First, I enjoyed your kind and thoughtful response. Our conversation is helping sharpen what I want to say. This passage from Bakhtin is relevant.
Meaning does not reside in the word or in the soul of the speaker or in the soul of the listener. Meaning is the effect of interaction between speaker and listener produced via the material of a particular sound complex. It is like an electric spark that occurs only when two different terminals are hooked together. Those who ignore theme (which is accessible only to active, responsive understanding) and who, in attempting to define the meaning of a word, approach its lower, stable, self-identical limit, want, in effect, to turn on a light bulb after having switched off the current. Only the current of verbal intercourse endows a word with the light of meaning.
The ground is an abyss in this sense. In other words, philosophy, as I see it, is “nothing like math.” What is relevantly “external” is the darkness of the other, and how the signs signify for the other. Speech is the risky hopeful attempt to build a bridge. The meaning is not “in the words.” Yet part of an attempt to contact the other involves expectations about how words will signify. I assume or rather hope that the sign will sound in your ear as it does in mine, in the largest meaning of “sound” that includes what many call “conceptuality.”
There’s a negative element here in that nothing but the attempt to “share in world” with the other is held fixed or sacred. There’s also no assumption that the others are interchangeable. So we don’t necessarily have something like the presentation of universal truth. Informally, we don’t reach out to just anyone. Some we take as “closed off” to this or that potential disclosure. And we also can’t or don’t assume the duty to open ourselves to the disclosure of just anyone.
So the monological thrust is mitigated. Even those we do reach out to are not “irrational” if they can’t meet us in this or that particular disclosure. Civility itself is already rationality. What is relatively transpersonal remains, to some degree, ambiguous.
One thing that may have been misleading is my endorsement of the “parochial” under such moniker that is usually pejorative (as used by David Deutsch in The Beginning of Infinity, for instance, where he advocates for a view of scientific progress as enhancement of universality of applicability) whereas what it is that I want to stress (with @j_j) is the centrality of situatedness, and embodiment, in both corporality and practical forms of life.
Another misleading aspect of my example is that the situated uses of the concepts of rest, motion, displacement, etc., that the “farmer in the field” uses would seldom be characterized as “geocentric” outside of the context of a dispute about cosmology. And such a dispute, I want to argue, is a dispute within the field of cosmology.
What I am arguing isn’t that, within that field, geocentrists and heliocentrists are both right each from their own perspectives (which is something that @j_j’s picture sometimes seems to suggest). There is a genuine dispute, and phenomena like the rotating motion of the Foucault pendulum or the precession of the planets help arbitrate it. But with respect to claims about specific objects having moved or having stayed in the same place, as made by the farmer in the field, those claims don’t contradict the heliocentric view since they are interpretable (i.e. gain their meanings and truth conditions) within a domain of practical concerns that is separate from that of the cosmologist.
Hence, the propositions “The tree moved” (together with the Earth) as stated by Galileo (as viewed, notionally, from space) and the claim “The tree didn’t move” as stated by the farmer in the field aren’t contradictory since the predicative expression “…moved,” as used by each one of them, have different meanings. And this is something that, ironically, an endorser of Galilean relativity ought to endorse!
Fair enough, with the stipulation about the different meanings of “moved.” And I agree that the example may not have been suited to bring out the points you wanted to. It would be interesting to examine some of the same points in the context of an example where there were ethical stakes for each participant – that might really foreground the situatedness. After all, no great harm is done either way if you think the sun goes round the earth or vice versa. But what about a belief in the efficacy of human sacrifice to influence the weather?
I’m really enjoying your analysis. Just for clarity though, I’m suggesting that the sign “right” doesn’t have any a-perspectival purchase. At least I can’t make sense of a “right” that isn’t attached to a situated judgement. I’m not saying from God’s POV that there is no God’s POV. I’m confessing that I can’t make sense of God’s POV. Then adding that I don’t think this is a practical problem.
We act from our “settled belief” ( the relatively crystallized component of our total sense of the world.) This “sense” or “articulation” of the world(-from-POV) also includes the tentative beliefs we are more like to call “belief.” Most of our sense of the world is not thematic at all. Strong philosophers are often strong precisely by “digging this up,” which transforms “false necessity” into “recognized contingency.” We enact our deep sense of the world. It’s “there in our comportment.” I step out of bed, not expecting to fall through the floor, etc.
Note that I “make a leap” here. I can’t “know” that it is for others as it is for me. So these claims are tentative tentacles. Their transpersonal relevance is far from assured. But I speak in the hope of a greater sense of sharing the world with others.
I hear you. For me it’s more ecstasy than despair. So much of this is captured in the idea of existence as “thrown projection.” This is also an intensely visceral reading of Gadamer’s claim that we are “constituted by prejudice.” This “prejudice” is “visceral” in the sense that it’s the raw bloody meat of our comportment. This is our “forehaving” of the stranger or the difficult text. This fore-having is primarily inexplicit.
I’d relate this also to Wittgenstein’s On Certainty. Or perhaps to metamathematics. To build an object language, we need the metalanguage we inherit, or that inherits us. For me this isn’t a gospel of passivity. Indeed, I see philosophy as something like an impossible hope that we can catch our tail. A noble enterprise ! To try and get a better grip on what we even mean by terms we take to be fundamental, like the word “meaning” itself, for instance.
This case would be more similar to the phlogiston case than it would be to the geocentric case, regardless of moral significance, right? The believer in human sacrifice might be criticized for endorsing a crude utilitarian ethical conception, but, more to the point, regardless of their ethical standpoint, we hold them to be mistaken regarding the causal link between the sacrifice and the weather, which, we believe, undermines the point of their sacrifice (e.g. its utility or nobility) by their own lights (as we think they should recognize). This is how I wanted to split the difference between your and @j_j’s views about truth standards. The standards always are internal to a practical form of life, as j_j insists, and hence we can say that true beliefs always are cases of the world showing itself to us as constituted by our practical relation to it. And also, as you appear to intimate, within the conceptual space that such a practical form of life enables us to navigate, the world often fails to show up to us as it truly is, not “in itself”, but as our embodied/encultured practices constitute it. And this happens whenever we misperceive, misjudge, or hallucinate some phenomenon, affordance, event, etc. Contrary to what @j_j may sometimes seem to suggest, such failures aren’t cases of the world presenting a different face to us, but are cases where we agree (or should ideally come to agree, by our own standards) that we failed to engage with it.
Yes, I see how this resembles the phlogiston case more directly. The geocentrist isn’t, on the face of it, offering a causal story of why the Sun revolves around the Earth.
Yes, with all respect to @j_j , I think this is right. Do you think that, if we equate “as it truly is” with “how our embodied/encultured practices constitute it,” we can avoid the further puzzle of how we can make empirical claims about the world?
@Pierre-Normand
I realize I should expand my previous question a little.
Empirical claims can be the sort of claims that are locally right or wrong, so to speak. Your list, “misperceive, misjudge, or hallucinate” would all be examples of what I mean by local mistakes. They are sorted out within a broad framework of shared cultural and intellectual practices, just as you say.
But there may also be empirical claims that talk about the framework itself. We can say that phlogiston does not exist because we adopt, and can give reasons for, a broadly scientific framework of the physical world. What we say about phlogiston is a local empirical claim. But I think scientific realism would further say that the framework itself is also an empirical claim.
The contested term would be “empirical,” of course. Do we truly discover realism in the world, as the scientific realist sometimes seems to be saying? Or is the framework necessarily situated beyond the reach of adjudication via empirical evidence?
So my previous question about “the further puzzle” refers to such an alleged non-local empirical claim. To get beyond local claims, which are decidable by cultural practices, must we opt for “the world as it truly is”? Is scientific realism committed to this, if it argues that the framework itself – reason, evidence, inquiry, justification, et al. – reflects what we can discover in the world? Or should we place the emphasis on “what we can discover,” and insist that the question remains local to our practice?
Sure, but this is just communal belief. Of great and even fundamental importance, but just what “we” believe. What we call “truth.”
I’ve tried to emphasize that we live in our beliefs and not they in us by using “faces of world” as a metaphor. Our strong beliefs are not toys we play with. We are the toys. For me beliefs are not internal. Belief is the articulation of a “face” of the world.
This may sound subjectivistic, but I want to empty the subject. The subject is “structural.” It is the more or less explicit “from-a-point-of-view-ness” that is there as world itself.
Beautiful post, PN ! I love your prose. So forgive me for not surrendering just yet.
A crooked stick looks straight when you pull it out of the water. Or no that’s not it. But why not ? Because ‘we’ privilege the constancy of the tactile manifestation of the stick.
Of course I agree that we tend to describe the revision of our beliefs as progressive. Back then we were confused. Now the object itself shines forth in its final truth.
I must also protest that the “we-talk” involves an idealization, as if the leap from “I believe” to “we believe” is trivial. However much I insist on emphasizing the sociality of reason, we rely each on our individual sense organs and we react to signs as individuals. Bakhtin’s points on the concrete speech act strike me as pointing out what philosopher tend to overlook, precisely because they aspire to voice the ideal we.
At the basis of the modes of linguistic thought that lead to the postulation of language as a system of normatively identical forms lies a practical and theoretical focus of attention on the study of defunct, alien languages preserved in written monuments. This philological orientation has determined the whole course of linguistic thinking in the European world to a very considerable degree, and we must stress this point with all possible insistence. European linguistic thought formed and matured over concern with the cadavers of written languages; almost all its basic categories, its basic approaches and techniques were worked out in the process of reviving these cadavers.
…
But the monologic utterance is, after all, already an abstraction, though, to be sure, an abstraction of a ‘natural’ kind. Any monologic utterance, the writ- ten monument included, is an inseverable element of verbal communication. Any utterance - the finished, written utterance not excepted - makes response to something and is calculated to be responded to in turn. It is but one link in a continuous chain of speech performances. Each monument carries on the work of its predecessors, polemicizing with them, expecting active, responsive understanding, and anticipating such understanding in return. Each monument in actuality is an integral part of science, literature, or political life. The monument, as any other monologic utterance, is set toward being perceived in the context of current scientific life or current literary affairs, i.e., it is perceived in the generative process of that particular ideological domain of which it is an integral part .
…
Thus each of the distinguishable significative elements of an utterance and the entire utterance as a whole entity are translated in our minds into another, active and responsive, context. Any true understanding is dialogic in nature. Understanding is to utterance as one line of a dialogue is to the next. Understanding strives to match the speaker’s word with a counter word. Only in understanding a word in a foreign tongue is the attempt made to match it with the ‘same’ word in one’s own language.
…
Therefore, there is no reason for saying that meaning belongs to a word as such. In essence, meaning belongs to a word in its position between speakers; that is, meaning is realized only in the process of active, responsive under- standing. Meaning does not reside in the word or in the soul of the speaker or in the soul of the listener. Meaning is the effect of interaction between speaker and listener produced via the material of a particular sound complex. It is like an electric spark that occurs only when two different terminals are hooked together.
Those are very good questions. I’m still attempting to split the difference between @j_j, who may still seem to view you (and myself) not to be sensitive enough to the ontological primacy of interpersonal social encounters, and yourself who, despite being equally hostile to God’s-eye-view metaphysical realisms, may still view j_j (and myself) not to adequately account for non-parochial dispute resolution standards.
What may help advance the dispute forward, maybe, and move towards reconciling your and j_j’s good phenomenological instincts, might be to stress that what it is that I had advocated as embodiment and situatedness within a practical form of life, and that some thinkers (like the Popperian physicist David Deutsch) often disparage as mere parochialism is, due to the requirements of ineliminable situatedness, simply the requirement for a sufficient degree of specificity.
I’d like to appeal to R.M. Hare’s distinction of distinctions (between the singular/universal and the specific/general distinctions) that David Wiggins transposes from the philosophy of law (where Hare primarily deployed it) to the metaphysics of substances and to the domain of practical deliberation generally. The main rationale for stressing the meta-distinction is that crafting the conceptual nets required to constitute phenomena that we care about (for both practical and explanatory purposes) demands that we make them bendable like Aristotle’s Lesbian rule, as it were, if they are to adequately constrain and capture empirical phenomena where it is that we encounter them in experience, practice, and imagination. And this means that being “parochial” often just means being specific enough in our crafting of those nets such that they find more universalizable application within the practical domains where they are meant to find application (and thereby successfully catch the empirical fish).
(The new model Claude 4.8 Opus adds a useful caveat regarding the Lesbian rule that I intend to be understood qua reusable measuring competence in the third paragraph of its comment/elaboration here.)
Edited to add:
Deutsch may have inherited from Popper something like the idea of empirical content qua falsifiability, and making a theory more rigorous/falsifiable is a sort of tightening of the conceptual net, to reuse my favorite metaphor. When a thus “tightened” theory survives falsifications, its scope expands to the new regions where it was found to be corroborated and hence could be claimed to have become more universal. But another way to tighten the net (and thereby increase the empirical content of the theory) is to deliberately restrict its scope of application, thereby making it apply more universally within this restricted domain. Maybe Popper and Deutsch’s focus on material sciences, paradigmatically physics, as contrasted with, say, biology, leads them to falsely equate generalization with universalization and thereby to neglect or disparage moves of scope restriction. But the sort of scope expansion that makes a rabbit, a cannonball, and a planet, all fall under Newton’s law of gravitation also view them in a way that abstracts away from what it is that makes a rabbit the specific sort of thing that it is (i.e. from its specific form, as opposed to what it is that it is materially constituted of).
And so, for the purpose of our discussion, those considerations may hand both you and j_j what it is that you wanted. Your non-parochial standards become form-appropriate standards. The Foucault pendulum binds the cosmologist because cosmology is a fishery with empirical standards that are life-form-indifferent, and it leaves the farmer untouched because their fishery is cut to a different “parochial” standard. And j_j’s situatedness also gets its metaphysical warrant. Embodiment and the practical form of life are the form of the social interactions that j_j stresses. Their error, if it is one, is only to mistake fidelity-to-a-shared-form for relativity-to-faces when the form just is what the many faces need to share in order to be faces of anything at all.
First of all, I much appreciate your efforts to see this issue from (at least) two sides. Your comments are extremely helpful to me.
Indeed, there’s so much to ponder in your last reply that I’m going to hold off making any substantial rejoinder for now. I read what you’ve written as an invitation to reconsider the framing of the problem so that it doesn’t reside along the parochial/general binary, but instead along the specific/general binary. An excellent thought. I’ll spend some time with it.
EDIT: Sorry, should have been “parochial/universal,” above.
I’m tempted to say that it’s always others’ standards that are parochial, from our enlightened point of view.
Steiner jokes about “adultery in Rhode Island” in an incredible lecture on the history of literacy. Let us zoom on the adulteress and her lover as they kiss for the last time, for he can no longer bear it, and so on. The way that situation presents itself to her, in that moment, is what I’d call a flash of a face of the world. Its “entire lifeworld significance” can only be quasi-essentialized and desiccated as it is woven as a “fact-from-POV” that plays a merely supporting role in some other scene. One can contemplate the position of organic molecules at location X in spacetime or estimate the pheromones in the air in ppm.
I’m only sort-of-joking here. “Truth” as a property of statements, and yet those statements don’t “compress” situations in their richness but precisely exclude richness in order to be relevant to their average users, who must skillfully apply the generality to a concrete situation.
Very nice ! We need not assume that scientific statements must all cohere globally or be built in terms of layers. A great violinist need know nothing of the physics of sound. You might say that they “do,” but then their “knowledge” is more skill than “true propositions.”
But the cosmologists enact a life-form together.
Just for clarity, I’m trying to simultaneously emphasize the “forum” as deeply presupposed/enacted and the strange way the world shows itself through individual nervous systems in terms of individuals’ beliefs. This is why I suggest “faces of (our) world” rather than “many (private, disconnected) worlds.” Many philosophers, in my view, go too far in either direction, losing something important, leaving out a crucial part of the story.
In terms of the OP, I’d say still that “truth” is an adjective applied to Our more warranted enlightened effective tested etc beliefs. We “experience” or “live” these beliefs as the world itself insofar as it is intelligible to us. So we are more theirs than they are ours.
For sure! My use of “life-form-independent” in the present context was misleading. I meant that the Newtonian/Galilean cosmologist treats as paradigm the movements of the planets qua planets, and the movements of ideal solids on Earth qua ideal solids (e.g. as maintaining constant shape and mass, resting on frictionless slopes, etc.), and those planets and solids don’t exemplify life-forms though the cosmologists themselves bring those concepts (e.g. planet, solid, friction, gravitation) to bear on their objects in accordance with their own practical form of life, which includes their scientific practices.
Consider the case of a jury tasked with establishing the guilt of the accused beyond a reasonable doubt, as the evidence standard is commonly enacted in criminal law. This suggests that when they reach a guilty verdict, the jurors must take themselves to know that the accused is guilty, or to hold that the claim that accused is guilty is true. It doesn’t mean, of course, that they hold themselves to be infallible. The standard is reasonableness, not certainty. The jurors would not hold themselves to know that the accused is guilty if they merely thought the “guilty” judgement to be better warranted than the “non guilty” one. Conversely, they would not render a non-guilty verdict if they took themselves to know that the accused is guilty.
Now, when deciding the question, over the course of the trial and deliberation period, the questions of actus reus and mens rea are commonly distinguished. The first question concerns, in light of the evidence, whether the prohibited act was committed and the second one whether it was done intentionally, with or without premeditation, negligently, recklessly, etc. The law or statute spells out both the general conditions under which an act falls under the prohibition (actus reus) and what constitutes a culpable state of mind (mens rea) when committing this act. An orthogonal, albeit not fully independent, distinction is the quaestio facti versus quaestio iuris one. Those answer the questions “What sort of issue is this?” and “Who has authority to decide it?” respectively. The jury normally has full discretionary power to determine the “facts” (what it is that the accused did, and what was their state of mind) and the judge (and appellate courts, when required) decide the general standards governing the scope of applicability of the law.
A naïve realist view would sort out contributions of “the world” and those of “the mind” (or of our concepts) through locating actus reus and quaestio facti issues on the “objective” side of the goings-on in the world (what are the facts/data that our judgements bear on) and the quaestio iuris on the subjective and conventionalist sides of the judgement (what norms/concepts are brought to bear on the facts/data). On that view, the mens rea question might sit uneasily between both, it being presumably subjective on account of the inscrutability of the mind of the accused. A less naïve view would construe the target of the judgement—the putative criminal action that merits, or vindicates, the rendering of a guilty verdict—to be the sort of act that is constituted as such (i.e. as a criminal act) by the norms governing the administration of criminal justice. Those norms (as articulated in written statutes and the relevant jurisprudence) make up the conceptual nets within which criminals are caught and constituted as such.
The story so far seems to depict a division of labor whereby juries are tasked with wielding the net (and judging whether the accused is, or isn’t, caught in its mesh) whereas the written law (and hence the legislators), the presiding judge and the appellate courts build and maintain the net. There is however a common practice of jury nullification, which is a discretionary power accorded to juries, whereby they can acquit the accused even if they judge that they are caught in the net of justice according to the standards set by the law (and interpreted/specified/articulated by the presiding judge). Jury nullification may be construed as a modern, institutionally-tolerated instance of Aristotelian epieikeia, or equity as the correction of legal justice where it fails due to its excessive generality. Aristotle’s point in the Nicomachean Ethics is that the equitable is just but not definitionally legally just. It is rather what corrects the law when the law is defective precisely because it must be universal (and therefore leans too much towards generality, and neglects relevant specific circumstances). The lawgiver legislates in general terms but can’t anticipate every particular case, so when a situation arises that the universal rule doesn’t adequately address, equity steps in to rectify that gap. This is where juries step in, in cases of jury nullification, for the benefit of the accused wrongly caught in a net that wasn’t meant to catch them, and where appellate judges step in though creating new precedents, and hence adjusting the mesh of the net to make it more specific and thereby also more universally applicable within its thus adjusted scope of application.
I think this illusttration of the joint collective responsibility for forum participants to abide by the norms embodied in our institutions and, at the same time, to adjust those norms in the light of epieikeia, as we encounter unforeseen cases, gives us a decent model of what a pragmatist theory of truth needs, and of what I take you to be reaching for.
When you say that “we are more theirs than they (our beliefs) are ours”, I want to agree and the net metaphor is meant to explain why without paradox. We do not each spin a private mesh. We rather are inducted into the standing and historically maintained net of a practice and it is our shared practical form of life that makes our several takes the faces of one world rather than so many disconnected ones. The shared form (embodied norms and living practices) just is what the many faces need to share in order to be faces of anything at all, as I had previously suggested. And because the net is answerable, because it can catch the wrong man (or wrong object, in general) and because we have the standing responsibility to adjust it by epieikeia, the facts it discloses are both ours, as caught in our mesh, and the world’s, as what the mesh must answer to in unforeseen circumstances. “True” is the adjective we reserve for what survives in a net so maintained.
Thanks for the clarification. That sounds right to me.
Our issue here got kicked up again over the “existence of the past thread.”
Over there I repeated myself in some ways. I invoked the “theological residue” bit again, as an attempt to “get myself heard” on my primary objection to “truth.”
Perhaps you and I are not so far apart on the issue. I grant that there are reasonable uses of “truth.” My main point is the tendency of some thinkers to speak as if they themselves weren’t embedded believers like everyone else. Sure, some beliefs are much better than others. Sure, we tend to try to cooperate in non-verbal action and part of this is a convergence of maps, of beliefs. But the grandest ideal We is still a believing we. In my view, they “live in” those beliefs “as the truth.”
I connect this to a creative misreading (?) of Heidegger’s authenticity. Owned ontology is ( tautologically) situated.
Rejecting this way of proceeding in which the subject-object schema is foisted on fields of investigation is only one of the most urgent precautionary measures needed today. A second concerns a prejudice which merely constitutes the counterpart to the uncritical approach of generating constructions and theorizing. This is the demand for observation which is free ofstandpoints. This second prejudice is even more disastrous for research because, with its express watchword for the seemingly highest idea of science and objectivity, it in fact elevates taking an uncritical approach into a first principle and promulgates a fundamental blindness. It cultivates a strange modesty and grants a general dispensation from critical questioning by means of the apparent self-evidence of what it demands. For what could be more obvious even to the slowest than the demand for an unbiased approach to the subject matter-and thus for suspending one’s standpoint? (The motives behind this idea of freedom from standpoints?) (Free of standpoints only when there is nothing to be done, but what if we actually have to look at matters and carry out research on them? A free-standing detached standpoint = the ruin of being-a-subject. Developing our standpoint is prior on the level of being. The right way of doing this which we must be capable of recognizing prejudices and indeed regarding not just their content but also their being. Public tolerance-as against that, the prior genuine way of entering the world, lifting the controls on it, giving it free play.[511) Even unbiased seeing is a seeing and as such has its position of looking and indeed has it in a distinctive manner, Le., by having explicitly appropriated it so that it has been critically purged. If the term is to say anything at all, “freedom from standpoints” is nothing other than an explicit appropriation ofour position oflooking. This position is itself something historicaL Le., bound up with Dasein (responsibility, how Dasein stands regarding itself), and not a chimerical in-itself outside of time.
Elsewhere we were discussing the darkness under objects as their future. Gadamer might say that the darkness of the object is also the darkness of our own selves as we go to meet that object. Our deepest prejudices are those least visible to us. It’s only collision with objects ( including other human beings) that reveals us to ourselves.
For me talk of truth is the talk of a “god” who is “no one at all.” As if any particular comportment could exhaust the darkness under the object, its ground in the future.
In more mundane terms, there’s just the conspicuousness and immediacy of unshared belief. “This crazy dude thinks that consciousness is being.” So it makes sense to me that belief play the role of the fundamental concept. Meanwhile people point out what “truth” is merely by sharing their beliefs with me ! To be fair, some philosophers in this thread have done much better than that. I suppose I want to point at the “reality” of the interpersonal situation. Because everyone calls their own beliefs “true,” there’s a tendency to look for something under belief. Indeed, we want others to adopt our beliefs. To “come back down to reality.” And yet this reality is the face is shows to us, currently in terms of what I think is better called “belief” than “your truth” and “his truth” and “her truth.”
I found a brief paper that links Heidegger to Bakhtin. I quote a few passages relevant to my objection to “truth” as something “more” than situated belief.
Heidegger’s statements about solicitude—in both its positive and deficient modes—show that it is dialogical in character. The deficient modes of solicitude represent, however, a failure to fulfill the dialogical potential inherent in the phenomenon of solicitude, and thus amount only to monological action. It should be unsurprising that the “deficient” modes of solicitude fail to live up to the dialogical potential inherent in solicitude. But based on his description of “leaping in” for the other, contra Heidegger’s implicit suggestion, this “positive” mode seems monological in character as well, as it involves Dasein acting without regard for the interlocutory partner’s agency which makes the to-and-fro of mutual reciprocity possible in the first place. In “tak[ing] over for the Other” whereby “[t]he Other is thus thrown out of his own position,” Dasein in fact remains impervious to the to-and-fro movement constitutive, in part, of the dialogical. Thus, I want to suggest, it is only in the positive mode of “leap[ing] ahead” of the other that the dialogical potential in solicitude gets fulfilled.
“Proximally Dasein is ‘they,’ and for the most part it remains so. If Dasein discovers the world in its own way [eigens] and brings it close, if it discloses to itself its own authentic Being, then this discovery of the ‘world’ and this disclosure of Dasein are always accomplished as a clearing- away of concealments and obscurities, as a breaking up of the disguises with which Dasein bars its own way” (BT 167).
Dasein’s fallenness in the “they” is the reason why average, everyday Dasein is ignorant of and impervious to the dialogical character of Being-with and solicitude, and thus “proximally and for the most part” comports itself monologically, even if at times it can appear otherwise. As Heidegger says, “Being-with-one-another in the ‘they’ is by no means an indifferent side-by-sideness in which everything has been settled, but rather an intent, ambiguous watching of one another, a secret and reciprocal listening-in. Under the mask of ‘for-one-another,’ an ‘against-oneanother’ is in play” (BT 219). Notwith-standing Dasein’s appearing to comport itself dialogically, its fallenness in and conformity to the “they” renders it impervious to the dialogical potential of discursive Being-with. “[T]he ‘they’ presents every judgment and decision as its own, it deprives the particular Dasein of its answerability” (BT 165), Heidegger says.
To speak the “truth” is ( in this context) to speak for the “They” or for “God.” Not I, but Truth through me.
Does this matter for practical life ? Well the use of “truth” is usually quite innocent. So I’m looking at a “metaphysical surplus.”
Why did pragmatists feel the need to drag truth in in the first place ? Why did Sellars define truth as warranted assertibility ? This is so “weak” (in a good way) that “truth” seems too strong of a name for it.