[143] By this notion is meant the common-sense idea that truth in all
cases “corresponds” to fact, my perception of the sunset to the real
sunset, my “idea” of a “true” friend to a real person whose outward
acts “correspond to” or “faithfully reflect” his inner feelings. See
the first chapter of Mr. Joachim’s book upon _The Nature of Truth_,
where this notion is examined and found wanting. It is probably
the oldest notion of truth, and yet one that takes us readily into
philosophy from whatever point of view we examine it. It was held by
nearly all the Greek philosophers before the time of the Sophists,
who first began to teach that truth is what it “appears to be”--the
“relativity” position that is upheld, for example, by Goethe, who said
that “When I know my relation to myself and to the outer world I call
this truth. And thus every man can have his own truth, and yet truth is
always the same.” The common-sense view was held also by St. Augustine
in the words, “That is true what is really what it seems to be (_verum
est quod ita est, ut videtur_),” by Thomas Aquinas as the “adequacy
of the intellect to the thing,” in so far as the intellect says that
that is which really is, or that that is not which is not (_adaequatio
intellectus et rei_), by Suarez, by Goclen, who made it a conformity
of the judgment with the thing. Its technical difficulties begin to
appear, say in Hobbes, who held that truth consists in the fact of the
subject and the predicate being a name of the same thing, or even in
Locke, who says: “Truth then seems to me in the proper import of the
word to signify nothing but the joining or separating of signs, as the
things signified by them, do agree, or disagree, one with another”
(_Essay_, iv. 5. 2). How can _things_ “agree” or “disagree” with one
another? And an “idea” of course is, anyhow, not a “thing” with a shape
and with dimensions that “correspond” to “things,” any more than is a
“judgment” a relation of two “ideas” “corresponding” to the “relations”
of two “things.”
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