Heidegger on Correspondence

As Inwood explains, Heidegger doubts that a correspondence theory of truth is coherent. Truth for him is “disclosure” rather than correspondence. Why?

If truth is correspondence, then an assertion is true if it corresponds to the facts of the case. Heidegger raises questions about both the assertion and secondly about the fact to which the assertion corresponds.

For the correspondence theory to work, we have to establish the independence of the assertion from the facts. If it’s not independent, then we don’t actually have two entities – assertion and fact – that should correspond to one another. What would an assertion independent of facts look like? Inwood explores some of Heidegger’s options.

In many cases, the assertion is not independent of the facts: I assert that a hammer is too heavy because I need a different tool in the particular task I’m involved in. Asserting something about the hammer is not an assertion about an “idea of a hammer.” Another possibility is that “words have meanings independent of the things they apply to and refer to, so that we can say that what corresponds to a fact is a meaningful sentence or a proposition? No. A word such as ‘hammer’ or ‘culture’ does not have a single determinate meaning or connotation; its meaning depends on, and varies with, the world in which it is used.”

Heidegger concludes, in Inwood’s words: There is “no pre-packaged portion of meaning sufficiently independent of the world and of entities within it to correspond, or fail to correspond, to the world. Words and their meanings are already world-laden.”

And what of the fact? For the correspondence theory to work, Heidegger says, we have to have an assertion-free access to the object to which we can compare the assertion. But Heidegger doesn’t believe we ever have such access. Heidegger argues that our sensations are always sensations as : We hear the sounds as words, even if we don’t know the language that is spoken. We never hear “mere noise,” but the birds singing, or someone hammering in the distance, or an assertion that we recognize as language even if we don’t understand the language being spoken.

Lacking world-free assertions and language-free access to the facts, the correspondence theory cannot work.