Idealistic Studies

Volume 33, Issue 1, Spring 2003

Davidson and Disclosedness
An Analysis of Heideggerian and Davidsonian Truth

Donald Davidson assigns truth a central role in his theory of meaning but he also makes truth a guiding methodological principle in metaphysics. Truth is inexorably connected to belief and meaning, and no one of these concepts has theoretical priority over the others. I argue that there is a methodological circularity in Davidson’s account of how the world contributes to the truth of our beliefs and utterances. The difficulty for Davidson is in providing an account of how speakers share a common world while denying an ontologically privileged domain of entities and further claiming that being supervenes on truth. I suggest that the Heideggerian notion of disclosedness offers one solution.