Aristotle indicates that the manifold types of speaking which are to be sure comprehensible, i.e., which communicate something and provide an orientation but yet do not let anything be seen, belong to rhetoric and poetry. ῥητορικῆς γὰρ ἢ ποιητικῆς οἰκειοτέρα ἡ σκέψις—ὁ δὲ ἀποφαντικὸς τῆς νῦν θεωρίας (a5ff.). The 'λόγος ἀποφαντικός, on the other hand, is the object of the current investigation.
Aristotle says, as we know, that λόγος, speech, is ἀποφαντικός, i.e., it lets something be seen, if a disclosure, ἀληθεύειν, is present in it. Traditional logic, precisely in its appeal to this analysis, had allowed itself to be led astray into a fundamental misunderstanding insofar as it maintained that for Aristotle judgment is the proper bearer of truth. Then, when closer study found investigations in which Aristotle speaks about truth and yet not about judgment, his concept of truth was said to be contradictory.
On the basis of what we have clarified, we want to gain a fundamental understanding of the relation between λόγος and ἀλήθεια. Already now it is clear that Aristotle is not at all primarily referring to judgment but to speech and that speech can show something, be ἀποφαντικός, only if there occurs in it ἀληθεύειν, true disclosure. Speech is not the primary and unique bearer of the ἀληθές; it is something in which the ἀληθές can occur but does not have to occur. Λόγος is not the place where ἀληθεύειν is at home, where it is autochthonous.
β) Rejection of λόγος as the proper place of truth. Νοεῖν as
ἀληθεύειν without λόγος. The 'λόγος ἀποφαντικός as the
place of ψεῦδος. The synthetic structure of the 'λόγος
ἀποφαντικός as the condition of ψεῦδος.
Λόγος, insofar as it possesses the structure of ἀποφαίνεσθαι, of the "something as something," is so little the place of truth that it is, rather, quite the reverse, the proper condition of the possibility of falsity. That is, because this λόγος is a showing which lets that about which it speaks be seen as something, there remains the possibility that the thing might get distorted through the "as" and that deception would arise. Something can be distorted only if it is grasped in terms of something else. Only when ἀληθεύειν is carried out in the mode of the "as something," only when the "as" is structurally present, can it occur that something is presented as that which it is not. In simple disclosing, in αἴσθησις as in νοεῖν, there is no longer a λέγειν, an addressing of something as something. Therefore no deception is possible there either.
Aristotle now determines more precisely the structure by which λόγος is disclosive: if we remain with κατάφασις—"That is so"—then in this emergence of speech the whole is given without anything standing out in relief. Κατάφασις, insofar as it is a λέγειν τι κατά τινος, implies that the καθ᾽ οὗ λέγεται τι, that in relation to which something is said, is already present at the very outset and at the very outset is already objectified without anything standing out in relief.