Abstract

Hegel's doctrine that "Truth... lies in the coincidence of the object with itself, that is, with its notion" is taken as a precedent for the author's theory of truth. Hegel, he says, "must be credited for the profound insight that truth is not something that is simply delivered whole and complete by a proposition as such but rather requires a process in which the object that may bear a truth realizes itself as the thing that it properly is." Heidegger is also cited, but since Deutsch thinks that he does not make a sufficiently radical break with the conventional correspondence position, he turns, for a more radical formulation of "an ontological approach," to Albert Hofstadter's book Truth and Art. Hofstadter's doctrine of truth of spirit is said to affirm "the central insight of Hegel into the meaning of truth." In truth of spirit it is not the intentionality of the knower that is at issue, but rather of the thing known, for, in Hofstadter's words, the "thing itself must be intentionalistic," and is "uncovered as being what it ought to be in and of itself, which can be the case only if the concept is the thing's own." The term "concept" is of course here used in a sense reminiscent of Hegel's. The claim that the fundamental sense of truth is to be found in what Deutsch calls "the realization of the object's own being" runs all through the book, and it is this claim, expressed in terms of Deutsch's modification of Hofstadter's notion of the intentionality of the known object, that is applied successively to the artwork, to religious language, and to propositional language.