Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/177

THE AMBIGUITY OF TRUTH. 163 of dogmas concerning the nature of an ' infinite ' intelligence (whatever that may mean !), have evinced much hesitation about attributing to it the discursive procedures of our own, .and have usually hinted that it would transcend the predica- tion of truth and falsehood. As being then a specific pecu- liarity of the human mind the conception of ' truth ' seems closely analogous to that of ' good ' and of ' beautiful,' which seem as naturally to possess antithetical predicates in the J bad ' and the ' ugly,' as the ' true ' does in the ' false '. And it may be anticipated that when our psychology has quite .outgrown the materialistic prejudices of its adolescence it will probably regard all these habits of judging experiences AS just as distinctive and ultimate features of mental process ,as are the ultimate facts of our perception. In a sense there- fore the predications of ' good ' and ' bad,' ' true ' and ' false,' ^tc., may take rank with the experiences of 'sweet,' 'red,' J loud,' ' hard,' etc., as ultimate facts which need be analysed no further. 1 We may next infer that by a truth we mean a proposition to which this attribute ' true ' has somehow been attached, and which, consequently, is envisaged sub specie veri. The truth therefore is the totality of things to which this mode of treatment is applied or applicable, whether or not this extends over the whole of our experience. If now all propositions which involve this predication of truth really deserved it, if all that professes and seems to be 4 true ' were really true, no difficulty would arise. Things would be ' true ' or ' false ' as simply and unambiguously as they are ' sweet ' or ' sour,' ' red ' or ' blue,' and nothing could disturb our judgments or convict them of illusion. But in the sphere of knowledge such, notoriously, is not the case. Our anticipations are often falsified, our claims prove fre- quently untenable. Our truths may turn out to be false, our goods to be bad : falsehood and error are as rampant as evil in the world of our experience. This fact compels us (1) to an enlargement, and (2) to a distinction, in the realm of truth. For the logician ' truth ' becomes a problem, enlarged so as to include ' falsity ' as well, and so, strictly, our problem is the contemplation of experience sub specie veri et falsi. Secondly, if not all that claims truth is true, must we not distinguish this initial claim from whatever procedure subsequently justifies or validates it ? Truth, therefore, will become ambiguous. It will mean 1 The purport of this remark is to confute the notion, which seems dirnly to underlie some intellectualist criticisms, that the specific char- acter of the truth-predication is ignored in pragmatist quarters.