The Problem of Truth

by Herbert Wildon Carr

CHAPTER IX
CONCLUSION

I will now briefly sum up the argument of this book. The problem of truth is to discover the nature of the agreement between the things of the mind, our ideas, and the reality of which ideas are the knowledge. We call the agreement truth. What is it? We have seen that there are three different answers, namely—(1) That it is a correspondence between the idea and the reality; (2) That it is the coherence of the idea in a consistent and harmonious whole; and (3) That it is a value that we ourselves give to our ideas.

The theory that truth is correspondence we found to offer this difficulty. To say of an idea that it corresponds with reality supposes a knowledge of reality in addition to and distinct from the knowledge that is the idea, and yet the knowledge of reality is the idea of it. And if it be said that not the idea but the judgment is what corresponds with reality in truth, this equally supposes a knowledge of reality that is not a judgment. If, as the common sense of mankind requires us to believe, the reality that is known by us exists in entire independence of our relation of knowing to it, how can we state this fact without falling into contradiction in the very statement of it? This is the difficulty of a realist theory of knowledge.

We next examined the theory that truth is coherence, and this seemed to present to us an unattainable ideal. Only the whole truth is wholly true. We followed the idealist argument on which it is based, and this seemed to lead us inevitably, in the doctrine of the Absolute, to the paradox that unless we know everything we know nothing.

In pragmatism we met a new principle, the proposal to regard truth as a value. Truth, it is said, is something that happens to ideas; they become true, or are made true. There is no criterion, no absolute standard, independent of ideas to which they must conform if they are judged to be true. The value of an idea is its practical usefulness as tested by its workability. Truth is what works. This led us to criticise the concept of utility. We found that it is impossible to identify utility with truth even if we include theoretical utility in its widest meaning, because over and above the usefulness and workability of an idea there always remains the question of its relation to reality. But we recognised in the principle of truth-value an important advance towards a theory of knowledge.

The solution of the problem of truth, it became clear, must be sought in a theory of knowledge. Have we, in the new theory of life and knowledge of Bergson's philosophy, an answer to the question, What is truth? Yes, but not in the form of a direct solution of the dilemma which confronts us in every theory that accepts the independence of knowledge and reality—rather in a theory of knowledge in which the dilemma does not and cannot arise.

The theory of Bergson is that in the intuition of life we know reality as it is, our knowledge is one with our knowing; and in the intellect we possess a mode of knowing which is equally immediate but the essential quality of which is that it externalises or spatialises reality. We understand this mode of knowing in recognising the purpose it serves, its practical advantage to us. The theory, therefore, resembles pragmatism in bringing the concept of utility to the aid of its theory of knowledge. But, we insisted, the resemblance is outward only, for the essential tenet of pragmatism, that truth itself is a value, is fatal to the theory. It would mean, in fact, that not the mode of knowing, that is the intellect, but the actual knowledge itself, is a practical endowment. But the problem of truth arises in a new form, for the practical utility of the intellect consists in the illusion which it produces in us. It makes the flowing reality appear as fixed states. How, then, can universal illusion be consistent with the possession of truth? To answer this question we examined the nature of illusion and its distinction from error.

In the last chapter we have dealt with the problem of error. The fact of error presented a difficulty distinct from the question, What is truth? for it implied a real object of thought, of which it seemed equally contradictory to say that it exists and that it does not exist. In the solutions that have been proposed we saw how the problem is forcing philosophers to examine again the fundamental processes of the mind and the nature of the universe they reveal.