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10 Topology, Triangulation, and Truth Every interpretation is a dialogue with the work, and with the saying. However, every dialogue becomes halting and fruitless if it confines itself obdurately to nothing but what is directly said—rather than that the speakers in the dialogue involve each other in that realm and abode about which they are speaking, and lead each other to it. Such involvement is the soul of dialogue. It leads the speakers into the unspoken. —Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? Heidegger’s Being and Time is not primarily concerned with questions of interpretation or understanding. Its driving interest is instead ontological— an interest in the question of the “meaning of being.” Yet inasmuch as the work adopts a thoroughly hermeneuticized approach to ontology—the very focus on the meaning of being suggests as such—so the inquiry into ontology also involves Heidegger in an inquiry into the “structure” of understanding. Although the explicitly hermeneutic focus disappears from Heidegger’s later work, still the concern with understanding, thought in terms of a broader happening of disclosedness—a happening of world—can be seen to continue .1 Moreover, if we look to the work of Heidegger’s one-time pupil, Hans-Georg Gadamer, which takes as its starting point Heidegger’s later rather than earlier thinking, we can clearly see how the hermeneuticized ontology pursued by Heidegger readily gives rise to an ontologized hermeneutics . One might say that once philosophy takes the “hermeneutic turn,” the inquiry into some form of “fundamental ontology” and the inquiry into the structure of understanding become one and the same. Perhaps something similar is also true within so-called analytic philosophy: following the linguistic turn (the analytic correlate of the earlier turn to hermeneutics within continental thought), the inquiry into the structure of language seems inevitably to lead back to a concern with the fundamental structures in which meaning, rationality, and agency are grounded. 200 Chapter 10 If the move from a hermeneuticized mode of ontological inquiry back to an ontologized hermeneutics can be discerned in Heidegger’s work, as well as in Gadamer, then the work of Donald Davidson, and perhaps also the transition to Davidson from Quine, provides an example of how analytic philosophy might be viewed as turning from a concern with the linguistic, the logical, and the semantical, back to an interest in the underlying ontology (broadly understood) that grounds them. Thus, whereas Davidson’s earlier work may be viewed as characterized by a focus on semantic and logical issues, his later work has been increasingly concerned with the elaboration of the fundamental structures in which the possibility of meaning and understanding reside (or, as Davidson puts it into “the conditions of objective thought”). Heidegger and Davidson can both be seen, then, as providing an example of how the inquiry into questions of interpretation and understanding may be central to a broader set of more fundamentally “ontological ” issues. In addition, and notwithstanding the enormous divergence between them in style and philosophical background, there also seems to be a number of important points in relation to these issues on which the two converge. The exploration of such convergence has come to be the focus for a small but growing body of literature.2 As I read matters, however, the convergence at issue here cannot adequately be understood except inasmuch as the work of both Heidegger and Davidson is read as giving a central role (whether implicitly or explicitly) to the idea of locality or place—to the idea of topos. Within the framework of the inquiry into interpretation one might say that the structure of interpretation is itself given in the structure of place or location; more broadly, that the very possibility of the disclosing or unconcealing of things, the very possibility of world, is to be found through the disclosing of that same topological structure—through the disclosing or unconcealing of what Heidegger calls “the place or . . . locality of Being [Ortschaft des Seins].”3 Such a topological or topographical approach is one in which the work of a “mapping out” of the “place” of disclosedness is, at the same time, the delineation of a certain “topography” of understanding—and so one in which understanding is also reconfigured.4 This approach is, so I claim, characteristic of Heidegger’s thinking both early and late, and although it appears in a very different form, it is a central, if to some extent implicit, element in Davidson ’s work as well...

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