Heidegger, Tugendhat, Davidson - University of New Mexico

essential to any consideration of truth, gained predominance at an early stage in the analytic tradition;
without prejudice to whether sentences, sentence-types, or propositions are taken as the relevant units
of analysis, we shall call them sentential views. 25 By sharp contrast with them, as we have seen,
Heidegger recurrently criticizes a “traditional” conception of truth according to which the “assertion”
[Aussage] is its primary locus and characterizes the basic phenomenon of truth (as aletheia or
unconcealment) as a phenomenon that does not necessarily involve explicit judgment, linguistic
predication, or assertion. This criticism involves Heidegger repeatedly in challenging the actual
possibility of giving an adequate account of truth if one begins with sentences or their linguistic
interrelations; while from the other side, given the basic and essential connection, within the practice of
a language, between the structure of sentences and the possibility of saying something true or false, it
can be questioned whether any account of truth can succeed without a structural basis in the logical
structure of sentences (of the kind that Tarski’s account captures).
This difference points in obvious ways to broader methodological and thematic differences in the
traditions and lineages in which the two philosophers have most often been located. In particular,
Davidson’s sentential approach fits centrally within the tradition of which both of his most important
antecedents, Tarski and Quine, are unquestionably located, that of analytic philosophy in the wake of
the “linguistic turn”; whereas Heidegger’s approach, developing from Husserl’s phenomenology, does
not accord the linguistic turn, at least in the form inspired by Frege and first taken by Russell and the
early Wittgenstein, any central methodological priority. Some recent scholarship has emphasized the
ways in which Heidegger’s own commitments, particularly with respect to truth, can be seen as
embodying a critical position with respect to those of much of the mainstream analytic tradition; for
example, Dahlstrom has recently suggested that a major basis for Heidegger’s positive views is his
critique of a “logical prejudice” which is both historically dominant and also characteristic, according to
Dahlstrom, of the analytic tradition of Frege, Quine and Davidson. On the position that Dahlstrom
presents Heidegger as criticizing, the sentence, proposition, or assertoric utterance is the basic locus of
truth, and the structure of truth can only be understood through a systematic reflection on the structure
25 A good example of a propositional conception is the view that comes powerfully to the fore in the first remarks
of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus:
The world is all that is the case.
And
The world is the totality of facts, not of things. 25
Here, the contrast is drawn explicitly between a conception of the world as inherently structured in such a way
that it can only be adequately revealed or described by means of sentences or propositions and a conception (to
be rejected) on which it does not have this kind of structure, but is instead simply a collection or totality of
individual things or objects.
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