CHAPTER V

THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH AND ERROR

It has been shown in the last chapter how urgent has become the problem of discriminating between the true and false among relative ‘truths.’  For absolute truth has become a chimera, self-evidence an illusion, and intuition untrustworthy.  All three are psychologically very real to those who believe in them, but logically they succumb to the assaults of a scepticism which infers from the fact that no ‘truths’ are absolute that all may reasonably be overthrown.

The only obstacle to its triumph lies in the existence of ‘relative’ truths which are not absolute, and do not claim to be, and in the unexamined possibility that in a relativist interpretation of all truth a meaning may be found for the distinction between ‘true’ and ‘false.’  Now, not even a sceptic could deny that the size of an object is better measured by a yard-measure than by the eye, even though it may be meaningless to ask what its size may be absolutely; or that it is probable that bread will be found more nourishing than stone, even though it may not be a perfect elixir of life.  Even if he denied this, the sceptic’s acts would convict his words of insincerity, and practically, at any rate, no one has been or can be a sceptic, whatever the extent of his theoretic doubts.

This fact is construed by the pragmatist as a significant indication of the way out of the epistemological impasse.  The ‘relative’ truths, which Intellectualism passed by with contempt, may differ in practical value and lead to the conceptions of practical truth and certainty which may be better adapted to the requirements of human life than the elusive and discredited ideals of absolute truth and certainty, and may enable us to justify the distinctions we make between the ‘true’ and the ’false.  At any rate, this suggestion seems worth following up.

To begin with, we must radically disabuse our minds of the idea that thinking starts from certainty. Even the self-evident and self-confident ‘intuitions’ that impress the uncritical so much with their claim to infallibility are really the results of antecedent doubts and ponderings, and would never be enunciated unless there were thought to be a dispute about them.  In real life thought starts from perplexities, from situations in which, as Professor Dewey says, beliefs have to be ‘reconstructed,’ and it aims at setting doubts at rest.  It is psychologically impossible for a rational mind to assert what it knows to be true, and supposes everyone else to admit the truth of.  This is why even a philosopher’s conversation does not consist of a rehearsal of all the unchallenged truisms that he can remember.