Heidegger, Tugendhat, Davidson - University of New Mexico

to the structure of Dasein in relation to world). 46 Although most of these conditioning phenomena are
not “pre-linguistic,” in the sense that they could probably not be accessed by an individual
consciousness (such as that of an animal or infant) incapable or innocent of articulate language, neither
the linguistic analysis of meaning nor an account of the general conditions of linguistic predication (and
hence of the specific nature of truth) cannot afford wholly to ignore the dimension of accessibility that is
illuminated by Heidegger’s account.
What comes into view here, specifically, is the possibility of a broader and expanded picture of
transcendental truth, the elucidation of which is not possible from the perspective of either the “objectoriented”
or the “linguistic-analytic” approach alone (as Tugendhat describes them) but to which they
can both be seen as, necessarily, joint and complementary contributors. On this picture, in particular,
the truth and falsity of sentences is not founded simply (as the linguistic-analytic approach has it) in the
structure of language or simply (as Heidegger’s approach has it) in the givenness of objects, for there is
not just one dimension of foundedness; rather, both presuppose each other and thereby found the
phenomenon of predication in different ways and from different directions. The debate between the
linguistic conception of the foundations of sentential truth and Heidegger’s disclosive conception is
therefore to be resolved as a draw, or rather replaced by a broader and more comprehensive picture in
which they are not in competition to begin with.
III
I have argued that Heidegger’s disclosive approach to transcendental truth can be brought together with
a “linguistic-analytic” conception that bases itself on the analysis of the structure of language, and that
there need not be any competition between the two approaches provided that they are seen as
“founding” the phenomenon of truth in different, though complementary ways. This contention can be
tested by consideration of what is in many ways the most fully worked-out example of the linguisticanalytic
approach to truth, Davidson’s Tarskian account. As I will argue in this section, Davidson’s
picture of transcendental truth can indeed usefully be supplemented with Heidegger’s disclosive
account, yielding a more comprehensive picture that illuminates the phenomenon of truth in ways that
neither picture can do alone. In particular, Heidegger’s disclosive picture supplements Davidson and
Tarski’s description of the systematic structure of languages by illuminating the ontological and
ultimately temporal foundations for the specific phenomenon of linguistic structure, on which the
Tarskian-Davidsonian picture of truth and predication turns.
46 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.”
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