Meaning and referentiality in Being and Time: a response to criticism from Lafont

Abstract

We analyse Lafont criticism according which Heidegger’s Being and Time project ends up in an aporia by presupposing two inconsistent thesis, which are: the thesis according which the world comprehension, of entities, is relative to each world disclosure of a specific epoch, being, therefore, plural and holist, and the thesis about sense determines reference, that is, the way we understand the entities determines how and to what entities we can refer to. We show that Lafont’s argumentation is a misleading, for it fails in assimilating Frege and Heidegger’s conception of designation in terms of sign notion, what render her thesis about Heidegger’s linguistic idealism as invalid.