Being thus conditioned by a doubt, every judgment is a challenge.  It claims truth, and backs its claims by the authority of its maker; but it would be folly to imagine that it thereby becomes ipso facto true, or is meant to be universally accepted without testing.  Its maker must know this as well as anyone, unless his dogmatism has quite blotted out his common sense.  Indeed, he may himself have given preference to the judgment he made over the alternatives that occurred to him only after much debate and hesitation, and may propound it only as a basis for further discussion and testing.

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 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.  For false judgments also formally claim ‘truth,’ No judgment alleges that it is false.[C]

On the other hand, if the distinction between truth-claims and validated truths is made, there ceases to be any theoretic difficulty about the conception and correction of errors, however difficult it may be to detect them in practice.  ‘Truths’ will be ‘claims’ which have worked well and maintained themselves; ‘errors,’ such as have been superseded by better ones.  All ‘truths’ must be tested by something more objective than their own self-assertiveness, and this testing by their working and the consequences to which they lead may go on indefinitely.  In other words, however much a ‘truth’ has been validated, it is always possible to test it further. I.e., it is never theoretically ‘absolute,’ however well it may practically be assured.  For a confirmation of this doctrine Pragmatism appeals to the history of scientific truth, which has shown a continuous correction of ‘truths,’ which were re-valued as ‘errors,’ as better statements for them became available.

It may also be confirmed negatively by the breakdown of the current definitions of truth, which all seem in the end to mean nothing.

The oldest and commonest definition of a ‘truth’ which is given is that it is ‘the correspondence of a thought to reality.’  But Intellectualism never perceived the difficulties lurking in it.  At first sight this seems a brave attempt to get outside the circle of thought in order to test its value and to control its vagaries.  Unluckily, this theory can only assert, and neither explains nor proves, the connection between the thought and the reality it desiderates.  For, granting that it is the intent of every thought to correspond with reality,