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Looking back to the explanations of the manner of establishing reference to some x, one opposition in particular is worth noting once again and calling for a further development. Whereas an activity of presenting x, as achieved in PER x, does not in itself and alone fully bring about reference to the x as identical and objective, it does, however, establish actual, direct, contact with x itself in its surroundings (see chapter 2). Activities of purely mentally representing like IMA x and REM x, in contrast, do achieve reference to the x as identical and objective, but they do so at the price of not actually, directly, being in contact with x (see chapter 3). The very achievement of reference to something identical and truly objective was claimed to involve that the object quasi-appears in correlation with one's perceiving in the mode of non-actuality. The question can be raised whether this involvement does not just appear to be the case because we have only been studying ways of referring to x as being absent. According to our discussion, in these cases the non-actual (or quasi-) appearing of the object (thing, event etc.) made sense, indeed, and its occurrence led us to define the ways of referring to x in its being absent to be ways of quasi-direct reference to x (see 3.4, in particular).

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-2239-1_5

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