Lia’s Reviews > Heidegger and Unconcealment: Truth, Language, and History > Status Update

For Heidegger, the decision to focus on truth as a property of representational states has its root in the historical influence of Plato’s doctrine of the ideas. Attention to the ambiguity in Plato’s account, however, shows that what now seems a natural way to approach truth actually hides at its basis a decision – namely, the decision to consider truth only insofar as it is a property of propositions.

calling unconcealment Wahrheit (it does not really work in English) would help us think about the importance of stabilizing and securing an understanding of the world... Why call unconcealment Wahrheit ? To provoke us to reflect on our role in opening up, sheltering, preserving, and stabilizing understandings of beings, entities, and thinkable states of affairs in the world.

Correspondence needs to be rethought in terms of H’s account of how to assess the success or failure of linguistic acts like assertion. An assertion most genuinely succeeds if it brings a state of affairs into unconcealment for thought (which may well go with a correlative concealing of the practical world) ... propositional truth is a form of making something available toward which we can comport.

H’s objection is not to the notion of correspondence per se, but to correspondence theories that understand correspondence as a relation holding between mental representations and nonmental things. Such theories are unable to explain instructively the notion of a relation of agreement.

Assertoric “truth” is leveling:
In assertion, our experience undergoes an explicit restriction of our view, and we dim down the whole richly articulated situation in front of us to focus on some particular feature of the situation. The “assertoric determining of a thing,”Heidegger suggests, must be understood as a “levelling-off of the primary understanding within [everyday] dealings”

unconcealment is not ‘dependent’ on saying, but rather every saying already needs the domain of unconcealment...Only where unconcealment already prevails can something become sayable, visible, showable, perceivable. If we keep in view the enigmatic prevailing of Alêtheia, the disclosing, then we come to the suspicion that even the whole essence of language is based in dis-closing, in the prevailing of Alêtheia

for an entity to be is for it to stand in a context of constitutive relations. The lack of any possible context is thus an ontological concealment – the absence of the conditions under which the entity in question could manifest itself in being.

there are for Heidegger social constraints on meaning only because meaningful activities are inextricably caught up in a social world.

... this paper explore Heidegger’s view about the role of a community in determining or constraining linguistic meaning... argue against the view that Dreyfus and Carman, among others, attribute to Heidegger by demonstrating that language is not responsible for the banalizing and leveling of everyday human modes of existence

Because Heidegger believes that idle conversation is a pervasive phe- nomenon, he is often taken to hold that language itself is essentially and necessarily limited to public norms of understanding and interpretation. Because our language is constrained by social factors, the argument goes, we are forced to express things that are either banal or untrue whenever we use language.