Thinking about Transcendental truth
with Heidegger and Davidson
In his last, posthumously published book, Truth and Predication, Davidson
suggests that the application of Tarskian truth-definitions for particular
languages depends upon a pre-existing grasp of a general concept of truth
(that is not simply truth-in-L for a particular language). Davidson argues that
this cuts against both correspondence and coherence definitions of truth, but
also against disquotationalist views on which the notion of truth is empty or
redundant. Recently, both Mark Wrathall and Mark Okrent have suggested
connections between Davidson’s translational project and Heidegger’s
understanding of truth as disclosure in practical situations of action and
comportment. I shall consider whether and to what extent Heidegger’s
understanding of truth as disclosure or aletheia indeed can underwrite a
general understanding of the basis of truth and predication in such a way as to
be capable of synthesis with Davidson’s Tarskian picture. In conclusion, I
consider the implications of this synthesis for Davidson’s argument against the
dualism of scheme and content in “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme”.
Propositional Truth and
Transcendental Truth
• In the following, I’ll assume that Tarski’s convention (T) captures, in
an important way, the structure of propositional truth in a
language:
(T): “Snow is white” is true-in-English iff snow is white.
• Tarski offers this as a reformulation that captures the spirit of
Aristotle’s Metaphysics IV, 7, 1011 b 26:
“To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false,
while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is
true…”
• In an important sense, an extensionally adequate truth-definition
for a language captures everything that can be said about truth and
falsity in the language
• Nevertheless there are still further questions to be raised about the
presuppositions or bases of propositional truth, so understood.
Two questions about transcendental
truth:
• Is there something to say about truth in
general (not just truth-in-L for a particular
language L)?
• Is there something to say about the nonsentential preconditions for the truth of
sentences?
Davidson on Tarski
(Truth & Predication)
• “My own view is that Tarski has told us much of what
we want to know about the concept of truth, and that
there must be more. There must be more because
there is no indication in Tarski’s formal work of what it
is that his various truth predicates have in common,
and this must be part of the content of the concept. It
is not enough to point to Convention-T as that
indication, for it does not speak to the question of how
we know that a theory of truth for a language is
correct. The concept of truth has essential connections
with the concepts of belief and meaning, but these
connections are untouched by Tarski’s work.” (Truth
and Predication, pp. 27-28)
Davidson, Truth, and Interpretation
(review)
• Davidson holds that what a speaker knows in knowing
a language, as discovered in radical interpretation, can
be captured by a recursive (and finitely axiomatizable)
truth-theory in Tarski’s sense which allows particular
sentences to be connected to their truth-conditions,
thus yielding as consequences all the true sentences of
form (T).
• Because belief and meaning are interdependent and
inseparable factors in interpretation, it is necessary to
apply charity principles in arriving at a theory of
meaning for a particular language: we must attempt to
maximize the agreement between speaker and
interpreter.
Heidegger on the basis of assertoric
truth
• Truth is aletheia, disclosure, or unconcealment.
• Truth, as aletheia ,is not primarily correspondence or the truth of
assertions, but the disclosure of entities.
• “The pointing-out which assertion does is performed on the basis
of what has already been disclosed in understanding or discovered
circumspectively. Assertion is not a free-floating kind of behaviour
which, in its own right, might be capable of disclosing entities in
general or in a primary way: on the contrary it always maintains
itself on the basis of Being-in-the-world.” (S&Z, p. 156)
• Thus assertion is grounded in the “prior” disclosure of entities: both
in the availability of the individual entities involved and in the
holistic context of understanding in which they figure.
• Example: “The hammer is too heavy”.
Davidson and Heidegger: initial
similarities
• Both philosophers reject all of the following:
– i) Correspondence truth
– ii) Timeless propositions as truth-bearers
– iii) “Epistemic”, verificationist, subjectivist,
coherence, communitarian, or pragmatist theories
of the basis of truth
• Recent commentary has emphasized the
reasons for i) and ii), but not iii)
Davidson against
correspondence truth
• 1) The “slingshot”: If a sentence is made true by
corresponding to an entity, then (on certain
extensionalist assumptions) all true sentences
correspond to the same (maximal) entity
• 2) We cannot understand predication or the unity of
the sentence by taking predicates or the copula to have
their own, separable, representational reference or by
taking there to be special kinds of entities for
sentences to correspond to
– This is because every such assumption involves infinite
regresses and fails to clarify the actual structure of
predication
– Example: “The chalkboard is black”; “Theatetus flies”
Heidegger against
correspondence truth
• “Asserting is a being-toward the thing
itself…[In confirmation] the entity itself which
one has in mind shows itself just as it is in
itself; that is to say, it shows that it, in its
selfsameness, is just as it gets pointed out in
the assertion as being – just as it gets
uncovered as being. Representations do not
get compared, either among themselves or in
relation to the real thing.” (S&Z, p. 218)
Davidson and Heidegger on truth and
realism
• Heidegger: “’There is’ truth only in so far as Dasein is
and so long as Dasein is.”
• Davidson: “Nothing in the world, no object or event,
would be true or false if there were not thinking
creatures.”
• H. and D. are sometimes seen as agreeing on a
conception of truth as grounded in human action and
comportment, intersubjective social practices and/or
regularities of behavior
• But this renders mysterious the strenuous arguments
of both philosophers against epistemic, verificationist,
and (more generally) anti-realist theories of truth
Davidson against epistemic theories
• “We should not say that truth is correspondence,
coherence, warranted assertability, ideally
justified assertability, what is accepted in the
conversation of the right people, what science
will end up maintaining, what explains the
convergence on final theories in science, or the
success of our ordinary beliefs …anti-realism,
with its limitation of truth to what can be
ascertained, deprives truth of its role as an
intersubjective standard…” (Truth and
Predication, pp. 47-48)
Heidegger against epistemic theories
• “It is not we who need to presuppose that somewhere
there is “in itself” a truth in the form of a transcendent
value or valid meaning floating somewhere. Instead,
truth itself, the basic constitution of the Dasein,
presupposes us, is the presupposition for our own
existence. Being-true, unveiledness, is the
fundamental condition for our being able to be in the
way in which we exist as Dasein. Truth is the
presupposition for our being able to presuppose
anything at all. For presupposing is in every case an
unveiling establishment of something as being.
Presupposition everywhere presupposes truth.” (Basic
Problems, p. 221)
• Wrathall: “Practical expertise …bestows a normativity on
things, a normativity similar to (and Heidegger would say a
precursor to) the normative structure discernable in our
understanding of truth… It is thus on the basis of our
pragmatic discovery of things that language is possible, for
it is the structure of equipment and involvements built into
our comportment which delineates the features of things
which are salient to us--the very features which form the
content of our beliefs and utterances.” (Heidegger and
Unconcealment, pp. 46-47)
• Okrent: “…[T]here is something substantial to say about
truth beyond what Davidson is willing to commit himself to,
and Heidegger has gone a long way toward saying it. Truth
is uncovering, and it is tied ontologically to the existence of
a being whose very definition consists in the ability to
unveil the world by actively and successfully coping with it
perceptually in a motor-intentional way.” (“Davidson,
Heidegger, and Truth,” p. 109)
• I’ll argue that:
– i) If we see how Davidson supplements Heidegger
(in the right sort of way) then truth isn’t simply
uncovering (or being-uncovered)
– Ii) If we see how Heidegger supplements Davidson
(in the right sort of way) truth isn’t reducible to
the exercise of our abilities or the execution of our
actions (or our comportments)
I. How Tarski-Davidson supplements
Heidegger
• Tarski and Davidson, following Frege, take the assertion
(or sentence) to be the primary locus of truth.
• In Truth and Predication, Davidson argues that this is
the key to Tarski’s solution to the ancient problem of
predication: we can take the truth or falsity of
sentences as primary and reconstruct the reference
and satisfaction on that basis (without taking
predicates to have their own, separate reference).
• This appears at first directly opposed to Heidegger’s
understanding of truth as disclosure.
Davidson on the primacy of
propositional truth
• “…[T]he key role of Convention-T in determining that truth, as
characterized by the theory, has the same extension as the intuitive
concept of truth makes it seems that it is truth rather than
reference that is the basic primitive. [This] is, I think, the right view.
In his appeal to Convention-T, Tarski assumes … a prior grasp of the
concept of truth; he then shows how this intuition can be
implemented in detail for particular languages…The story about
truth generates a pattern in language, the pattern of logical forms,
or grammar properly conceived, and the network of semantic
dependencies. There is no way to tell this story, which, being about
truth, is about sentences or their occasions of use, without
assigning semantic roles to the parts of sentences. But there is no
appeal to a prior understanding of the concept of reference.”
(Davidson, Truth and Predication, pp. 34-35).
Truth as disclosure:
Tugendhat’s objections
• “Being-true (truth) means being-discovering.” (S&Z, p.
219)
• Heidegger thus seems to hold that the truth of an
assertion consists in its disclosing the entity (or entities)
involved.
• Objections:
– This yields no basis for a distinction between true and false
statements about the same entities
– Negative and relational assertions
– Makes truth into an (ontic) event
– Fails to grasp the aspects of logical structure that yield
inferential relations among concepts and judgments
Response to objections: The
apophantic vs. the hermeneutic “as”
• According to Heidegger, the possibility of predicative assertion and truth
and falsity is grounded in a more primary (and not necessarily linguistic)
structure: the “hermeneutic as”.
• This “hermeneutic” as-structure gives the underlying structural meaning
of the copula “is” as it appears in explicit judgments or assertions
• Primary disclosedness is not simply the disclosedness of an entity but the
disclosedness of “something as something.”
• In this primary disclosure, something can be disclosed as it (actually) is or
otherwise (in the second case, Heid. sometimes says it is “partly
concealed” or “covered-over”).
• Hermeneutic “as” is the basis of the possibility of understanding
predication as synthesis/diaresis (cf. Aristotle and Plato)
• “Within [the] basic comportment of uncovering…there is the showing of
the subject matter in terms of something else. Only on the basis of this
structure is there any possibility of passing something off as something
else.” (Logic: The Question of Truth, p. 158)
Features of the hermeneutic ‘as’
• “Pre-predicative” in the sense that the disclosure
of something-as-something doesn’t require
explicit judgment, assertion, etc.
• Thus, can occur in engaged, practical
comportment (or distanced contemplation, etc.)
• Fully intensional (should preclude worries about
the Myth of the Given, etc.)
• Nevertheless, non-epistemic: whether something
is successfully disclosed (i.e. disclosed as it is, or
otherwise) need not and often cannot be known
by the discloser
Complicating the hermeneutic “as”
• We can use this structure (if we extend and specify it a little) to
capture many of the aspects of logical form and structure that
emerge from Tarski and Davidson’s propositional account
• In particular, we may understand an entity as truly disclosed if it is
disclosed as it (actually) is; and falsely disclosed (or partially
concealed) if it is disclosed as it is not.
• Thus logical structure is shown as already present in our unthematic
activities and dealings with the world
• But we need not think of this as simply a“pre-linguistic” availability
of entities: rather, along with Davidson, we can think of the
inferential and logical relations among propositions as holistically
articulating what, and how, entities are disclosed
• Nevertheless, as a structure of the world itself, this is not simply “in
us” or imposed by our practices
• Need to extend to: multiple matters, negative judgments, etc.
• Remaining problem: negative existential judgments
II. How Heidegger supplements
Davidson
• Davidson argues that Tarski’s apparatus of satisfaction gives
the unique answer to the problem of predication by showing
how the truth of sentences can be determined by the
semantics of their parts, without predicates or the copula
referring to separate entities.
• He argues that, given this, we can say little more about
truth: all we can do is show (empirically and through
interpretation) that specific truth-theories explicate the
actual behavior of speakers or communities.
• But this leaves obscure:
– i) what the phenomenological basis for predication actually is;
– ii) the sense of the general concept of truth (not just true-in-L);
and
– iii) why this is not (as Davidson says it is not) simply an epistemic
theory of truth (that treats it as a species of judgment,
knowledge, or assertibility).
• Suggestion: all of these difficulties can be remedied if we
see disclosure, in accordance with the hermeneutic asstructure, as the general basis for truth.
• We can then interpret the hermeneutic “as” as the
underlying basis for the “is” of predication, without taking
this (or the predicate) to represent a separate entity.
• Interpretation remains, as for Davidson, the basis for the
semantics of truth. Nothing is true unless it is interpretable
as true. But here what is being interpreted is not only the
speech behavior of others, but also the world itself (both its
individual entities and its overall structure).
• In the hermeneutic “as”, the essential possibility of the
matters being disclosed as they are or as they are not
ensures that interpretation is constitutively linked to truth.
• Thus understood, truth is not in “us” or in the “beings,” but
“in” the Being of the beings.
Truth and Being
•
•
Truth is not a present (vorhanden) relationship between two beings that are themselves present – for
instance between something psychical and something physical, and also it is no “coordination” (as one
often says these days). If it is in any sense a relationship, it is one with has no analogy with any kind of
relation between beings. It is – if one may say so – the relationship of Dasein as Dasein to its world
itself, the world-openness of Dasein, whose being toward the world itself is disclosed and uncovered in
and with this being toward the world. (Logic: The Question of Truth, p. 137)
So far as the “is” in assertion is understood and spoken, it already signifies intrinsically the being of a
being which is asserted about as unveiled. In the uttering of the assertion, that is to say, in the uttering
of exhibition, this exhibition, as intentionally unveiling comportment, expresses itself about that to
which it refers. By its essential nature, that which is referred to is unveiled. So far as this unveiling
comportment expresses itself about the entity it refers to and determines this being in its being, the
unveiledness of that which is spoken of is eo ipso co-intended. The moment of unveiledness is implied
in the concept of the being of the entity which is meant in the assertion. When I say “A is B,” I mean
not only the being-B of A but also the being-B of A as unveiled. …The extant entity itself is in a certain
way true, not as intrinsically extant, but as uncovered in the assertion. …This appropriation of a being
in a true assertion about it is not an ontical absorption of the extant entity into a subject, as though
things were transported into the ego. But it is just as little a merely subjectivistic apprehending and
investing of things with determinations which we cull from the subject and assign to things. …
Assertion is exhibitive letting-be-seen of beings. In the exhibitive appropriation of a being just as it is
qua uncovered, and according to the sense of that appropriation, the uncovered entity’s real
determinativeness which is then under consideration is explicitly appropriated to it. We have here
once again the peculiar circumstance that the unveiling appropriation of the extant in its being-such is
precisely not a subjectivizing but just the reverse, an appropriating of the uncovered determinations to
the extant entity as it is in itself.” (Basic Problems of Phenomenology, pp. 218-19)
Implications
• Truth is dependent on Dasein, but Dasein (in the sense in
which truth depends on it) shouldn’t be identified with
individual or collective human activities or attitudes. It is,
rather, the structure of possible disclosure as such.
• Dasein is essentially a disclosure not only of beings but of
the world as such.
• The primary constraint on how things can be disclosed
comes not from our own categories, concepts, practices,
beliefs, etc. but from the things themselves.
• What shows up in the Tarskian framework as the logical
structure of the recursively defined truth-predicate is, here,
the structure of the Being of beings.
“Davidsonian coherentism” and having
the world in view
• In Mind and World, McDowell responds to a dilemma, one
horn of which is a “Davidsonian coherentism” that fails to
bring the world into view (in the right sort of way).
• Key to McDowell’s response is the idea that perception,
e.g., can directly present things as they are.
• McDowell appeals to Gadamer and to the idea of a
language as a “repository of tradition” and to the idea of
interpretation as fusion of horizons (Davidson’s conception
of interpretation has also often been compared to
Gadamer’s).
• But he might have done better to make use of Heidegger’s
hermeneutics of facticity and the basic structure of the
hermeneutic “as”.
Phenomenological interpretation of
Metaphysics IV, 7, 1011 b 26
• “Denn das redende Sehenlassen des Seienden als
Nichtsein oder des Nichtseienden als Sein ist
Verdeckung, das Sehenlassen aber des Seienden
als Sein und des Nichtseienden als Nichtsein ist
Entdeckung.”
• “For the saying letting-be-seen of beings as notbeing or of non-beings as being is concealment,
but the letting-be-seen of beings as being and of
non-beings as non-being is disclosure.” (Logic:
The Question of Truth, p. 137)
Phenomenological interpretation of
Tarski’s convention T
• Tarski in Wahrheitsbegriff: “A true sentence is one
which says that the state of affairs is so and so, and the
state of affairs is indeed so and so.”
• Davidson objects:
i) This appears to call for existent “states of affairs”
ii) how do we fill out the “so-and-so”?
• “Heideggerian” modification: “A true sentence is one
which, in disclosing the beings, discloses them as they
(actually) are.”
• “Snow is white” is true iff snow is disclosed as white
when it is disclosed as it (actually) is.
World-disclosure, truth, and time:
implications
• In “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme”, Davidson
argues against the intelligibility of relativism on two
grounds:
– Incoherence of the scheme/content distinction
– It is impossible for two languages to have widely divergent
ontologies, if one can interpret the other at all.
• But in his late work, Heidegger suggests the Being of
entities is disclosed very differently in successive historical
epochs.
• If disclosure is a general underlying structure of truth (and
not just truth-in-L for some particular L), what does this
suggest about the possibility of fundamental ontological
differences between successive periods?
• If truth is essentially disclosure grounded in
the structure of being-in-the-world, assertion
and judgment need not be construed as
products of a “conceptual scheme” set off
against the world as an independent factor.
• Nor is there any reason to suppose any of the
different historical languages in which beings
are revealed are mutually untranslatable.
• Within the history of metaphysics, the interpretation of beings –
the way they come to light and are disclosed – is based in each case
on the interpretation of some kind of being as the privileged or
most exemplary being.
• In general, these regimes interpret the sense of predication or the
copula by referring it to a privileged entity (Examples: the Idea in
Plato, the subject in Descartes or Kant).
• But if, as Davidson and Heidegger agree, neither the copula nor the
unity of the assertion can be referred to some entity, each of these
regimes is also concealing with respect to Being itself.
• If, in each language/epoch, truth is figured as an ontic relationship
to some privileged entity, then the distinction between language
and metalanguage (which is crucial to Tarski’s structure) is not
maintained, and each regime of the disclosure of truth structurally
contains contradictions (of the Liar-paradox type).
• Conclusion: nothing in Davidson’s argument precludes the
possibility of the kinds of ontological change Heidegger describes,
and some aspects of Davidson’s argument actually support the
suggestion that it takes place within the history of metaphysics.
•
Toward a phenomenologicalontological interpretation of
Davidson
and
Tarski
For Davidson and Tarski, the possibility of truth is articulated
essentially by a specific way of understanding the structure of
language and the possibility of linguistic meaning (i.e. as modeled
by a recursive, finitely axiomatizable and interpretable structure)
• In this conception, a certain understanding of the structure of
human finitude, and hence the possibility of disclosure, comes to
light
• This understanding correlates with a particular ontological
understanding of language, information and signification and can be
interpreted along these lines
• In this interpretation, the problem of how “transcendental” truth
can be understood immanently (e.g. how and to what extent it is
possible to describe what Davidson and Tarski theorize as the
structure of truth for a language within that language itself)
becomes one of special importance.
Conclusions
• Heidegger’s understanding of truth as disclosure can be
synthesized with Davdison’s Tarskian account of truth in
a way that is wholly consistent with the T-schema but
also shows its underlying phenomenological basis in
disclosedness and ultimately in being.
• This suffices to distance Heidegger’s account from any
epistemological, pragmatist, or anti-realist account of
truth.
• It also makes possible an interpretation of the sense of
Being as it shows up in contemporary conceptions of
the nature and structure of language and logic drawn
from the analytic tradition.
Further questions
• If this synthesis is successful, what does it suggest about the
origin and ontological status of the aspects of logical or
“grammatical” structure that are replicated within a
Davidsonian meaning-theory for a natural language?
• How can we think of the structures in terms of which we
interpret the world as given (and changing) in time,
although they are not to be understood as variable
conceptual schemes set over against the world as it is in
itself?
• How might we understand particular epochs of disclosure as
conditioned by the paradoxes and contradictions involved in
assuming a universal (i.e. not language-specific) concept of
truth, or those involved in the interpretation of Being as a
particular being?