Karl Buhler’s Organon-Model And Its Theoretical Relation With Logical Investigations

Karl Buhler is an important psychologists and linguist in the first half of 20th century. His invention of the Organon-Model has strongly influenced several disciplines of humanities in Europe. One of the most famous Buhler-citations was made by Habermas, who used Buhler’s model in his criticism of philosophy of language, including Husserl’s theory of meaning. But Buhler’s confrontation with Husserl is even earlier than that.Habermas hasn’t talked about the background or context of Buhler’s theory, neither has Chinese philosophy circle ever paid attention to him. The following thesis focuses on the construction and foundation of the Organon-Model based on Buhler’s masterpiece Theory of Language:The Representational Function of Language and analyzes its theoretical characters.In compare with Husserl’s theory of meaning, which is based not only on his semiotic but also on a phenomenological analysis of expression, we can conclude that this approach to the meaning of language could be regarded as an essential foundation of Buhler’s empirical description of the functions of language.In addition, by arguing that Buhler’s three functions cannot be universally applied in each and every language-using circumstance, the following thesis suggests, that Husserl’s conception of "pure grammar" would contribute to the complement of them.