The Puzzle of Empty Formal Indications: On the ‘Deferred’ Meaning of Heidegger's Language

Abstract

Heidegger's notion of philosophical concepts as “formal indications” is rightly viewed as a crucial development. The idea of formal indication is partly intended to answer concerns that phenomenology objectivizes conscious life. Formal indication responds—in what would become a signature feature of much of Heidegger's early work—by setting up a unique dependency of the meaning of phenomenological concepts on their “enactment” in the first‐personal life of the investigator or reader. Commentators have appropriately wondered whether this move succeeds. Yet relatively little emphasis has been placed on the potential problem of underdetermination: whether this model of deferring meaning to “enactment” leaves the reader with a sufficient understanding of the term that they know what to enact and (hopefully) gain some positive self‐understanding through it. This problem becomes more or less acute depending on how we model the “deferred meaning” of formal indication. Here I study candidate models of “deferred meaning,” including those prominent in the literature, to determine whether any are suitable to model the meaning‐structure of formal indication and stave off the underdetermination problem.