PHIL306
How did Bertrand Russell win
his dispute with F. H. Bradley?
Oliver Spinney’s dissertation, submitted as part of his BA Philosophy degree,
looks at the early 20th century dispute between F. H. Bradley, one of the leading
proponents of British Idealism, and the radical anti-Idealist philosopher Bertrand
Russell. The dissertation argues that various aspects of Bradley’s philosophy
were treated uncharitably, even misapprehended, by Russell; Bradley’s views
on relations, the logical structure of judgement, and the nature of truth and
falsehood have suffered historically for this treatment. This excerpt from the
dissertation deals with Bradley’s notions of truth.
It is one of the received features that
characterise the historical dispute between
Russell and Bradley that the former held
to a correspondence theory of truth, the
latter a coherence theory (Candlish, 2007,
p. 9). In this chapter these claims will be
examined and the conclusion drawn that
for Bradley coherence was not in fact the
final arbiter of truth, but only an inevitable
consequence of an ‘identity’ theory. The
source of this erroneous portrayal will be
seen to originate with Russell (1973), who
goes on to suggest that Bradley’s doctrine
of ‘degrees of truth’ is self-undermining.
Bradley’s identity theory will be shown
to be problematic for common sense in
that it demands thought’s “happy suicide”
(Bradley, 1930, p.150) in order to achieve
ultimate truth, but that, firstly, Bradley would
not have considered this problematic in
and of itself, and secondly, his theory is not
vulnerable to Russell’s criticism that it is
self-undermining.
of which all of the members held broadly
indistinguishable views. Russell mentions
that he shall “…often refer to Mr. Joachim’s
book… because it gives me what seems
to me the best recent statement of certain
views which I wish to discuss” (p. 151);
furthermore, Russell frequently mentions
Bradley himself throughout the article
(pp. 159–165). Given Russell’s enormous
influence on 20th century philosophy, it is not
surprising that his conclusion, that Bradley
endorsed the same views as Joachim, has
become a commonplace assumption.
In answer to the question of quite why
Russell should have simplified the picture
in this fashion we must look to his general
criticisms of coherence theories of truth. A
coherence theory of truth is one in which
truth is a property of a set of propositions,
to the extent that they are consistent and
mutually supporting. The degree to which a
judgement is true is the degree to which it
coheres with others. This theory contrasts
with the rival ‘correspondence’ approach,
which holds that individual beliefs are true if
they correspond to an ontologically distinct
fact or state of affairs. Coherence theories
in general suffer from what has come to be
known as the ‘isolation problem’ (O’Brien,
2006). This criticism asks us to imagine
two different sets of beliefs, in each case
the sets are internally coherent yet directly
contradict the other set. The coherence
theory has no method of distinguishing
between which is true and which is false.
The Charge of Coherence
Firstly, we must establish exactly why
it is that Bradley has been viewed as a
coherence theorist and whether this is a
claim of any substance. Stewart Candlish
(2007) has suggested that Russell’s article,
The Monistic Theory of Truth (1973), is the
source of the ascription. In the article, Russell
takes Harold Henry Joachim’s explicitly
coherentist theory to task, but it is also clear
that Russell believes Joachim’s theory to be
representative of a ‘neo-Hegelian’ school,
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