comes up with a third realm of meaning, an invention that is no less doubtful than medieval speculation about angels. If this impossible situation is to be avoided, the sole possibility lies in reflecting on what would be the subject "inside" which something like being-true is supposed to have its own existence.
We shall first ask what it means to say that an assertion is true. To find the answer it is necessary to go back to the determination of assertion that was given, that it is communicative-determinative exhibition. The last mentioned character, exhibition, is primary. It means that an assertion lets that which is talked about in it be seen in the way of determinative predication; assertion makes that which is talked about accessible. This predicative exhibition of a being has the general character of unveiling letting-be-encountered. In understanding the communicated assertion, the hearer is not directed toward words or meanings or the psychical processes of the communicator. Instead, so far as the assertion is on its own part in keeping with the thing, the hearer is directed from the very beginning in his understanding of it toward the entity talked about, which should then come to meet him in its specific being [So-sein]. Exhibition has the character of unveiling, and it can be determination and communication only because it unveils. This unveiling, which is the basic function of assertion, constitutes the character traditionally designated as being-true.
The way of unveiling correlative to the entity about which an assertion is made varies with the intrinsic content and the mode of being of the assertion's object. We shall call the unveiling of an extant being—for example, nature in the broadest sense—uncovering. The unveiling of the being that we ourselves are, the Dasein, and that has existence as its mode of being, we shall call not uncovering but disclosure, opening up. Within certain limits terminology is always arbitrary. But the definition of being-true as unveiling, making manifest, is not an arbitrary, private invention of mine; it only gives expression to the understanding of the phenomenon of truth, as the Greeks already understood it in pre-scientific as well as philosophical understanding, even if not in every respect in an originally explicit way. Plato already says explicitly that the function of logos, of assertion, is δηλοῦν, making plain, or, as Aristotle says more exactly with regard to the Greek expression of truth: ἀληθεύειν. Λανθάνειν means to be concealed; α- is the privative, so that ἀ-ληθεύειν is equivalent to: to pluck something out of its concealment, to make manifest or reveal. For the Greeks truth means: to take out of concealment, uncovering, unveiling. To be sure the Greeks' interpretation of this phenomenon was not successful in every respect. Therefore the essential initial approaches made by this understanding of truth could not be followed through favorably but—for reasons we cannot here consider more closely—fell victim to misunderstanding, so that today