Our knowledge of truths, unlike our knowledge of things, has an
opposite, namely _error_. So far as things are concerned, we may know
them or not know them, but there is no positive state of mind which can
be described as erroneous knowledge of things, so long, at any rate,
as we confine ourselves to knowledge by acquaintance. Whatever we are
acquainted with must be something; we may draw wrong inferences from
our acquaintance, but the acquaintance itself cannot be deceptive. Thus
there is no dualism as regards acquaintance. But as regards knowledge of
truths, there is a dualism. We may believe what is false as well as
what is true. We know that on very many subjects different people
hold different and incompatible opinions: hence some beliefs must be
erroneous. Since erroneous beliefs are often held just as strongly
as true beliefs, it becomes a difficult question how they are to be
distinguished from true beliefs. How are we to know, in a given case,
that our belief is not erroneous? This is a question of the very
greatest difficulty, to which no completely satisfactory answer is
possible. There is, however, a preliminary question which is rather less
difficult, and that is: What do we _mean_ by truth and falsehood? It is
this preliminary question which is to be considered in this chapter. In
this chapter we are not asking how we can know whether a belief is true
or false: we are asking what is meant by the question whether a belief
is true or false. It is to be hoped that a clear answer to this question
may help us to obtain an answer to the question what beliefs are
true, but for the present we ask only 'What is truth?' and 'What is
falsehood?' not 'What beliefs are true?' and 'What beliefs are false?'
It is very important to keep these different questions entirely
separate, since any confusion between them is sure to produce an answer
which is not really applicable to either.
There are three points to observe in the attempt to discover the nature
of truth, three requisites which any theory must fulfil.
(1) Our theory of truth must be such as to admit of its opposite,
falsehood. A good many philosophers have failed adequately to satisfy
this condition: they have constructed theories according to which all
our thinking ought to have been true, and have then had the greatest
difficulty in finding a place for falsehood. In this respect our theory
of belief must differ from our theory of acquaintance, since in the case
of acquaintance it was not necessary to take account of any opposite.
(2) It seems fairly evident that if there were no beliefs there could
be no falsehood, and no truth either, in the sense in which truth is
correlative to falsehood. If we imagine a world of mere matter, there
would be no room for falsehood in such a world, and although it would
contain what may be called 'facts', it would not contain any truths, in
the sense in which truths are things of the same kind as falsehoods.
In fact, truth and falsehood are properties of beliefs and statements:
hence a world of mere matter, since it would contain no beliefs or
statements, would also contain no truth or falsehood.
(3) But, as against what we have just said, it is to be observed that
the truth or falsehood of a belief always depends upon something which
lies outside the belief itself. If I believe that Charles I died on the
scaffold, I believe truly, not because of any intrinsic quality of my
belief, which could be discovered by merely examining the belief, but
because of an historical event which happened two and a half centuries
ago. If I believe that Charles I died in his bed, I believe falsely: no
degree of vividness in my belief, or of care in arriving at it, prevents
it from being false, again because of what happened long ago, and not
because of any intrinsic property of my belief. Hence, although truth
and falsehood are properties of beliefs, they are properties dependent
upon the relations of the beliefs to other things, not upon any internal
quality of the beliefs.
The third of the above requisites leads us to adopt the view--which has
on the whole been commonest among philosophers--that truth consists in
some form of correspondence between belief and fact. It is, however, by
no means an easy matter to discover a form of correspondence to which
there are no irrefutable objections. By this partly--and partly by the
feeling that, if truth consists in a correspondence of thought with
something outside thought, thought can never know when truth has been
attained--many philosophers have been led to try to find some definition
of truth which shall not consist in relation to something wholly outside
belief. The most important attempt at a definition of this sort is the
theory that truth consists in _coherence_. It is said that the mark of
falsehood is failure to cohere in the body of our beliefs, and that it
is the essence of a truth to form part of the completely rounded system
which is The Truth.
There is, however, a great difficulty in this view, or rather two great
difficulties. The first is that there is no reason to suppose that
only _one_ coherent body of beliefs is possible. It may be that, with
sufficient imagination, a novelist might invent a past for the world
that would perfectly fit on to what we know, and yet be quite different
from the real past. In more scientific matters, it is certain that there
are often two or more hypotheses which account for all the known facts
on some subject, and although, in such cases, men of science endeavour
to find facts which will rule out all the hypotheses except one, there
is no reason why they should always succeed.
In philosophy, again, it seems not uncommon for two rival hypotheses
to be both able to account for all the facts. Thus, for example, it is
possible that life is one long dream, and that the outer world has only
that degree of reality that the objects of dreams have; but although
such a view does not seem inconsistent with known facts, there is no
reason to prefer it to the common-sense view, according to which other
people and things do really exist. Thus coherence as the definition
of truth fails because there is no proof that there can be only one
coherent system.
The other objection to this definition of truth is that it assumes the
meaning of 'coherence' known, whereas, in fact, 'coherence' presupposes
the truth of the laws of logic. Two propositions are coherent when both
may be true, and are incoherent when one at least must be false. Now in
order to know whether two propositions can both be true, we must
know such truths as the law of contradiction. For example, the two
propositions, 'this tree is a beech' and 'this tree is not a beech',
are not coherent, because of the law of contradiction. But if the law of
contradiction itself were subjected to the test of coherence, we should
find that, if we choose to suppose it false, nothing will any longer
be incoherent with anything else. Thus the laws of logic supply the
skeleton or framework within which the test of coherence applies, and
they themselves cannot be established by this test.
For the above two reasons, coherence cannot be accepted as giving the
_meaning_ of truth, though it is often a most important _test_ of truth
after a certain amount of truth has become known.
Hence we are driven back to _correspondence with fact_ as constituting
the nature of truth. It remains to define precisely what we mean by
'fact', and what is the nature of the correspondence which must subsist
between belief and fact, in order that belief may be true.
In accordance with our three requisites, we have to seek a theory of
truth which (1) allows truth to have an opposite, namely falsehood, (2)
makes truth a property of beliefs, but (3) makes it a property wholly
dependent upon the relation of the beliefs to outside things.
The necessity of allowing for falsehood makes it impossible to regard
belief as a relation of the mind to a single object, which could be said
to be what is believed. If belief were so regarded, we should find that,
like acquaintance, it would not admit of the opposition of truth and
falsehood, but would have to be always true. This may be made clear
by examples. Othello believes falsely that Desdemona loves Cassio. We
cannot say that this belief consists in a relation to a single object,
'Desdemona's love for Cassio', for if there were such an object, the
belief would be true. There is in fact no such object, and therefore
Othello cannot have any relation to such an object. Hence his belief
cannot possibly consist in a relation to this object.
It might be said that his belief is a relation to a different object,
namely 'that Desdemona loves Cassio'; but it is almost as difficult to
suppose that there is such an object as this, when Desdemona does not
love Cassio, as it was to suppose that there is 'Desdemona's love for
Cassio'. Hence it will be better to seek for a theory of belief which
does not make it consist in a relation of the mind to a single object.
It is common to think of relations as though they always held between
two terms, but in fact this is not always the case. Some relations
demand three terms, some four, and so on. Take, for instance, the
relation 'between'. So long as only two terms come in, the relation
'between' is impossible: three terms are the smallest number that render
it possible. York is between London and Edinburgh; but if London and
Edinburgh were the only places in the world, there could be nothing
which was between one place and another. Similarly _jealousy_ requires
three people: there can be no such relation that does not involve three
at least. Such a proposition as 'A wishes B to promote C's marriage with
D' involves a relation of four terms; that is to say, A and B and C and
D all come in, and the relation involved cannot be expressed otherwise
than in a form involving all four. Instances might be multiplied
indefinitely, but enough has been said to show that there are relations
which require more than two terms before they can occur.
The relation involved in _judging_ or _believing_ must, if falsehood is
to be duly allowed for, be taken to be a relation between several terms,
not between two. When Othello believes that Desdemona loves Cassio, he
must not have before his mind a single object, 'Desdemona's love for
Cassio', or 'that Desdemona loves Cassio ', for that would require that
there should be objective falsehoods, which subsist independently of
any minds; and this, though not logically refutable, is a theory to be
avoided if possible. Thus it is easier to account for falsehood if
we take judgement to be a relation in which the mind and the various
objects concerned all occur severally; that is to say, Desdemona and
loving and Cassio must all be terms in the relation which subsists when
Othello believes that Desdemona loves Cassio. This relation, therefore,
is a relation of four terms, since Othello also is one of the terms of
the relation. When we say that it is a relation of four terms, we do not
mean that Othello has a certain relation to Desdemona, and has the same
relation to loving and also to Cassio. This may be true of some other
relation than believing; but believing, plainly, is not a relation which
Othello has to _each_ of the three terms concerned, but to _all_ of
them together: there is only one example of the relation of believing
involved, but this one example knits together four terms. Thus the
actual occurrence, at the moment when Othello is entertaining his
belief, is that the relation called 'believing' is knitting together
into one complex whole the four terms Othello, Desdemona, loving, and
Cassio. What is called belief or judgement is nothing but this relation
of believing or judging, which relates a mind to several things other
than itself. An _act_ of belief or of judgement is the occurrence
between certain terms at some particular time, of the relation of
believing or judging.
We are now in a position to understand what it is that distinguishes a
true judgement from a false one. For this purpose we will adopt certain
definitions. In every act of judgement there is a mind which judges, and
there are terms concerning which it judges. We will call the mind the
_subject_ in the judgement, and the remaining terms the _objects_. Thus,
when Othello judges that Desdemona loves Cassio, Othello is the subject,
while the objects are Desdemona and loving and Cassio. The subject and
the objects together are called the _constituents_ of the judgement.
It will be observed that the relation of judging has what is called a
'sense' or 'direction'. We may say, metaphorically, that it puts its
objects in a certain _order_, which we may indicate by means of the
order of the words in the sentence. (In an inflected language, the same
thing will be indicated by inflections, e.g. by the difference between
nominative and accusative.) Othello's judgement that Cassio loves
Desdemona differs from his judgement that Desdemona loves Cassio, in
spite of the fact that it consists of the same constituents, because the
relation of judging places the constituents in a different order in the
two cases. Similarly, if Cassio judges that Desdemona loves Othello,
the constituents of the judgement are still the same, but their order is
different. This property of having a 'sense' or 'direction' is one which
the relation of judging shares with all other relations. The 'sense'
of relations is the ultimate source of order and series and a host of
mathematical concepts; but we need not concern ourselves further with
this aspect.
We spoke of the relation called 'judging' or 'believing' as knitting
together into one complex whole the subject and the objects. In this
respect, judging is exactly like every other relation. Whenever a
relation holds between two or more terms, it unites the terms into a
complex whole. If Othello loves Desdemona, there is such a complex whole
as 'Othello's love for Desdemona'. The terms united by the relation may
be themselves complex, or may be simple, but the whole which results
from their being united must be complex. Wherever there is a relation
which relates certain terms, there is a complex object formed of the
union of those terms; and conversely, wherever there is a complex
object, there is a relation which relates its constituents. When an act
of believing occurs, there is a complex, in which 'believing' is the
uniting relation, and subject and objects are arranged in a certain
order by the 'sense' of the relation of believing. Among the objects,
as we saw in considering 'Othello believes that Desdemona loves Cassio',
one must be a relation--in this instance, the relation 'loving'. But
this relation, as it occurs in the act of believing, is not the relation
which creates the unity of the complex whole consisting of the subject
and the objects. The relation 'loving', as it occurs in the act of
believing, is one of the objects--it is a brick in the structure, not
the cement. The cement is the relation 'believing'. When the belief is
_true_, there is another complex unity, in which the relation which was
one of the objects of the belief relates the other objects. Thus, e.g.,
if Othello believes _truly_ that Desdemona loves Cassio, then there is
a complex unity, 'Desdemona's love for Cassio', which is composed
exclusively of the _objects_ of the belief, in the same order as they
had in the belief, with the relation which was one of the objects
occurring now as the cement that binds together the other objects of the
belief. On the other hand, when a belief is _false_, there is no such
complex unity composed only of the objects of the belief. If Othello
believes _falsely_ that Desdemona loves Cassio, then there is no such
complex unity as 'Desdemona's love for Cassio'.
Thus a belief is _true_ when it _corresponds_ to a certain associated
complex, and _false_ when it does not. Assuming, for the sake of
definiteness, that the objects of the belief are two terms and a
relation, the terms being put in a certain order by the 'sense' of
the believing, then if the two terms in that order are united by the
relation into a complex, the belief is true; if not, it is false. This
constitutes the definition of truth and falsehood that we were in search
of. Judging or believing is a certain complex unity of which a mind is
a constituent; if the remaining constituents, taken in the order which
they have in the belief, form a complex unity, then the belief is true;
if not, it is false.
Thus although truth and falsehood are properties of beliefs, yet they
are in a sense extrinsic properties, for the condition of the truth of
a belief is something not involving beliefs, or (in general) any mind
at all, but only the _objects_ of the belief. A mind, which believes,
believes truly when there is a _corresponding_ complex not involving the
mind, but only its objects. This correspondence ensures truth, and its
absence entails falsehood. Hence we account simultaneously for the two
facts that beliefs (a) depend on minds for their _existence_, (b) do not
depend on minds for their _truth_.
We may restate our theory as follows: If we take such a belief as
'Othello believes that Desdemona loves Cassio', we will call Desdemona
and Cassio the _object-terms_, and loving the _object-relation_. If
there is a complex unity 'Desdemona's love for Cassio', consisting of
the object-terms related by the object-relation in the same order as
they have in the belief, then this complex unity is called the _fact
corresponding to the belief_. Thus a belief is true when there is a
corresponding fact, and is false when there is no corresponding fact.
It will be seen that minds do not _create_ truth or falsehood. They
create beliefs, but when once the beliefs are created, the mind cannot
make them true or false, except in the special case where they concern
future things which are within the power of the person believing, such
as catching trains. What makes a belief true is a _fact_, and this fact
does not (except in exceptional cases) in any way involve the mind of
the person who has the belief.
Having now decided what we _mean_ by truth and falsehood, we have next
to consider what ways there are of knowing whether this or that belief
is true or false. This consideration will occupy the next chapter.