Abstract
Positivism knows the ontic status of the world and its individual inhabitants: it pretends to stand outside and observe it. Edmund Husserl's epistemological descriptions unfold over roughly half a century from a subjectivist description of arithmetics to the noetic/noematic description of language and thought, to the question of how egos are realized through processes of 'appresentation' to the exploration of the Lebenswelt in the Crisis and Experience and Judgment. Polysemy in itself does, of course, not question Husserl's distinction between noetic act and noematic content; it merely multiplies their relations. A special piece of equipment in Husserl's toolkit for the description of the directionality of consciousness is his distinction between noematic and noetic phases of acts of consciousness. For the study of discursive phenomena Husserl's last phase is by far the most exciting, because it promises to review noetic modifications in terms of reciprocity and meaning negotiation rather than formal ideality.