OBJECTIFYING ACT. Objectifying acts—the class of acts denoted by what Husserl takes to be the most precise sense of the term “presentation”— are those acts in which something becomes objective to us in a determinate manner. Objectifying acts may be either pre-predicative or predicative, that is, objectifying acts include both nominal and perceptual acts as well as judgmental and propositional acts. The class of objectifying acts also includes both positing and non-positing acts. Objectifying acts may also involve either intuitive acts that present an object directly and include intuitive fullness or they may be (founded) signifying acts with their signitive intentions that present an object through the medium of a sign—a complex of words, for example.

Hence, an objectifying act presents an object to consciousness, which object might be either an individual or a state of affairs and which object might or might not be meant as existent. The objectifying act establishes both the act’s objective sense and its referent.

In the Logical Investigations, Husserl adopts the view that acts, including objectifying acts, are composed of act-quality and act-matter, and the sense and referent of an act is determined primarily by its matter. Hence, Husserl claims that Franz Brentano’s thesis that every act is either a presentation or based on a presentation is reinterpreted as the claim that every intentional experience is either an objectifying act or based on an objectifying act. In the latter case, the founded act must contain an objectifying act such that the matter of the founded act is (at least in part) the same as the matter of the objectifying act that can be separated out from the founded act. Ultimately, according to Husserl, every act must be grounded in a simple nominal or perceptual act such that the matter of the founded act includes the matter of the objectifying act that presents the unarticulated referent with a certain significance, and such that the quality of the founded act is rooted in the objectifying quality of the underlying act. In the works from Ideas I on, however, Husserl transforms what he had called the matter of the act into the noematic sense contained within the full noema. It is this noematic sense that determines the referent. Hence, although Husserl does not drop the language of objectifying acts, the notion of noematic sense takes over in Husserl’s later philosophy some of the role of the objectifying act. In the later works, in other words, the noematic sense of the founded act must have as a component the noematic sense (objective sense) proper to an originally objectifying act, that is, a nominal or perceptual act that could occur independently of the founded stratum.

Moreover, in works subsequent to the Logical Investigations, Husserl also draws a distinction between significative intentions and signitive intentions. The former are the intentions belonging to objectifying acts, whereas the latter are the intentions belonging to expressive acts. The former present an object with a certain significance, whereas the latter are the intentions belonging to the act expressing in words the sense belonging to the objectifying act. See also FOUNDED MOMENT; INTUITION; JUDGMENT; NOMINAL ACT; PERCEPTION.