Dasein - Monoskop

70 PART II
seem independent of perception? As we shall see, this latter point
is closely related to the further question as to how we have access
to meanings as abstract entities, how are we to know anything about
them. I shall try to tackle each of these questions in turn.
The question as to whether Husserl can claim to have undermined
a relativistic notion of truth is not difficult to answer. In his
terms, the refutation proceeds in the following way. Since truths are
ideal they cannot be relative to singular acts of judging by singular,
empirical persons. The point is that there is an ideal relation between
a given type of meaning, its fulfillment, and the corresponding selfevidence;
this relation holds independent of us as humans. Of course,
it is always possible that someone thinks that he has self-evidence
for what is later discovered to be a falsehood; Husserl cannot exclude
this possibility. The only thing he needs to exclude, and he
can exclude it by drawing on truth as grounded ultimately in ideal,
abstract relations, is that someone who formerly took the meaning
"red" to be fulfilled by a patch of green cannot uphold this fulfillment
as "true-making" once he later comes to see that the meaning "red"
can and must be fulfilled by a patch of red colour. It is not possible to
say that we have two—relative—truths here, based on two different
self-evidences. On the one hand, truths are ultimately independent
of our judging, and on the other hand, the former self-evidence cannot
be maintained, once the later self-evidence is experienced. The
former self-evidence has to be given up.
As concerns the question how Husserl's analysis of truth stands
up to the Fregean notion of truth as undefinable, the answer can
also be straightforward: Husserl's theory shows all the marks of the
correspondence theory of truth that only a defender of the calculus
conception can fully abide by. He not only regards "adaequatio rei et
intellectus" 234 as the meaning of truth, but he also claims that correspondence
can be expressed and perceived from a metalevel act, and
that correspondence can be explained. Furthermore, Husserl would
also be likely to claim that his analysis undercuts the dilemma that
Frege constructs for the correspondence theory. As we saw above,
this dilemma confronts this notion with two equally unsatisfactory
ways of accounting for correspondence or identity. If we say that the
identity holds between a presentation and the real thing out there in