Heidegger's eliding of disclosure and validity stems from his insisting on the nonpropositional and disclosive character of truth. Habermas has precisely the opposite intuition, namely, that truth properly so called is propositional, and that other dimensions of validity are at most analogous to propositional truth. Like Tugendhat, Habermas argues that one must distinguish sufficiently between validity and disclosure to have an adequate conception of truth. That, too, is what the previous two chapters have argued, in their own way, against Heidegger's hypermetaphysical anti-aesthetics. But a corollary also holds: unless one traces detailed links between disclosure and validity, one cannot have an adequate conception of artistic truth. That is what the current chapter attempts, partly in response to Habermas's postmetaphysical account of validity.

The chapter begins with debates about artistic truth in contemporary Critical Theory. The idea of artistic truth is a crossroad for third-generation critical theorists. Few ideas were more crucial for Theodor W. Adorno's social philosophy, arguably the most important contribution to Critical Theory by the first generation. Yet it finds little place in Jürgen Habermas's theory of communicative action, the dominant paradigm among second-generation critical theorists.