Chapter 15 Chapter 15 Definition of "Truth"

On the question of the definition of "truth", I have written articles in two different periods.Four articles written on this subject between 1906 and 1909 were reprinted in Philosophical Treatises (1910).In the late 1930s I returned to the subject, and the results of this second study were published in Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (1940) and, with slight changes, printed in Human Knowledge (1948). )inside. Since I gave up monism, I am convinced that what truth is must be explained by some relation to facts, but what that relation is depends on the nature of the truth.I set out to refute two theories with which I strongly disagree.I refute first monism and then pragmatism.The doctrine of monism is formulated in Hallard Jourchin's The Nature of Truth (Oxford, 1906).In an earlier chapter I gave a general discussion of the monism of the book.

I would now like to discuss monism's claims about truth more specifically. Monism defines "truth" in terms of coordination.Monism maintains that no truth is entirely independent of the others, but that each truth, if fully stated without omission, without unreasonable abstractions; the result is the whole truth about the whole universe.According to this doctrine, delusion consists in abstraction, in the perception of the part as an independent whole. As Chau Chin said: "A person who is wrong believes that what he knows is the truth. This is the characteristic of error, and it turns the understanding of the truth into falsehood." Regarding this definition, I once said: This A great advantage of this view is that it regards error as a doctrine of truth which totally disavows monism.As long as the doctrine is admitted, no judgment is wrong; once the doctrine is rejected, every judgment is a mistake.However, we have some objections to this comfortable conclusion.If I am "convinced that what I know is the truth," I am wrong to say that Bishop Staubers once wore bishop's leggings; and if a monist philosopher does not forget that finite truths are only partial , he said that Staubers was hanged for murder, and that was true.So it is obvious that Mr. Joochin's standard does not distinguish right from wrong as commonly understood.Its inability to do this is an indication of its shortcomings. (Philosophical Papers, p. 155).

I conclude by saying: there is a sense in which a proposition like "A killed B" can be true or false; a sense in which it is not true or false because it is part Or not depending on part of the truth.This sense seems to me to be presupposed in constituting the whole truth; for the whole truth consists of propositions which are true in this sense, and because the belief in the proposition "Stobers was hanged for murder" is the basis of the whole truth. Part of it is impossible (Philosophical Treatise, pp. 155-6). There are not many people who advocate truth monism now.But the pragmatism that I criticized at the same time is still firmly held by some people.I have written two articles on this subject, the first a critique of William James's Pragmatism: A New Term for Several Old Ideas, and the second on pragmatism in general, published in 1900 In the Edinburgh Review, April 1999.

The gist of my objection to pragmatism is this: Pragmatism asserts that a belief is presumed to be true if it has certain effects.I contend that an empirical belief can be concluded to be true if it has some cause.A few quotations from the original text can understand James' proposition.He said: "Thoughts ... are true if they help us to have a satisfying relationship with other parts of our experience".He also said: "Truth is a kind of good. It is not a category that is different from good and juxtaposed with good like the usual thinking. Anything that is proved to be good in terms of belief can be called truth. Good is also because there are There are definite reasons that can be given.” Let’s quote two more passages from James, and the words in them are more powerful.These two paragraphs are as follows: In short, "truth" is nothing but an expedient of our thinking, just as "right" is an expedient of our conduct.Expediency and convenience are various; of course convenience is from a long-term and overall perspective. ("Pragmatism", p. 222).

Our explanation of the truth is the explanation of the majority of truths, the process of explanation and guidance, and its realization in things.Truths have only one quality in common, and that is that they benefit man (ibid., p. 218). I have paraphrased the last definition above into this sentence: "Anything is truth if it is beneficial to believe it." Pragmatists insist that I have greatly distorted James' words, but I can never Understand what he means by this. Leaving aside its general defect, there is one great difficulty in the view that what one believes is true if it has great effects, I think it is insurmountable.The difficulty is this: before we know whether a belief is true or false, we should know (a) what the effects of the belief are, and (b) whether these effects are good or bad.I think we must apply the pragmatic criterion to (A) and (B): we use the "beneficial" view as to what exactly a believed effect is, and as to whether those effects are good or bad. , we must also adopt the "good" point of view to determine.Obviously this traps us backwards to infinity.I once criticized James: There is an idea that it is extremely easy to know when the consequences of a belief are good, and in fact it is so easy that a doctrine of knowledge is unnecessary for such a simple matter. Speaking—I have to say that, in my opinion, this idea is one of the strangest assumptions for building a theory of knowledge.Let us give another example.

Many people who participated in the French Revolution were followers of Rousseau.Their belief in his teachings had far-reaching consequences.Without that consequence, Europe would be a very different world today.If the consequences of those people's beliefs are on the whole good, we are obliged to say that their beliefs are truth; if they are bad, their beliefs are false.But how do we calculate this ledger?It's nearly impossible to clean up what those aftermaths are.Even if we can determine what those consequences are, our judgments about whether they are good or bad are determined by our political opinions.It is of course much easier to discover the nonsense of the "civil covenant" by direct research than to determine whether the belief in the civil covenant has evil or good results as a whole. ("Philosophical Essays", pp. 135-6).

In addition to this purely theoretical criticism of the pragmatist definition of "truth", there are also some practical criticisms, and these practical criticisms seem to be more suitable for people with a pragmatic temperament.The question of what kinds of beliefs will have good consequences in an individual's life is often left to the government and the police.A belief that is good in America is bad in Russia. The same is true in reverse: beliefs that are good in Russia are bad in America.The beliefs of the Nazis did not meet the pragmatist standard of truth because Germany was defeated in World War II; but if Germany had been defeated, pragmatists would hail the Nazi creed as pragmatist truth.Pragmatists reject such an argument, pointing out that James has a condition, which is: "of course in the long run and on the whole".I don't think this condition makes the situation any better.Muslims believe that if they die defending the "true faith" in war, they will go to heaven.In my opinion, this belief has shown to pay off "in the long run and overall."Shall we therefore consider this belief to be true, even though the dead Mohammedan did not in fact enjoy the bliss he desired?If he did in fact enjoy that bliss, what shall we say of the beliefs of former Christians which were contrary to Islam?Christians think that when a follower of Muhammad dies, he goes to hell all the time.

This belief is useful to Christians, but it is impossible for both beliefs to be factual. In addition to the theoretical flaws of pragmatism, fifty years ago, before the two world wars, I believed that pragmatism was not only wrong in theory, but that the philosophy of pragmatism was very harmful to society.My view has been proven correct by history.My criticism of pragmatism at that time concluded by saying that the hope of international peace, as of the attainment of domestic peace, depends on the creation of an effective force in public opinion formed by judgments of right and wrong of.Therefore, it is misleading to say that disputes are decided by force without adding that force is based on justice.But whether there can be such a public opinion depends on whether there can be a standard of justice which is the cause, not the result, of the desires of society; this standard of justice seems to be in contradiction with the philosophy of pragmatism .So this philosophy, though it begins with liberty and tolerance, develops from inner necessity to appeal to the judgment of force and armies.As a result of this evolution, the philosophy fits democracy at home and imperialism abroad.In this respect, therefore, this philosophy is more ingeniously adapted to the needs of the times than any other philosophy invented before.

To sum it up: pragmatism appeals to a temper that finds on earth all imaginable material; I have not noticed; this temper loves war and all the dangers that accompany war, because this temper thinks victory is sure; It is a consolation and a help for us not to think of religion as something that can give us something other than this world to satisfy our longing for the highest good and absolute worship. But there are those who feel that living in this world would be prison life were it not for the windows into another great world; and some who think it is presumptuous to believe in omnipotence, and that they prefer the freedom of the Stoics , this liberty comes from the restraint of the passions, rather than from a Napoleonic domination which puts kingdoms at its feet--in a word, some people think that man is not a proper object of their worship, and for all the above For such people, the pragmatist's world is almost parochial, robs the source of human value, and dwarfs man by depriving the universe he contemplates of all its splendor. ("Philosophical Essays", pp. 125-6).

William James defended my criticism in an essay entitled "Two English Critics" in The Meaning of Truth (1909).He, like some other pragmatists, accuses me of perverting pragmatism; he charges me, like some other pragmatists, of imagining the meaning of what he said.In this passage he admits that it is easier to decide whether the popes are never wrong than to decide whether it is good or bad that they are so influential.He went on to say: "Our proposition is by no means as muddled as Mr. Russell imagines."But when he explained what he meant, it seemed to me that he meant more than I had imagined.He said he did not mean that the consequences of such beliefs were good, but that the person who believed in them thought the consequences would be good.It turns out (and he admits the consequences) that if A believes a thing and B believes the opposite, both A and B may be right in what they believe.He said: "I can think that Shakespeare really wrote those plays signed by Shakespeare, and I can express my opinion to a critic. If the critic is a pragmatist and a Baconian, from a practical From the standpoint of a Baconist, he will see clearly that I being I, my opinion works to make it perfectly right for me, while from the standpoint of a Baconian, he still believes that Shakespeare never wrote through those dramas.” I frankly find that assertion inexplicable.It seems to me that if there is truth in the statement "Shakespeare wrote Hamlet," there was a time when Shakespeare had pen in hand and wrote some words; but if Hamlet was written by Bacon, these words were written by Bacon .Whether it is one of the two is a matter of fact, and it has nothing to do with what anyone living now thinks.If what I say about Shakespeare is true and what I say about Bacon is false, my statement would be true if there had ever been one fact; It is fake.But, in James' view, what happened while Hamlet was being written is completely irrelevant; the only thing that matters is how critics feel today.

I have pointed out the necessary corollary of James's doctrine, and I still think I was right when I said that "A exists" is true in a pragmatic sense, Even if A does not exist.After James' death I was given his own copy of my article, with his comments.His comment on the above sentence is "confused!" In the printed article, he slightly developed those two words.He said: "Mr. Russell joins the large group of people who tell readers that the belief that A exists can be true, according to the pragmatist definition of truth, even if A does not exist. These are our critics. The same old slander that they say over and over has been heard enough."I don't understand at all that this is a slander.I will go a step further and say something that a pragmatist might consider a greater slander.James really wanted to find a way to assert that the statement "God exists" was true without involving himself in the vortex of metaphysics, and his interest was focused on the present world, so he only paid attention to "God exists" The consequences of these words in this world.He doesn't care whether there is in fact an omnipotent God who transcends time and space and controls the universe with wisdom.Therefore, he thought he had found an argument to prove that the statement "God exists" could be established, and he did what his religious sense asked him to do. I can honestly say that on this point I share the sympathy of the Pope, who has denounced pragmatism as an unsatisfactory way of maintaining religious faith. I later wrote another critique of pragmatism in 1939, which appeared in the volume on Dewey in the Living Philosophers Series, edited by Dr. Sherbo.Dewey defended it in this book.I don't believe what the two of us said added much to the previous discussion. At that earlier period my own definition of truth was published in the last chapter of the Philosophical Treatises. I later had to abandon this doctrine, which rests on the assertion that feeling is primarily a matter of relation.As I said in an earlier chapter of this book, I have given up this doctrine because of the influence of William James.My assertion at that time is best illustrated by an example.Today there is a proposition of 'Socrates loves Plato'.If you can understand the proposition, you must understand the words that make up the proposition.At that time I thought that understanding these words consisted in the relationship of the meaning of these words.Therefore, when I believe that "Socrates loves Plato", there is a relationship of four relations between me and Socrates and love and Plato.In fact, when Socrates loved Plato, there was a relationship between Socrates and Plato.In my belief in the fact that "Socrates loves Plato," the unity of the complex depends on believing in a relationship in which love is not a relational relation but a belief in what the relation means. A relation among several relations maintained.If this belief is correct, there is a complex of Socrates and Plato, connected by the relationship of love.I argued then that it is because of this complex that the complex associated with "believe" is real.I have given up on this doctrine because I no longer believe in a "self" and also because I no longer think that a relationship arises so important that it becomes a relationship-bearer, (if it can be explained in detail, the relationship is not so appear, it is another matter).For these reasons, while maintaining my criticism of the monistic and pragmatic doctrines of truth, I have had to seek a new doctrine for denying this "self." I have stated this doctrine in detail in "Inquiry into Meaning and Truth". This book spends a lot of space talking about the meaning of words. After discussing this topic, I will talk about the meaning of sentences. When going back to what is primitive, there are many stages.The first is the sentence; the second is the commonality of sentences spoken in various languages, that they all say the same thing.This is something I call a "proposition". Such as "Caesarisdead" (English, Caesar died) and "Csarestmort" (French, Caesar is dead) says a proposition, although the sentences are different.Behind the proposition is faith.People who can speak often express their beliefs in sentences, though sentences have other uses than expressing beliefs.Sentences can be used to tell lies, to make people believe what we do not believe.Sentences can also be used to express a command, or a will, or a question.But from the point of view of epistemology or the definition of truth, it is the sentence of belief that matters.Both truth and falsity are originally properties of belief, which are only transferred from the properties of propositions and sentences.If belief is fairly simple, it can exist without language.We may well believe that the higher animals have faith.A belief is "true" if it has an appropriate relation to one or more facts, and "false" if it does not.The problem of defining "truth" therefore consists of two parts: first, an analysis of the meaning of "belief"; and second, the study of the relationship between belief and the facts that make it true. As far as I understand, the term belief refers to a state of an organism which has no direct relation to the facts which make belief true or false.For a man who knows languages, all but the simplest beliefs must be expressed in words.But the use of language is only one of the states in which the organism expresses its beliefs.The most obvious instance that comes to mind is the expectation of a notable event in the near future.For example, if you see the wind blowing on a door and expect it to slam, when you expect it, you are in a state which, if you were to describe it in words, would be like this A sentence to express: "there is going to be a bang". But obviously, you can have this expectation without putting it into words.I think it may be generalized to say that the state of an organism believing in something other than its present actual condition can always be described theoretically without reference to the verifier of the belief.This is not easy to see because when we speak of language we tend to think that we mean what the language signifies.The chief characteristic of belief is easiest to see in the instance I have just mentioned, when you are expecting something to happen in the immediate future.In this instance, you have a feeling in the near future, which can be expressed by the words "really" or "strange!", depending on whether your feeling is true or false.I think it can be roughly said that surprise is the wrong criterion, but it is not always possible to apply this criterion. In this study, I started from the simplest, most primitive, and most definite examples, and proceeded to the more difficult, complex, and ambiguous ones.I had thought this procedure to be the obvious one in research law, but I have found that most writers who have undertaken to define "truth" proceed in quite a different way.They start with complex or dubious ones, like the law of gravity or the existence of God or quantum theory.They never cared about simple and obvious things like" I feel hot." This criticism applies as much to the logical positivist as it does to the pragmatist. Philosophers of almost all stripes do not study our knowledge of individual facts, but prefer to learn from our knowledge of general laws. Knowledge sets in. I think this is a fundamental mistake that corrupts their minds. As for me, as I have just said, I start with the simplest, most direct, and closest to the animal.If I say "I feel hot" and in doing so I express a belief, this belief is a bodily state which can exist without the use of words people think of some words to express it.In my mind, experience has established a causal relationship between a certain state of the body and the word "hot." It is because of this relationship that the words "I feel hot" become an expression of my state. But I can feel hot without words at all, and know that I feel hot, without difficulty.More than that, language is only the most efficient and convenient of several ways in which I can "represent" my state.I may be panting, I may wipe my sweating brow, I may be half undressed.These gestures, like the gesture of saying "I feel hot," express my condition.According to this situation, there seems to be no possibility of error.Of course, maybe I was cold and now I feel warm, and there may be a transition period after that, during which I don't know whether I feel hot or not.But there is no doubt that we are sometimes quite sure of this.Much the same may be said about the distinct sensations of which we are aware.If I had seen a flash of light, or heard a loud noise, or smelled an intolerable stench, I would have noticed it, and there can be no doubt that it happened. I gave up the relational nature of feeling so that I had to use "notice" instead of "know".Most events in our sensory life pass unnoticed; and when they are unnoticed, they are not the material of empirical knowledge.If we speak of these events in words, it is a clear proof that we have noticed them; but we are accustomed to notice many things which we do not speak of. In a belief, I distinguish between what the belief "expresses" and what the belief "indicates."What belief indicates is a state of myself; what belief indicates is not necessarily so.However, in the simplest instance, as in "I feel hot," it means the same thing as it indicates.For this reason, the chance of making a mistake here is minimal.In this simplest instance, if I use language, I utter the words because of their meaning: when I say "hot," I say the word because I feel hot.This is the cornerstone on which all empirical knowledge is based. But, roughly speaking, there is no such simple relation between words and the fact that makes them true (if that word is true).If I say, "Caesar has crossed the Rubicon," I am true because something happened a long time ago.There is nothing I can do now to change the matter; and if a law should be passed that makes it a capital offense to say that Caesar has crossed the Rubicon, it will have nothing to do with the truth of saying that he has crossed the river.The truth of this statement consists in a certain relation to a certain fact.The fact that makes the statement true I call the "verifier" of the statement.Only the simpler statements have but one "verifier"; the statement "All men are mortal" has as many verifiers as there are men.But whether there is one verifier or many verifiers, it is always a fact or facts which make or fail the statement (as the case may be); statement) is independent of language, and perhaps of all human experience. Now I come to some beliefs, which, if expressed in words, include such words as "all" or "some" or "one" or "this".Take, for example, the sentence, "I met a man in the wilderness."If this sentence is true, it means that there is a certain person I met, and my meeting with him is the verifier of my sentence.But I can know it is true without knowing who I am meeting.In this instance, what I know I explain as follows: There is a situation expressed by "I met A" and another situation expressed by "I met B", (in these situations A and B are people,) and so on, so that all mankind.All these situations have something in common.The common denominator of these situations is expressed by the words "I met a man."So, if I meet my friend Jones, the realization that I have met a person is an actual part of the realization that I have met Jones.This is why the reasoning from "Jones" to "a person" works. The importance of this analysis has to do with understanding sentences that are beyond the scope of my personal experience.Please take this sentence as an example: "There are some people I have never met".We all believe it to be true.I have found that even solipsists are appalled at not meeting other solipsists.The important point is that in the sentence "there are some people I have never met", the people I have never met are not listed one by one. The simpler sentence "I met a man" would have been so if in fact the man I had met was Jones.Although Jones is the corroborator of my statement, it does not refer to him, nor when I say "there are some people I have never met."Whether to understand the statement, or to know whether it is true, I do not have to say who the person I have never met actually is.Sentences about "have" or "some" say less than sentences that substitute for some particular person or thing; , can be understood by humans.We are all convinced that we not only know there are people we have never met, but there are people we have never heard of and never will.We cannot give a single instance of any such person, but we can still know the general assertion that there were some.I find that many empiricists go astray on this point, thinking that it is impossible for us to know a certain thing unless we can give at least one instance of such a thing.Such an opinion, if deeply believed, leads to such absurd paradoxes that it is held only by those who do not notice these paradoxes. It is important to know that the fact or facts which substantiate a sentence do not necessarily have a logical form to have any close relationship with the logical form of that sentence. The simplest example of this is a disjunctive proposition.Suppose I see a volcano, and believe, "That is either Mount Etna or Mount Stramberry," and suppose that my belief is correct, and what confirms my statement is the fact that the volcano is Mount Etna. , or the fact that the volcano was Strandberry.So the relationship between a disjunctive proposition and its verifier is not as direct as that between the true half of a disjunctive proposition and its verifier.This can also be applied to sentences containing the word "some" or the word "one".In all such sentences there is a general noun like "person."We can understand the meaning of this word in this way, that is, in "I met A", "I met B" and so on (A and B and so on are different people), we can see some common point.It is by means of this mechanism that we are able to cross the individual boundaries of experience, although we must learn empirically the meaning of some general terms like "man" which we use in general sentences. , but we can't give examples of such sentences. To sum up: the main thing is that belief has the quality of being true or false (as the case may be).Sentences also have this property of being secondary.A belief is a fact which has or may have some relation to another fact.I can believe it is Thursday on Thursday or any other day.If I believe this on a Thursday, there is one fact—that today is Thursday—to which my belief has some special relation.If I believe so on other days of the week, there is no such fact.When a belief is true, I call the fact that makes the belief true its "verifier."To complete this definition, given belief, we must be able to describe the fact or facts (if such fact exists) that make belief true.This is a lengthy business, for the kind of relation that can exist between a believer and its verifier varies according to the nature of the belief.The simplest example of this point of view is a complex memory image.Suppose I picture in my mind a room I know well, and in this shadow I see in my mind a table surrounded by four chairs, and suppose that on entering the room I see the table And the four chairs, and what I saw was the verifier of the shadow I fancied; the image of memory was akin to the perception that believed and confirmed this belief.Now to put the matter in extremely brief terms: Suppose I have in my mind a visual memory, not a verbal memory, of seeing A to the left of B, and in fact A being to the left of B. .In this case, the correspondence between the mental image and the fact is straightforward.The image of A is like A, and the image of B is like B. The relationship of "on the left" is the same in the image and in the verifier.But as soon as we use language, this simplest correspondence becomes impossible, because the word that signifies a relation is not a relation.If I say: "A is before B", my sentence is a relationship between the "four" characters, but what I want to say is the relationship between "two" things.The complexity of the coincidence increases with the use of logical words such as "or", "no", "all" and "some".But while the complexity has increased, the principles remain the same.In Human Knowledge I summed up the discussion of the question of truth and falsity with the following definition: "Belief is not merely an impetus to action. Every belief has a graphic quality and at the same time a 'Yes sense' or 'feeling not to be'; that is, the belief is true if there is a fact which bears the same resemblance to the figure as a template does to an image. True; as regards the feeling of not being, if there is no such a fact, then the belief is true and true. A belief that is not true is called 'false'". (p. 170). A definition of "truth" does not automatically lead to a definition of "knowledge."Knowledge consists of some true beliefs, but not all true beliefs.A common example of negative is when a clock has stopped, but I believe it is still running.When I happened to look at this clock, it happened that the time indicated was absolutely correct.If so, my beliefs are correct about time, but my knowledge is not.But the question of how knowledge comes about is a subject which I do not intend to discuss in this chapter, which would take up a great deal of space. 在《对意义与真理的探讨》一书中所逐步形成的真理学说基本上是一个符合说——那就是说，当一个句子或一个信仰是真的时候，其为真是凭借对于一件或多件事实的关系；但是这种关系并不总是简单的，是随该句子的构造而变的，也是随所说的和经验的关系而变的。虽然这种变化引进了不可避免的错综繁复，在能够避免可以指出的错误的范围内这个学说的目的却是在于不违背常识。