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Updated: May 19, 2025
This engenders the truth-claim, which is necessarily a 'good' in its maker's eyes, because it has been selected by him and judged preferable to any alternative that occurred to him. How, then, is it tested? Simply by the consequences which follow from adopting it and using it as an assumption upon which to work.
Initially, then, every judgment is a truth-claim, and this claim is merely formal. It does not mean that the claim is absolutely true, and that it is impious to question it. On the contrary, it has still to be validated by others, and may work in such a way that its own maker withdraws it, and corrects it by a better.
The correspondence theory, then, does not test the truth-claim of the assertion; it only gives a fresh definition of it. Yet the theory is not wholly wrong. Many of our thoughts do claim to correspond with reality in ways that can be verified.
If these consequences are satisfactory, if they promote the purpose in hand, instead of thwarting it, and thus have a valuable effect upon life, then the truth-claim maintains its 'truth, and is so far validated. This is the universal method of testing assertions alike in the formation of mathematical laws, physical hypotheses, religious beliefs, and ethical postulates.
Made out it must be; for as the criterion is quite formal and holds of all assertions, the claim to 'correspond' may be false. To prove the correspondence, then, the 'reality' would have somehow to be known apart from the truth-claim of the thought, in order that the two might be compared and found to agree.
Thus, once again, we find that an account of truth-claim is being foisted on us in place of a description of truth-testing. The intellectualist, then, being in every case unable to justify the vital distinction commonly made between the true and the false, we return to the pragmatist.
The intellectualist accounts of truth have all failed to make this vital distinction between 'truth-claim' and validated truth. They rest on a confusion of formal with absolute truth, and it is on this account that they cannot distinguish between 'truth' and error.
Good consequences are not proposed by us merely as a sure sign, mark, or criterion, by which truth's presence is habitually ascertained, tho they may indeed serve on occasion as such a sign; they are proposed rather as the lurking motive inside of every truth-claim, whether the 'trower' be conscious of such motive, or whether he obey it blindly.
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