The Indefinability of Truth and Interpretation in Heidegger and Davidson

starting points that lead to ‘the true’ but are not themselves genuine or authentic. For Heidegger, once we reflect on their inadequacies and recognize their function in everyday practice, they have no further role to play in philosophical reflection. Indeed, once we reach this point, reliance upon the everyday senses of truth becomes a barrier to reflection. We dispense with truth as correctness just as we throw away the Wittgensteinian ladder once we have reached a pertinent height. Although he also rejects the correspondence theory of truth (or at least one of its particular variations), Donald Davidson develops a theory of interpretation that suggests some reasons why the ordinary senses of truth should not be so mistreated: responsible theories of interpretation should treat the everyday senses of truth more seriously. I do not mean to suggest thereby that all important hermeneutic questions are satisfied. On the contrary, the point is that some version of the theory of truth embodied in Tarski’s convention T is a necessary but insufficient condition of interpretation. In the following I intend to argue that the necessity of convention T as a condition of interpretation means that correctness is essential both in philosophy and elsewhere. This is due to the fact that we cannot clearly distinguish the authentic from the inauthentic, since correctness is a condition of understanding, and because it functions as a crucial constraint on false and arbitrary interpretation.