Heidegger, Tugendhat, Davidson - University of New Mexico

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)
That the basis of truth is not any relation between beings suggests that it is ontologically grounded in
the difference between Being and beings.
Davidson’s arguments against correspondence theories are differently motivated and situated, but their
upshot is, in important ways, structurally similar, despite the linguistic setting of Davidson’s theory. In
particular, Davidson has essentially two reasons for holding that there is no tenable relation of
“correspondence” between language and the world to be found at all, for “there is nothing interesting
or instructive to which true sentences correspond.” (p. 39). The first is that, as Davidson argues drawing
on an argument made in different forms by Frege, Church, Gödel, and Neale, if a sentence is said to
correspond to one entity in the world, it must ultimately be said to correspond to all of them. 16 The
argument, the so-called “slingshot,” demonstrates on relatively straightforward (but not entirely
unproblematic) assumptions 17 that any two true sentences, if they each correspond to anything, both
correspond to the same thing; similarly, any two false sentences also correspond to the same thing. 18 It
is thus possible to hold that true sentences correspond to something only if all true sentences
correspond to some maximal object, perhaps the totality of reality or the world itself. The resulting
16 The argument for this, though already at least implicit in Frege’s arguments for the claim that the “reference” of
a sentence is always one of the two truth-values (True or False), is sometimes called the “slingshot” and is given in
(slightly different) classic forms by: Church, A. (1956) Introduction to Mathematical Logic, vol. 1 (Princeton:
Princeton U. Press) and Gödel (1944) “Russell’s Mathematical Logic,” in P.A. Schlipp (ed.), The Philosophy of
Bertrand Russell, (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern U). For the discussion and further references, see Davidson, Truth
and Predication, pp. 126-30.
17 The first assumption is that if a sentence corresponds to something, substituting a co-referring noun phrase will
not change what it corresponds to; the second is that two logically equivalent sentences correspond to the same
thing if they correspond to anything at all.
18 Assumptions:
i) if a sentence corresponds to something, substituting a co-referring term won’t change what it
corresp. to.
ii) Logically equivalent sentences corresp. to the same thing.
G= Grass is green.
S = The sun is 93 million miles away.
1) G
2) The x such that [x=Socrates and G] = The x such that [x=Socrates]
3) The x such that [x=Socrates and S] = The x such that [x=Socrates]
4) S
These ALL correspond to the same thing. 1 and 2, and 3 and 4, are logical equivalents
3 just substitutes a co-referring term into 2.
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