Volume 26, 2001
A. C. Genova
Pages 1-22
How Wittgenstein Escapes the Slingshot
The paper attempts to do the following: (1) provide a reconstruction of a valid argument for Frege’s thesis that a truth-apt sentence refers to its truth value---an argument that is the implicit argument of Frege’s original text, based on premises explicitly stated or clearly implied in “On Sense and Reference”; (2) examine a standard version (essentially Davidson’s) of the recent counterpart of the Fregean Argument (the so-called Slingshot) designed to refute, quite generally, fact-based correspondence theories of truth; and (3) show exactly why Wittgenstein’s correspondence theory in the Tractatus is not subject to the Slingshot Argument. If so, then, contra Davidson, it is neither the case that a correspondence theory need be nonexplanatory of truth, nor the case that a “strategy of facts” cannot be sustained. Indeed, for Wittgenstein, the Slingshot cannot even come into play, unless we attempt to say what can only be shown.