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 non-sentential 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 as-structure, 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 not-being 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 phenomenological-ontological 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?