Back to Being and Time - Assertion (Judgment)

From a previous blog:

This process of interpretation and building meaning could be one way of starting to define learning.

The ability to move between possible interpretations and meanings is a freedom and requires playfulness. In this sense the understanding could be freedom - understanding and choosing possibilities as possibilities.

Learning can be assisted by the freedom to move between, subsume and synthesise interpretations and meanings.

On further reflection, it is hard to imagine learning without understanding and pursuing possibilities as possibilities that is freedom as I have started to define it.

Heidegger introduces us to a place for 'assertion' (judgment?):

All interpretation is grounded on understanding. That which has been articulated as such in interpretation and sketched out beforehand in the understanding in general as something articulable, is the meaning. In so far as assertion ('judgment') is grounded on understanding and presents us with a derivative form in which an interpretation has been carried out, it too 'has' a meaning. Yet this meaning cannot be defined as something which occurs 'in' a judgment along with judging itself. (p. 195)

In what follows, we give three significations to the term "assertion". These are drawn from the phenomenon which is thus designated, they are connected among themselves, and in their unity they encompass the full structure of assertion.

1. The primary signification of "assertion" is "pointing out". In this we adhere to the primordial meaning of... ...letting and entity be seen for itself. I the assertion 'The hammer is too heavy', what is discovered for sight is not a 'meaning', but an entity in the way that it is ready-to-hand'...

2. "Assertion" means no less than "predication". We 'assert' a 'predicate' of a 'subject', and the 'subject' is given a definite character by the 'predicate'. In this signification of "assertion", that which is put forward as assertion is not the predicate, but 'the hammer itself'... ...Every predication is what it is, only as a pointing-out. The second signification of "assertion" has its foundation in the first. Within this pointing-out, the elements which are Articulated in predication - the subject and predicate - arise. It is not by giving something a definite character that we first discover that which shows itself - the hammer - as such; but when we give it such a character, our seeing gets restricted to it in the first instance, so that by this explicit restriction of our view, that which is manifest may be explicitly manifest in its definite character. In giving something a definite character, we must, in the first instance, take a step back when confronted with that which is already manifest - the hammer is too heavy. In 'setting down the subject', we dim entities down to focus in 'that hammer there', so that by thus dimming the, down we let that which is manifest be seen in its own definite character as a character that can be determined. Setting down the subject, setting down the predicate, and setting down the two together, are thoroughly 'apophantical' in the strict sense of the word.

3. "Assertion" means "communication". As communication, it is directly related to "assertion" in the first and second significations. It is letting someone see with us what we have pointed out by way of giving it a definite character... ...That which is put forward in the is something which can be passed along in 'further retelling'. There is a widening of the range of that mutual sharing which sees. But at the same time, what has been pointed out may become veiled again in this further retelling, although even the kind of knowing which arises as hearsay (whether knowledge that something is the case or merely an acquaintance with something always has the entity itself in view and does not 'give assent' to some 'valid meaning' which has been passed around. Even hearsay in a Being-in-the-world, and a Being towards what it has heard. (pp. 196-8)

If we bring together the three significations of 'assertion' which we have analysed, and get a unitary view of the full phenomenon, then we may define "assertion" as "a pointing-out which gives something a definite character and which communicates". (p. 199)