[Some assume that the true and the false is in the signified, i.e., in the incorporeal λεκτόν; others in the spoken sound; and still others, in the movement of the discursive intellect.]29
Truth is thus a characteristic of ideal being.
At this point we should clarify the distinction between the real [i.e., the empirical] and the ideal, and determine how this distinction is relevant to the formulation of the concept of truth. To that end we begin with a statement, a proposition: “The board is black.” The statement can be roughly characterized as a succession of positings. [55] The positing of the board as that-about-which the judgment is made; the positing of the black from out of the already given object (the board); and also positing as the positing-as-distinct (διαίρεσις) in the sense (and intent) of im-posing blackness upon the subject. What gets articulated, joined together, and intended in this succession of positings can be called the “judged” as such: that which is judged, the content of the positing, in short, the proposition of the blackness or beingblack of the board. The content of this proposition can be asserted by each one of you—i.e., by different individuals in different circumstances, at different times, with different clarity, in different moods, in different propositional and judgmental contexts. But what is judged in this endless series of instances is always the same proposition. What is intended is always one identical propositional content.
Therefore, a proposition is always a self-identical thing that maintains its identity in face of the multiplicity of empirical acts of positing judgments with their empirical circumstances and properties. And this changing mental act is differentiated from the abiding propositional content not only as a matter of fact but also, at bottom, arbitrarily. What are differentiated are the identity and permanence of the proposition versus the variability and change of the positings; on the one hand, the temporal course of the mental act while the judgment is being performed; and on the other hand, the non-temporal subsistence of the ideal meaning that is judged.
But we also know this correlation from other regions of objects. We speak of “color” in contrast to a changing plurality of colors; and we speak of “red” in contrast to these or those red things, a limitless profusion of different shades of red, each one having this determination of “red.” Or the “triangle” that is to be found in a series of different triangles, whether drawn, painted, thought of, or imagined. So we have the idea “triangle” as self-identical, just as we have the idea
29. [In Moser (pp. 130–132), Heidegger’s opening remarks for the next lecture (19 November 1925) offered an extended commentary on this text from Sextus Empiricus; this commentary does not appear in GA 21.]