Abstract
The concept of attitude is the product of a debate on psychologism during the first years of the twentieth century: the theory that all philosophical issues are in essence a matter of the human psyche and its power of decision making. Attitude appears to be pivotal in phenomenology and a central philosophical theme in the case of meaning. The intellectual climate of the concept is researched in this chapter; its roots appear in German literature of the eighteenth century, and attitude became a key-component of Edmund Husserl's ideas. Originally a differentiation between a naïve- and a non-naïve attitude, the concept became decisive in understanding language layers, which were producing either naïve-natural or non-naïve-natural levels of linguistic articulation essential for meaning. This determined the method and content of Husserl's phenomenology and Peirce's pragmatism as well as his theory of signs. The two have in this chapter an extended conversation via Skype, which uniquely clarifies differences and common ideas on the foundations of meaning. The law student will in the last section learn the relevance of these ideas for law and legal discourse, in which attitude changes should be trained.