Heidegger, Tugendhat, Davidson - University of New Mexico

picture still threatens to open the door to infinite regresses, and raises significant additional problems of
its own. First, there is the notorious problem of reference to concepts: the attempt to say anything
about a concept immediately demands that it have the logical type of an object, and thus involves a
crossing of levels which Frege must rule out by fiat. Second, Frege’s assumptions about the
compositional structure of sentences lead him to hold that both the sense and reference of sentences
must be determined by the sense and reference of their individual parts; and this leads him to the claim
that predicative terms have functions or function-like objects as referents. Frege’s metaphor for such
objects is that they are “unsaturated”; but as Davidson points out, it is obscure what can be meant by
the existence of objects that are inherently “gappy” in this sense. One can identify the “semantic value”
of functional expressions with their semantic role rather than their reference, as Dummett essentially
suggests; but this represents an important departure from Frege’s original picture, and makes the
reference itself redundant.
It is here, according to Davidson, that recursive picture improves over Frege’s. In particular, in
characterizing truth-conditions of a language’s sentences as systematically dependent upon satisfaction
conditions for predicates and singular terms, Tarski can account for the compositional structure
underlying these conditions without invoking unsaturated entities or shadowy referents for predicates
and functional expressions. More generally, the Tarskian structure avoids all of the various kinds of
regresses that have recurrently problematized correspondence and other theories by conceiving of truth
as a unitary predicate of sentences, to be illuminated ultimately in terms of the overall truth-conditional
structure of a language, rather than in terms of the relation of any particular sentence to anything else.
As Davidson emphasizes, it is, here, the fact that the predicate “true,” as applied to sentences, is
essentially a one-place predicate that here provides an important clue to the emptiness of
correspondence theories:
We explain the application of a one-place predicate by reference to a relation only when there is
an indefinitely large number of distinct entities to which the relation bears. There are no such
entities available in the case of sentences, beliefs, judgments, or sentential utterances. It is
important that truth, as applied to things in the world (utterances of sentences, inscriptions,
beliefs, assertions), is a unitary property, for it is this that ties it so closely to the problem of
predication. A large part of the problem of predication is, after all, just the problem of
specifying what it is about predicates that explains why the sentential expressions in which they
occur may be used to say something true or false. (p. 130)
As Davidson here suggests, any theory of the truth of sentences that treats it as a relational property will
ultimately fail to account for the kind of truth-evaluable unity that sentences exhibit. This is because
any such theory will advert to a relationship between a true sentence and some entity (be it a fact, state
of affairs, situation, or whatever) that makes it true; and it will then be necessary to explain the unity of
the sentence in terms of the unity of this entity. But this does not solve the problem of unity, but only
reiterates it; and given the Slingshot argument, the only entity in terms of which it will be possible to
explain the truth of any sentence will be the “maximal” entity, the True. Though this might be treated
as a kind of correspondence explanation, if there is indeed at most one thing for true sentences to
correspond to, “we say no more when we say ‘corresponds to the truth’ than we say by the simpler ‘is
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