recognized as an important philosopher with the spirit of analytic philosophy. His article “Demarcation of Truth,” together with some classical articles in the field of analytical philosophy, has been reprinted in the book Analytic Philosophy: Retrospection and Reflection, which is recently published in China . It is not incorrect that Youding Shen is not regarded as phenomenologist. He did not attempt to approach inner structure of consciousness descriptively; He did not ask such question as “ is the thinking intuitive or not? if yes, how the thinking works intuitively? And what is the relationship between intuitive thinking and intuitive (sensitive) perception?” He did not ask question about the ontological basis of the unity of intentional act of consciousness and intentional object and the sensitive object of outer world. 90% of his work is about mathematic logic and interpretation of traditional Chinese works of logic. If he used the Husserlian model of epistemology in his research he mentioned Husserl’s name rarely. What he wanted to do was to take the useful results of Husserl’s logical investigations for believable or trustful clarification of ideas of logical grammar. But it is nevertheless incorrect totally ignoring the influence of Husserl’s logical investigations on Youding Shen’s theory of logical grammar, especially of the linguistic expressions. The first introduction of Husserlian phenomenogical philosophy into China was Rengeng Yang’s article 1929. But Youding Youding Shen was the first one, who used the Husserl’s result of Logical Investigations into his own logical investigations in China.

    This paper is aimed to inquire into the relevance of Youding Shen’s analysis of linguistic expressions to Husserl’s works, in particular, his Logical Investigations. Firstly, I make some brief remarks on the possibly historical influence of Husserl on Youding Shen. Secondly, I want to check up his first independent investigation of linguistic expressions to show how far he got into the way to resolve the problem, and what hindered him to reach the level at which Husserl already had arrived in Logical Investigations. Finally, I briefly examine Youding Shen’s mature views on linguistic expressions after he had indeed studied Husserl’s work on logic .

I
    The fact that Youding Shen had intensively studied Husserl’s works on logic, quite unfortunately, has been generally ignored in China: the only exception may be was the American mathematical logician, Hao Wang, who was a former student and friend of Youding Shen. There is still no document to indicate which book(s) of Husserl Youding Shen had really studied. But from the content of Youding Shen’s own work it seems evident that he must have studied Logic Investigations in some details, probably Husserl’s later works on logic as well. But from the very beginning the leading tendency running through his research is logical realism , although he didn’t want to grant it. It is not clear that Youding Shen studied Huserl’s logical theory directly under the guidance of Husserl, despite the fact that Youding Shen’s positions on philosophy of logic explicitly manifested the heavy influence of Husserl. Insofar as the relationship of Youding Shen to Husserl is concerned, the only thing we can know from the documents is that he did really visit Husserl during his stay in Freiburg. The nature of the relationship is hard to spell out, but it is at least true that Youding Shen had interviewed with Husserl. For example, in his letter to Hao Wang, dated on 11th August 1997, Youding Shen wrote in regard to Husserl’s remarks on the literature of phenomenology at that time: “as I was in Germany, Husserl told me, only his own works were well qualified to count as phenomenology, other literature on so-called phenomenology are simply useless.” “But at one point,” continued Youding Shen, “Husserl was correct: we should tell the ‘beginner’ that he must read Husserl’s own work at first and ignore all other works of phenomenology.” After he came back to China in 1934, Youding Shen worked as a professor of philosophy in Tsinghua University, and he held seminars on Husserl and Wittgenstein, in addition to David Hilbert-Bernays’ The Foundations of Mathematics (Grundlagen der Mathematik). However, we didn’t exactly know which books of Husserl were studied in these seminars. The first result of Youding Shen’s research was “On Expression”, which was originally written in English during his stay in USA in 1931, and was published in Chinese in the Chinese journal Philosophical Review in 1935 when he returned to China. In the following years several articles about the same topic were witnessed: “On Demarcation of Truth” (1940), “On Language, Thought and Meaning”(1943), and “On Classification of Meaning”(1944).
      From these articles we can see that as a logician and mathematician, Youding Youding Shen had almost the same philosophical concerns and interests as did Husserl. As much as I know, Youding Shen was the first one in China to try to understand and interpret Russell’s logical theory and Wittgenstein’s critical reflections on natural and artificial language, and to determinate the very nature of linguistic expressions on the basis of the cognitive aspect of their use. He was obviously unsatisfied with both Russell’s and Wttgenstein’s treatment of linguistic expressions. For example, he did not pay credence to the Wittgensteinian dogma that a name is not a complete expression, and thus that “it is impossible for words to occur in two different ways, alone and in proposition.” Neither did he think that Russell was correct in viewing a proof as a series of assertions having certain properties. Furthermore, Youding Shen asked: “what does this serial character consist in?” Is it temporal or not? This critical examination of Wittgenstein’s and Russell’s theory of linguistic expressions paved the way for Youding Shen’s own studies of linguistic expressions.
      The field in which Youding Shen studied is heavily overlapped with the field where Husserl himself had already worked. However, Youding Shen didn’t know the results Husserl had reached at Logical Investigations before he came to Freiburg. In 1935, as the article “On Expression” was published, he said in the Remark, “This article was written in 1931, before I came into acquaintance with Husserl’s works on logic. It represents my first attempt at a formal and structural understanding of the nature of mathematical symbolism, and language in general. Though I found afterwards that some of my results had been anticipated by Husserl, I do not deem it superfluous to have now my article printed as it was written.”

II
    In 1940 he retrospectively talked about the two main goals he sought to realize in the first independent attempt, as shown in “On Expression.” In the first place, purely logical expressions, concepts and propositions, Youding Shen insisted, assert nothing about the reality; nor do they make any presuppositions about reality. In the second place, in the field of non-logical concepts and propositions, the distinction between the metaphysical, scientific and historical concepts lies in the fact of whether they are “pure theoretical” or not. Youding Shen did not follow the Russellian way of language analysis, then popular in China, firstly to analyze sentence in terms of subject and predicate (or proper name, adjective and verb), and then try to reduce them into rigorous logical terms. Rather, like Husserl, he regarded all language phenomena as expressions, and tried to classify them into several kinds in the light of the phenomenal characters, for example, whether or not they have the term occurrence, genuine and apparent occurrence, ligament and insulable, effectual and ineffectual, communicative and self-expressive expression.
    At first he distinguished the expressions from marks (signs), holding that expression has, as general shape, a meaning, and gives a mark (a sign) a meaning. But he didn’t, as Husserl had done in Logical Investigation, distinguish the indicating function of a mark from the signifying function (Bedeuten) of an expression. With the distinction between apparent and genuine occurrences of an expression, it seems that Youding Shen had been able to take notice of the difference between the physical side an expression has as an occurrence and the mental side it has as a significant expression. He illustrated this point with the following example: in practicing Chinese Calligraphy with brush, one writes many expressions without actually “using” them. “The marks written are thus only apparent occurrences of the expressions concerned.”
    In the next Youding Shen went on to divide the expressions into ligament (later he used the term ‘partial’ or ‘fragmental’) and insulable (in his mature terminology: ‘independent’ or ‘complete) expressions. The insulable expressions are then divided into communicative and self-expressive ones. According to Youding Shen, Communicative expressions are those that are actually used in a speech. In talking about self-expressive expressions, Youding Shen intended to articulate something like the ideal unity of the content of expression, but then he lacked proper concepts to express this idea. He simply had to explain his still vague idea by saying: “a real judgment is self-expressive,” “It is self-expressive if it states a problem to be thought about and investigated, as a soliloquial precursory to judgment,” and “Self-expressive expressions have to do with discovery and originality.” But we must wonder what he exactly intended to mean by “with discovery and originality to do”, and “as a soliloquial precursory to judgment.” It seems he was saying that the contents of discovery and originality are independent of the speaking acts of doers. That is to say, self-expressive expressions, on his view, seem to signify contents that are objective or ideal. However, he didn’t, like Husserl, substantively distinguish between expressions that assume the form of a statement and those that don’t. It follows that his thought was still fluctuating between the function of intimating (Kundgeben) and the function of signifying (Bedeuten). On the other hand, as he wrote, “A statement used for giving information is communicative, but a real judgment is self-expressive”, “a name is self-expressive or communicative according as it expresses a (soliloquial) contemplation or gives a presentation,” “communicative expressions have to do with education and propagation; self-expressive expressions have to do with discovery and originality”, he seemed to have touched the distinction between the function of intimating and signifying. Moreover, in saying that “an imperative expression is communicative if it expresses a command; it is self-expressive if it expresses a determination of resolution on the part of doer,” he seemed only to pay attention to the difference in the meaning of an expression as reflected on the part of hearer or speaker.
    In the article just mentioned, Youding Shen tried to distinguish between the meaning of an expression and proposition. He thought that the identity in the meaning of expressions is proposition. The purposes for “which the expression can be used through an insulated occurrence of it” completely determine the meaning of an insulable expression. He further noticed that, although the meaning of an insulable expression is determined by the purpose, it is not to be identified with the purpose itself. The reason is that the purpose is psychic, at best metaphysical but still extra-logical, while meaning is purely logical. An effectual occurrence of a complete expression embodies and fulfils the purpose. In order to insist on the ideality of the meaning, he went on to point out that complete meaning does not always have to have some expression since such expression may remain a mere possibility. “For example, it is conceivable that certain transfinite number will never have expressions invented for the sake of mentioning them (singlely), though there is the possibility of some such expressions being invented. Moreover, it is not even necessary that an expressions (which has been invented) should have any actual occurrence at all.”
    After studying Husserl’s work on logic, he made three corrections of the article in the form of appended remarks:

    (1) The characterization of an expression as a general shape involves a confusion between expression and orthographic form.
    (2) This article confounds an actualization of an expression with an individualization (occurrence) of it.
    (3) The view, held by some logicians, that a proof is itself one complex assertion requires a special refutation.

    In the following ten years Youding Shen had been working on the topic so as to improve on his original views on expressions. In this regard, two important articles are “On Demarcation of Truth” (1940) and “On Language, Thought and Meaning “(1943), both of which were written under the influence of Husserl’s work on logic. However, the first one is much more analytically than phenomenologically minded, and this is probably why it is reprinted in Analytic Philosophy: Retrospection and Reflection. Before discussing the second article in some detail, I need first say something about the first article.

III
    In order to philosophically defend his idea that purely logical concepts and propositions are independent of reality, Youding Shen tried to divide concepts and propositions into eight classes. The classification is illustrated in the following table, which is found at the end of his article “On Demarcation of Truth.” In what follows I will try to make some improvement on Youding Shen’s classification, and add my own remarks on the classification.

    The borderline between philosophical and non-philosophical

IV-VIII are non-analytical
II,III,IV are metaphysical IV
III Non-pure-analytical but VI V,VI,VII are
I,II,III are analytical Non-categorical Philosophical propositions non-analytical, scientific
but philosophical non-philosophical propositions
II Concepts and philosophical but implicated by analytic and VII
I is logical Non-logical analytic propositions philosophical propositions theoretical
but categorical concepts propositions not implicated
I and V by pure analytical VIII
Pure logical propositions non-philosophical and philosophical historical
concepts general names and propositions concepts and
propositions analytical propositions propositions

    This classification is quite problematic, but here I will not discuss all the problems involved in any detail.
    In class I it is clear that purely logical concepts and propositions assert nothing about reality, because they are formal and tautological, and thus luck content. In class II categorical concepts are all pure concepts except purely logical ones. They do not contain any empirical content, and thus they are a priori concepts. Categorical propositions are propositions such as “the telos of all things are Good.”
    However, Youding Shen was not quite clear about what are philosophical or metaphysical concepts and propositions. He simply asserted that concepts and propositions concerning the problem of universality are, in general, philosophical. He treated class I – VI as philosophical. Furthermore, he emphasized that there is a borderline between the philosophical and the scientific, which should not be overstepped.
    In demonstrating the soundness of his classification, Youding Shen simply identified truth with true proposition. He divided truth into two types: truth in a narrow sense and truth in a broad sense. According to Youding Shen, only those propositions that are necessarily and universally valid are true in the narrow sense . But all true propositions, including propositions about facts, for example, “there is cat on the earth”, are truths in a broad sense. In this article Youding Shen’s use of technical terms was much clear than before. He divided such terms into groups. The first group includes word (or noun), presentation, concept and object. The second group includes sentence, judgment, proposition, and truth. In Youding Shen’s view, the content of presentation (Begriffliches Vorstellen) is concept, and the content of judgment is proposition. Presentation and judgment, when made respectively by means of words and sentences, are concrete and individual occurrences. Both concepts and propositions are general. Furthermore, while the meaning of word is concept, the meaning of sentence is proposition.
    In order to emphasize the independence of concept he introduced an Aristotelian term “Essence” into his theory. On his view, there are two kinds of concept: historical and general. The content of a general concept is the Essence. In the case of a historical concept, there are some individual elements which can only be the indirect content of presentation (Begriffliches Vorstellen), but never be content of presentation (Begriffliches Vorstellen) directly. “Confucius,” for example, is a historical concept, while “horse” is a general concept. “Not only IS there an essence of horse, but there must necessarily be an essence of horse”. Insofar as logical and mathematical concepts and propositions are concerned, the claim that they are necessary and general truths seems plausible if issues concerning paradoxes in the elementary study of mathematic logic are to be ignored. But for general concepts and propositions in nature science the claim seems to me not be true. Such metaphysical claim is neither evident nor demonstrated.
    Youding Shen’s leading concern is with concept and proposition. Concept and proposition are neither identified with presentation (“Begrifflliches Vorstellen”) and judgment, nor with object and state of affairs. In this respect, Youding Shen said:

    The word ‘redness’ presents (or signifies, in my view) the redness, and it indicates the presentation (Begriffliches Vorstellen) of which the object is redness, but its meaning is neither redness nor the presentation (Begriffliches Vorstellen) of redness, but the general content of such presentation (Begriffliches Vorstellen) of redness, namely, the concept of ‘redness’.

    Here the redness has three meanings: the redness which the word presents, the redness in the sense of “presentation (Begriffliches Vorstellen) of redness,” and the redness as such or redness as concept against the redness of object (objective state of affairs). Evidently he used here the distinction Husserl makes in the first Logical Investigation between the intending act of consciousness and intended content of consciousness. However, by reflecting on the differences between thinking and content, he had failed to notice the Husserlian distinction among the intending act of consciousness, and intended content of consciousness and its intuitive fulfillment of it. Therefore he had difficulty in making clear the difference among redness as the content of presentation (Begriffliches Vorstellen), the redness as object of presentation (Begriffliches Vorstellen), and the general content of presentation (Begriffliches Vorstellen). Nonetheless, Such phenomenological terms used by Husserl were introduced three years later in the article “On Language, Thought and Meaning”(1943).

IV
    Eight years ago, with the help of Husserlian theory of expressions, Youding Shen noticed that an error had occurred in his early work: his characterization of an expression as a general shape involved a confusion between expression and orthographic form. Now, when he attempted to anew think about the structure of linguistic expression, the first thing he must do was to clarify that problem (what problem?). He introduced new terms such as expression(辞) and body of expression(辞身), by which he meant the psycho-physical support of an expression. In explaining, Youding Shen said:

    Whenever we hear someone to utter a word or a sentence, we are hearing a series of sound. But we do not treat the utterance as a series of sound. Instead we endow it with a meaning. For us, the series of sound is not only a series of sound but also a ‘body of expression’. In effect, we not merely endow the series of sound with the meaning we ascribe to it, but we also give the same meaning any series of sound that is the same as the particular one.

    If Frank and John utter the “same” series of sound, we ascribe the same meaning to them, and they are two body of the same expression. The possibility of combining an expression(辞) with the suitable physical form is, in Youding Shen’s terminology, the shape of expression (辞模).
    All effective bodies of expression in real speech act are manifestation of thought. In this point, Youding Shen introduced Husserl's terms to clarify thought: thought as act, which is for him only the psychic state of affairs, and thought as what Husserl calls noesis (意念，the character means in Chinese “the thinking of” in consciousness). Noesis (意念) emerges with the act of thinking, but it does not disappear as the act of thinking stopped. Rather noesis (意念) survives the act of thinking and “stays in our heart, and we can call it back again if it is necessary. Moreover, other people can also learn it from you. Your can transfer it to other people. In this way they become public property. … Every noesis has a causal relationship with other noeses.”
    Therefore, Youding Shen called noesis in this sense “general vein noesis (通脉意念)”. But this “general vein noesis (通脉意念)” is not identical with the noesis of an act of thinking: The former is only something potential, and it consists in a unity, much like a general mechanism beyond our psycho-physical mechanism. This mechanism Youding Shen called convention of noeses (意念习), which he viewed as nets of meaning from the other respects.
    Just as in Husserl, noesis is here also the content or direct objectivity of thinking. Our act of thinking, Youding Shen said, “sees” noesis as its object, namely its intentional or intended object(意指对象). But if it is possible, it can be representation of object in the real world. Having this Husserlian idea of epistemology in mind, Youding Shen once again tried to give a clear account of different relationships between the thinking and object. He gave us 4 sentences:

    I. Frank thinks of Monkey king. Comparison with II. Bettina thinks of Monkey king too. Intentionality (self) exists….is actuality is an inward state of affairs not identical Self exists is not actuality is an inward state of affairs not identical Intentional object intended exists is actuality is not an inward state of affairs identical Intending things not exists Object self not exists III. Frank thinks of Gerhard Schröder. Comparison with IV. Bettina thinks of Gerhard Schröder too. Intentionality (self) exists….is actuality is an inward state of affairs not identical Self exists is not actuality is an inward state of affairs not identical Intentional object Intended exists is actuality is not an inward state of affairs identical Intending things exists is actuality is not an inward state of affairs identical Object self exists is actuality is not an inward state of affairs identical

    It seems to me that he used the Husserlian model of epistemology to argue against the main trend of logical positivism prevailing in China at that time. He intended to show why non-scientific expressions, though distinct from scientific expressions, are nonetheless meaningful. The first two sentences have no object in question, but still have meaning in virtue of their intentional object. They are not scientific only because there is nothing in the world for them to correspond to, and thus they are empty. Furthermore, he also used this model to resolve the problem of ambiguity occurring in actual speech when an expression is used by two different persons, or by the same person but in different situations. In such cases, the intentional object as inward state of consciousness is not identical, but as intended content, as one of the “general vein noeses (通脉意念)”, it is identical, or at least partially identical.
    At the end of this article, Youding Shen tried to use this model to reinterpret the distinction Frege makes between Sinn and Bedeutung more exactly. In Youding Shen’s view, “the meaning of an expression is the possible manifestation of intentional content through its possibly effective expression-body.” If we have two intentional objects, we can now compare them in accordance with the object self, that is, what Youding Shen called “general vein noeses (通脉意念).” For example, if Frank thinks of “the sum of 2+5” and Bettina also thinks of “the sum of 2+5”, the two expressions have various intentional objects in the mind of Frank and Bettina. For the meaning of the two expressions are two different things, and they have but the same “general vein noeses (通脉意念)”, namely the sum of 2+5 and the intended thing namely “7”. Therefore, it may be said that the two expressions have the identical meaning, but “the sum of 2+5” have twice realized.

V
    After 1949 Youding Shen, like all philosophers who did not leave Mainland China, stopped his philosophical research, and concentrated on the “non-dangerous” historical research and abstract algebra and mathematic logic. Only after the culture revolution in his private correspondence with his friends Hao Wang did he begin to talk about philosophy, specially Husserl and phenomenology. In all of his publications he mentioned Husserl’s name just once (in 1935). But in his correspondence (33 in total) from 1972 to 1981, he mentioned Husserl at least 20 times! In 1976 Youding Shen held that “Husserl’s Logical Investigations is still the best model for philosophizing in German language”. He interpreted Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology as “unification of vijňaptimātrin subjective idealism and platonic objective idealism”, and thought that such unification “could possibly be unique.” “If we talk about thought, it concerns six different problems: subject, sense, behavior, content, attitude, and object. Content can refer to the content of thought, but can also refer to the content of reality or actuality. Here the content of thought is, in a broad sense, just Husserl’s Bedeutung. Content of actuality can refer to the content of thought which is “restricted” in the act of thinking, but it can also refer to entity which results from an act of thinking of so called ‘mind’. Husserl accepted only the former, and rejected the latter. Philosophically, Youding Shen was not in agreement with Husserl’s philosophy. He said the thought in his article showed the agreement with the “Prinzipial Koordination” between the subjective and objective world just by Richard Avenarius, (1843-96). It seems to me that this interpretation of Husserl’s Philosophy is not correct. Husserl was not against the “Prinzipial Koordination” between the subjective and objective world just by Richard Avenarius.
    I just happened to discover Youding Youding Shen’s unnoticed work on phenomenology short time before I was preparing the paper for PHENOMENOLOGY AS A BRIDGE BETWEEN ASIA AND THE WEST. After I have found it, I was very exiting, and changed at once the topic of my paper. But in the process of composing this paper, I have noticed that much more time and endeavor need to be paid to Youding Shen’s work than I had done. Therefore, I have to stop here, contenting myself to recommend you the work of the first philosopher in China who applied Husserl idea to his research.

    Thank you very much for your attention and your patience for my poor English.