On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and On the Will in Nature: Two Essays (revised edition)
Schopenhauer · en
judgments should have been pronounced _directly true_, and that
this _intrinsic logical truth_ should have been distinguished from
_extrinsic logical truth_, as attributed to all judgments which have
another judgment for their reason, I cannot approve. Every truth is
the reference of a judgment to something _outside_ of it, and the term
_intrinsic truth_ is a contradiction.
§ 31. _Empirical Truth._
A judgment may be founded upon a representation of the first class,
_i.e._ a perception by means of the senses, consequently on experience.
In this case it has _material truth_, and moreover, if the judgment is
founded _immediately_ on experience, this truth is _empirical truth_.
When we say, "A judgment has _material truth_," we mean on the whole,
that its conceptions are connected, separated, limited, according to
the requirements of the intuitive representations through which it is
inferred. To attain knowledge of this, is the direct function of the
_faculty of judgment_, as the mediator between the intuitive and the
abstract or discursive faculty of knowing--in other words, between the
Understanding and the Reason.
§ 32. _Transcendental Truth._
The _forms_ of intuitive, empirical knowledge which lie within the
Understanding and pure Sensibility may, as conditions of all possible
experience, be the grounds of a judgment, which is in that case
synthetical _à priori_. As nevertheless this kind of judgment has
material truth, its truth is _transcendental_; because the judgment is
based not only on experience, but on the conditions of all possible
experience lying within us. For it is determined precisely by that
which determines experience itself: namely, either by the forms of
Space and of Time perceived by us _à priori_, or by the causal law,
known to us _à priori_. Propositions such as: two straight lines do not
include a space; nothing happens without a cause; matter can neither
come into being nor perish; 3 × 7 = 21, are examples of this kind of
judgment. The whole of pure Mathematics, and no less my tables of the
_Prædicabilia à priori_,[131] as well as most of Kant's theorems in
his "Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft," may, properly
speaking, be adduced in corroboration of this kind of truth.
[131] See "Die Welt a. W. u. V." 3rd edition, vol. ii. ch. iv. p.
55.
§ 33. _Metalogical Truth._