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Problem of Truth

<h3> CHAPTER III THE LOGICAL THEORIES </h3> Whoever cares to become acquainted with the difficulty of the problem of truth must not be impatient of dialectical subtleties. There is a well-known story in Boswell's Life of Dr. Johnson which relates how the Doctor refuted Berkeley's philosophy which affirmed the non-existence of matter. "I observed," says Boswell, "that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I shall never forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it—'I refute it thus.'" Dr. Johnson is the representative of robust common sense. It has very often turned out in metaphysical disputes that the common-sense answer is the one that has been justified in the end. Those who are impatient of metaphysics are, therefore, not without reasonable ground; and indeed the strong belief that the common-sense view will be justified in the end, however powerful the sceptical doubt that seems to contradict it, however startling the paradox that seems to be involved in it, is a possession of the human mind without which the ordinary {21} practical conduct of life would be impossible. When, then, we ask ourselves, What is truth? the answer seems to be simple and obvious. Truth, we reply, is a property of certain of our ideas; it means their agreement, as falsity means their disagreement, with reality. If I say of anything that it is so, then, if it is so, what I say is true; if it is not so, then what I say is false. This simple definition of truth is one that is universally accepted. No one really can deny it, for if he did he would have nothing to appeal to to justify his own theory or condemn another. The problem of truth is only raised when we ask, What does the agreement of an idea with reality mean? If the reader will ask himself that question, and carefully ponder it, he will see that there is some difficulty in the answer to the simple question, What is truth? The answer that will probably first of all suggest itself is that the idea is a copy of the reality. And at once many experiences will seem to confirm this view. Thus when we look at a landscape we know that the lines of light which radiate from every point of it pass through the lens of each of our eyes to be focussed on the retina, forming there a small picture which is the exact counterpart of the reality. If we look into another person's eye we may see there a picture of the whole field of his vision reflected from his lens. It is true that what we see is not what he sees, for that is on his retina, but the analogy of this with a photographic camera, where we see the picture on the ground glass, seems obvious and natural; and so we think of knowledge, so far as it depends on the sense of vision, as consisting in more or less vivid, more or less faded, copies of real things stored up by the memory. But a very little reflection will convince us that the truth of our ideas cannot consist in the fact {22} that they are copies of realities, for clearly they are not copies in any possible meaning of the term. Take, for example, this very illustration of seeing a landscape: what we see is not a picture or copy of the landscape, but the real landscape itself. We feel quite sure of this, and with regard to the other sensations, those that come to us by hearing, taste, smell, touch, it would seem highly absurd to suppose that the ideas these sensations produce in us are copies of real things. The pain of burning is not a copy of real fire, and the truth of the judgment, Fire burns, does not consist in the fact that the ideas denoted by the words "fire," "burns," faithfully copy certain real things which are not ideas. And the whole notion is seen to be absurd if we consider that, were it a fact that real things produce copies of themselves in our mind, we could never know it was so—all that we should have any knowledge of would be the copies, and whether these were like or unlike the reality, or indeed whether there was any reality for them to be like would, in the nature of the case, be unknowable, and we could never ask the question. If, then, our ideas are not copies of things, and if there are things as well as ideas about things, it is quite clear that the ideas must correspond to the things in some way that does not make them copies of the things. The most familiar instance of correspondence is the symbolism we use in mathematics. Are our ideas of this nature? And is their truth their correspondence? Is a perfectly true idea one in which there exists a point to point correspondence to the reality it represents? At once there will occur to the mind a great number of instances where this seems to be the case. A map of England is not a copy of England such as, for example, a photograph might be if we were to imagine it taken {23} from the moon. The correctness or the truth of a map consists in the correspondence between the reality and the diagram, which is an arbitrary sign of it. Throughout the whole of our ordinary life we find that we make use of symbols and signs that are not themselves either parts of or copies of the things for which they stand. Language itself is of this nature, and there may be symbols of symbols of symbols of real things. Written language is the arbitrary visual sign of spoken language, and spoken language is the arbitrary sign, it may be, of an experienced thing or of an abstract idea. Is, then, this property of our ideas which we call truth the correspondence of ideas with their objects, and is falsity the absence of this correspondence? It cannot be so. To imagine that ideas can correspond with realities is to forget that ideas simply are the knowledge of realities; it is to slip into the notion that we know two kinds of different things, first realities and secondly ideas, and that we can compare together these two sorts of things. But it is at once evident that if we could know realities without ideas, we should never need to have recourse to ideas. It is simply ridiculous to suppose that the relation between consciousness and reality which we call knowing is the discovery of a correspondence between mental ideas and real things. The two things that are related together in knowledge are not the idea and its object, but the mind and its object. The idea of the object is the knowledge of the object. There may be correspondence between ideas, but not between ideas and independent things, for that supposes that the mind knows the ideas and also knows the things and observes the correspondence between them. And even if we suppose that ideas are an independent kind of entity distinguishable and separable from another kind {24} of entity that forms the real world, how could we know that the two corresponded, for the one would only be inferred from the other? There is, however, a form of the correspondence theory of truth that is presented in a way which avoids this difficulty. Truth, it is said, is concerned not with the nature of things themselves but with our judgments about them. Judgment is not concerned with the terms that enter into relation—these are immediately experienced and ultimate—but with the relations in which they stand to one another. Thus, when we say John is the father of James, the truth of our judgment does not consist in the adequacy of our ideas of John and James, nor in the correspondence of our ideas with the realities, but is concerned only with the relation that is affirmed to exist between them. This relation is declared to be independent of or at least external to the terms, and, so far as it is expressed in a judgment, truth consists in its actual correspondence with fact. So if I say John is the father of James, then, if John is the father of James, the judgment is true, the affirmation is a truth; if he is not, it is false, the affirmation is a falsehood. This view has the merit of simplicity, and is sufficiently obvious almost to disarm criticism. There is, indeed, little difficulty in accepting it if we are able to take the view of the nature of the real universe which it assumes. The theory is best described as pluralistic realism. It is the view that the universe consists of or is composed of an aggregate of an infinite number of entities. Some of these have a place in the space and time series, and these exist. Some, on the other hand, are possibilities which have not and may never have any actual existence. Entities that have their place in the perceptual order of experience exist, {25} or have existed, or will exist; but entities that are concepts, such as goodness, beauty, truth, or that are abstract symbols like numbers, geometrical figures, pure forms, do not exist, but are none the less just as real as the entities that do exist. These entities are the subject-matter of our judgments, and knowing is discovering the relations in which they stand to one another. The whole significance of this view lies in the doctrine that relations are external to the entities that are related—they do not enter into and form part of the nature of the entities. The difficulty of this view is just this externality of the relation. It seems difficult to conceive what nature is left in any entity deprived of all its relations. The relation of father and son in the judgment, John is the father of James, is so far part of the nature of the persons John and James, that if the judgment is false then to that extent John and James are not the actual persons John and James that they are thought to be. And this is the case even in so purely external a relation as is expressed, say, in the judgment, Edinburgh is East of Glasgow. It is difficult to discuss any relation which can be said to be entirely indifferent to the nature of its terms, and it is doubtful if anything whatever would be left of a term abstracted from all its relations. These difficulties have led to the formulation of an altogether different theory, namely, the theory that truth does not consist in correspondence between ideas and their real counterparts, but in the consistence and internal harmony of the ideas themselves. It is named the coherence theory. It will be recognised at once that there is very much in common experience to support it. It is by the test of consistency and coherence that we invariably judge the truth of evidence. {26} Also it seems a very essential part of our intellectual nature to reject as untrue and false any statement or any idea that is self-contradictory or irreconcilable with the world of living experience. But then, on the other hand, we by no means allow that that must be true which does not exhibit logical contradiction and inconsistency. It is a common enough experience that ideas prove false though they have exhibited no inherent failure to harmonise with surrounding circumstances nor any self-contradiction. The theory, therefore, requires more than a cursory examination. Thinking is the activity of our mind which discovers the order, arrangement, and system in the reality that the senses reveal. Without thought, our felt experience would be a chaos and not a world. The philosopher Kant expressed this by saying that the understanding gives unity to the manifold of sense. The understanding, he said, makes nature. It does this by giving form to the matter which comes to it by the senses. The mind is not a tabula rasa upon which the external world makes and leaves impressions, it is a relating activity which arranges the matter it receives in forms. First of all there are space and time, which are forms in which we receive all perceptual experience, and then there are categories that are conceptual frames or moulds by which we think of everything we experience as having definite relations and belonging to a real order of existence. Substance, causality, quality, and quantity are categories; they are universal forms in which the mind arranges sense experience, and which constitute the laws of nature, the order of the world. Space and time, and the categories of the understanding Kant declared to be transcendental—that is to say, they are the elements necessary to experience which are not {27} themselves derived from experience, as, for example, that every event has a cause. There are, he declared, synthetic a priori judgments—that is, judgments about experience which are not themselves derived from experience, but, on the contrary, the conditions that make experience possible. It is from this doctrine of Kant that the whole of modern idealism takes its rise. Kant, indeed, held that there are things-in-themselves, and to this extent he was not himself an idealist, but he also held that things-in-themselves are unknowable, and this is essentially the idealist position. Clearly, if we hold the view that things-in-themselves are unknowable, truth cannot be a correspondence between our ideas and these things-in-themselves. Truth must be some quality of the ideas themselves, and this can only be their logical consistency. Consistency, because the ideas must be in agreement with one another; and logical, because this consistency belongs to the thinking, and logic is the science of thinking. Truth, in effect, is the ideal of logical consistency. We experience in thinking an activity striving to attain the knowledge of reality, and the belief, the feeling of satisfaction that we experience when our thinking seems to attain the knowledge of reality, is the harmony, the absence of contradiction, the coherence, of our ideas themselves. This is the coherence theory. Let us see what it implies as to the ultimate nature of truth and reality. In both the theories we have now examined, truth is a logical character of ideas. In the correspondence theory there is indeed supposed a non-logical reality, but it is only in the ideas that there is the conformity or correspondence which constitutes their truth. In the coherence theory, reality is itself ideal, and the {28} ultimate ground of everything is logical. This is the theory of truth that accords with the idealist view, and this view finds its most perfect expression in the theory of the Absolute. The Absolute is the idea of an object that realises perfect logical consistency. This object logic itself creates; if it be a necessary existence, then knowledge of it cannot be other than truth. This view, on account of the supreme position that it assigns to the intellect, and of the fundamental character with which it invests the logical categories, has been named by those who oppose it Intellectualism. It is important that it should be clearly understood, and the next chapter will be devoted to its exposition. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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