SotA Anthology 2015-16
Russell gives us a specific example:
“… it may be perfectly possible to
construct a coherent whole of false
propositions in which “Bishop Stubbs
was hanged for murder” would find
a place… there is no explanation,
on the coherence-theory, of the
distinction commonly expressed by
the words true and false” (Russell,
1973, p. 157).
John McDowell has referred to the lack of
an appeal to an external state of affairs in
distinguishing a true set of beliefs from a false
one as leaving the theory as “frictionless
spinning in a void” (1994, p.66). Clearly this
is a forceful criticism of coherentism, but it
does not apply to Bradley. Ralph Walker
points out that “it is not being suggested
that truth consists in cohering with any
arbitrary set of propositions” (1989, p. 3).
The perceived coherence of a set of beliefs
is only an incidental result of an identity with
a greater reality.
The Identity Theory of Truth
Firstly, I will define the identity theory
that Bradley held to. For Bradley, truth is
reality. A given truth-bearer and its truthmaker are numerically identical. This
theory is therefore not applied at the level
of declarative sentence (Gaskin, 2015),
and so it is no surprise that no declarative
sentence counts as wholly true for Bradley.
We have already seen that, for Bradley,
judgements involve predicating single
ideas of reality. Judgements are necessarily
inferior to reality because they are
abstracts from reality, or the ‘Absolute’. All
divisions that we make within judgements
are artificial segregations where none truly
exist. The same is true of the judgement
taken as a single idea. The ideas: ‘wolf’, ‘is
eating’, and ‘lamb’ are arbitrary divisions
of a whole. This fuller notion though, that
‘the wolf is eating the lamb’, is also subject
to the same criticisms we can make of its
divisions. Firstly, the idea is an abstrac t,
and not concrete. More importantly, though,
the idea cuts away those specific chosen
features from a wider context. We might
say that ‘the wolf is eating the lamb next
to the barn’, or further again, ‘the wolf is
eating the lamb next to the barn, in which
the other lambs are sleeping’. Bradley’s
theory of truth is one where our judgement
comes closer to reality, and further from
appearance, the fuller the idea that we
apprehend. A consequence of this theory is
that it will seem as though we do indeed
have a cohering set of judgements as we
arrive closer and closer to truth. This is
simply because we are describing more
and more fully the reality that we are
predicating. These cohering judgements do
not contradict, not because they arbitrarily
happen not to, but because they pertain
to reality and reality is not contradictory.
The ‘Bishop Stubbs’ objection does not
shake Bradley’s theory because it treats
coherence as that which makes a belief
true or false, when it fact it functions only
as an indicator of truth; any true judgement
will inevitably reveal a coherence. Bradley
says this: “… the test which we do apply,
and which we must apply, is that of system”
(Bradley, 1914, p. 202). Clearly, remarks
like these have encouraged the myth that
Bradley’s position was coherentist, but it is
important to note his use of the word ‘test’.
Nowhere does he claim that coherence is in
itself the mechanism which grants truth, and
as Candlish says, “this evidence is merely
negative, though this on its own should be
enough: there is no published work of his
in which a coherence theory of truth is ever
expressed” (p. 79).
Truth and falsehood is not for Bradley a
binary affair. Judgements lie on the spectrum
in varying degrees; they are closer to truth
the nearer they come to describing reality
in full, further away to the extent they fail to
do this. No judgement then is ever wholly
false, but always, in virtue of demonstrating
any idea whatsoever, contains some grain
of truth. Ideas are, after all, abstractions
from reality. A judgement is less true the
more that we must stipulate the case in
order for that judgement to pertain, the
more conditions that we must describe in
order for that particular judgement to hold.
Mander explains the point:
… No judgement is ever wholly