Language and reference

Abstract

Like cognition, the language in which the cognition finds expression has, in principle, a function of synthesis, that is, a function of connecting the cognizing subject with the object of cognition. The language enables the human subject to have epistemic access to the object; in its form and function this epistemic access constitutes the necessary referentiality of the language itself. Cognition must inevitably refer to the object of knowledge in the mode of pre-linguistic sensory and abstract-conceptual accesses, as clearly highlighted by Kant in his basic notion of the synthetic nature and structure of conceptual knowledge. This points to an aporetic ambiguity of the epistemic referentiality of language. In the process of cognition the subject should have an epistemic access to the particular. However, the conceptual cognition departs from the particular and is directed to a general universal idea. The ambiguity between the referential access and the referential departure in cognition necessarily requires a supplementation of the abstractlogical through the pre-linguistic-sensory or aesthetic knowledge, as emphasized by Alexander G. Baumgarten in his doctrine of sensory cognition (cognitio sensitiva) and the aesthetic-logical truth. Such a supplementation within the framework of a theory of perception seems to establish a unique form of epistemological reference, in which the subjective-epistemic access to the particular object does not terminate in the ontological finality of a concept or conceptual cognition, but transcends the cognition into the infinity of an aesthetic perception.