Philosophy

The question of truth and falsehood has been wrapped in unnecessary mystery owing to a number of causes. In the first place, people wish to think that their beliefs are more apt to be true than false, so that they seek a theory that will show that truth is normal and falsehood more or less accidental. In the second place, people are very vague as to what they mean by “belief” or “judgment”, though persuaded that they know beliefs or judgments to be the objects to which the predicates “true” or “false” apply. In the third place, there is a tendency to use “truth” with a big T in the grand sense, as something noble and splendid and worthy of adoration. This gets people into a frame of mind in which they become unable to think. But just as the grave-diggers in Hamlet became familiar with skulls, so logicians become familiar with truth. “The hand of little employment hath the daintier sense,” says Hamlet. Therefore it is not from the logician that awe before truth is to be expected. There are two questions in our present subject: (1) What are the objects to which the predicates “true” and “false” apply? (2) What is the difference between such as are true and such as are false? We will begin with the first of these questions. Prima facie, “true” and “false” apply to statements, whether in speech or in writing. By extension, they are supposed to apply to the beliefs expressed in those statements, and also to hypotheses which are entertained without being believed or disbelieved. But let us first consider the truth and falsehood of statements, following our practice of going as far as we can with the behaviourists before falling back on introspection. We considered the meaning of words earlier; now we have to consider sentences. Of course a sentence may consist of a single word, or of a wink; but generally it consists of several words. In that case, it has a meaning which is a function of the meanings of the separate words and their order. A sentence which has no meaning is not true or false; thus it is only sentences as vehicles of a certain sort of meaning that have truth or falsehood. We have therefore to examine the meaning of a sentence. Let us take some very humble example. Suppose you look in a time-table and find it there stated that a passenger train leaves King’s Cross for Edinburgh at 10 A.M. What is the meaning of this assertion? I shudder when I think of its complexity. If I were to try to develop the theme adequately, I should be occupied with nothing else till the end of the present volume, and then I should have only touched the fringe of the subject. Take first the social aspect: it is not essential that anybody but the engineer and fireman should travel by the train, though it is essential that others should be able to travel by it if they fulfil certain conditions. It is not essential that the train should reach Edinburgh: the statement remains true if there is an accident or breakdown on the way. But it is essential that the management of the railway should intend it to reach Edinburgh. Take next the physical aspect: it is not essential, or even possible, that the train should start exactly at ten; one might perhaps say that it must not start more than ten seconds before its time or more than fifty seconds after, but these limits cannot be laid down rigidly. In countries where unpunctuality is common they would be much wider. Then we must consider what we mean by “starting”, which no one can define unless he has learnt the infinitesimal calculus. Then we consider the definitions of King’s Cross and Edinburgh, both of which are more or less vague terms. Then we must consider what is meant by a “train”. Here there will be first of all complicated legal questions; what constitutes fulfilment of a railway company’s obligations in the way of running “trains”? Then there are questions as to the constitution of matter, since evidently a train is a piece of matter; also of course there are questions as to methods of estimating Greenwich time at King’s Cross. Most of the above points have to do with the meaning of single words, not with the meaning of the whole sentence. It is obvious that the ordinary mortal does not trouble about such complications when he uses the words: to him a word has a meaning very far from precise, and he does not try to exclude marginal cases. It is the search for precision that introduces complications. We think we attach a meaning to the word “man”, but we don’t know whether to include Pithecanthropus Erectus. To this extent, the meaning of the word is vague. As knowledge increases, words acquire meanings which are more precise and more complex; new words have to be introduced to express the less complex constituents which have been discovered. A word is intended to describe something in the world; at first it does so very badly, but afterwards it gradually improves. Thus single words embody knowledge, although they do not make assertions. In an ideal logical language, there will be words of different kinds. First, proper names. Of these, however, there are no examples in actual language. The words which are called proper names describe collections, which are always defined by some characteristic; thus assertions about “Peter” are really about everything that is “Peterish”. To get a true proper name, we should have to get to a single particular or a set of particulars defined by enumeration, not by a common quality. Since we cannot acquire knowledge of actual particulars, the words we use denote, in the best language we can make, either adjectives or relations between two or more terms. In addition to these, there are words indicative of structure: e.g. in “A is greater than B”, the words “is” and “than” have no separate meaning, but merely serve to show the “sense” of the relation “greater”, i.e. that it goes from A to B, not from B to A. Strictly speaking, we are still simplifying. True adjectives and relations will require particulars for their terms; the sort of adjectives we can know, such as “blue” and “round”, will not be applicable to particulars. They are therefore analogous to the adjective “populous” applied to a town. To say “this town is populous” means “many people live in this town”. A similar transformation would be demanded by logic in all the adjectives and relations we can know empirically. That is to say, no word that we can understand would occur in a grammatically correct account of the universe. Leaving on one side the vagueness and inaccuracy of words, let us ask ourselves; in what circumstances do we feel convinced that we know a statement to be true or false as the case may be? A present statement will be regarded as true if, e.g. it agrees with recollection or perception; a past statement, if it raised expectations now confirmed. I do not mean to say that these are the only grounds upon which we regard statements as true; I mean that they are simple and typical, and worth examining. If you say “it was raining this morning”, I may recollect that it was or that it wasn’t. One may perhaps say that the words “this morning” are associated for me with the word “raining” or with the words “not raining”. According to which occurs, I judge your statement true or false. If I have neither association, I do not judge your statement either true or false unless I have material for an inference; and I do not wish to consider inference yet. If you say “the lights have gone out”, when I can see the lights shining, I judge that you speak falsely, because my perception is associated with the words “lights shining”. If you say “the lights will go out in a minute”, you produce a certain familiar kind of tension called “expectation”, and after a time you produce a judgment that you spoke falsely (if the lights do not go out). These are the ordinary direct ways of deciding on the truth or falsehood of statements about past, present, or future. It is necessary to distinguish between direct and indirect grounds for accepting or rejecting statements. Pragmatism considers only indirect grounds. Broadly speaking, it considers a statement false when the consequences of accepting it are unfortunate. But this belongs to the region of inference. I ask you the way to the station, you tell me wrong, and I miss my train; I then infer that you told me wrong. But if you say “the lights are out” when I see them shining, I reject your statement without inference. In this case, something in my present circumstances is associated with words different from yours, and different in ways which I have learnt to regard as involving incompatibility. The ultimate test of falsehood is never, so I think, the nature of the consequences of a belief, but the association between words and sensible or remembered facts. A belief is “verified” when a situation arises which gives a feeling of expectedness in connection with it; it is falsified when the feeling is one of surprise. But this only applies to beliefs which await some future contingency for verification or refutation. A belief which is an immediate reaction to a situation—e.g. when you are waiting for a race to begin and presently you say “they’re off”—has no need of verification, but verifies other beliefs. And even where the confirmation of a belief is in the future, it is the expectedness, not the pleasantness, of the consequences that confirms the truth of the belief. I think it is a mistake to treat “belief” as one kind of occurrence, as is done in traditional psychology. The sort of belief which is based upon memory or perception alone differs from the sort which involves expectation. When you find in the time-table that a train leaves King’s Cross at ten, your belief that this statement occurs in the time-table does not await future confirmation, but your belief about the train does: you may go to King’s Cross and see the train start. A belief which concerns an event may be a recollection, a perception, or an expectation. It may be none of these, in the case of an event which you have not seen and do not expect to see—e.g. Cæsar crossing the Rubicon, or the abolition of the House of Lords. But such beliefs always involve inference. I do not at this stage consider logical and mathematical beliefs, some of which must be, in a sense, non-inferential. But I think we shall find that this sense is different from that in which memories and perceptions are non-inferential. A belief, I should say, interpreted narrowly, is a form of words related to an emotion of one of several kinds. (I shall give a broader meaning later.) The emotion is different according as the belief embodies a reminiscence, a perception, an expectation, or something outside the experience of the believer. Moreover, a form of words is not essential. Where the emotion is present, and leads to action relevant to some feature of the environment, there may be said to be a belief. The fundamental test of a belief, of no matter what sort, is that it causes some event which actually takes place to arouse the emotion of expectedness or its opposite. I do not now attempt to decide what an emotion is. Dr. Watson gives a behaviouristic account of emotions, which would, if adopted, make my definition of “belief” purely behaviouristic. I have framed the definition so as not to involve a decision on the question of introspection. The subject of truth and falsehood may