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false, but all are to some extent true. Just as there could be no judgement which fulfilled all the conditions of its application, equally there could be no judgement which failed to fulfil any of them( 1994, p. 142).
Judgements are abstractions, and even full and thorough abstractions fail ultimately to meet their maker. Judgements are predicates which we attribute to reality, yet its application to a subject necessarily obstructs it from reaching identity with that subject and hence absolute truth. Thought itself, then, is incapable of truth. Bradley is clear on this point( 1930, p. 319):“ There is still a difference, unremoved, between the subject and the predicate, a difference which, while it persists, shows a failure in thought, but which, if removed, would wholly destroy the special essence of thinking”. Identity, and therefore truth, requires that thought be overcome in some sense, and dissolved into the Absolute( Davnall, 2013).
Criticisms It is perhaps true that Bradley’ s identity theory does not satisfy our common-sense platitudes about the nature of truth and falsehood. The idea that discursive thought cannot grasp absolute truth might strike us as implausible. Some words on Bradley’ s wider approach and methodology might explain this unorthodox picture.
Firstly, and unlike Russell, Bradley did not begin his philosophical endeavour with a list of intuitive truths that he desired to prove. Bradley’ s method was to avoid axioms where possible, applying reason uniformly and without prejudice. Bradley says that he takes up,“ certain facts or truths … that I find are offered … and I care very little what it is I take up. These facts or truths, as they are offered, I find my intellect rejects, and I go on to discover why it rejects them”( 1930, p. 509). The intellectual rejection Bradley mentions has been commonly understood to involve the discovery of some logical contradiction or other( Mander, 1994, p. 7). Importantly, though, Bradley’ s methodology leads him to accept what he finds regardless of its counter-intuitiveness or obscurity.
Moreover for Bradley, truth was reality, and there is no reason why either should be easily grasped or why his arguments should give way to common-sense intuition.
A more precise criticism comes from Russell. Russell believed that the doctrine of degrees of truth and reality undermined itself. If no judgement can ultimately claim to be true, how is it the case that we can state this doctrine with any degree of certainty? Russell puts it like this:“ the truth that a certain partial truth is part of the whole is a partial truth, and thus only partially true; hence we can never say with perfect truth“ this is part of the Truth””( 1910, p. 151). Thomas Baldwin formulates the problem succinctly when he says that,“ Bradley’ s claim is prima facie paradoxical, for it implies that it itself is not absolutely true”( 1998, p. 73). This criticism was preempted by Bradley, who qualified his theory with the clause that certain principles were as true as any judgement can be. Specifically, no correction by our intellect could possibly bring them closer to truth. Of course, absolute truth demands that we move beyond the intellect, but these most general principles cannot be conditioned by anything within thought. Furthermore, where Russell sees that all truths are partially false he appears to implicitly assume that this makes them equally false. Mander defends Bradley from Russell when he says that,“ Russell’ s mistake is to infer from the fact that the truth is not quite true to the fact that it permits correction”( 1994, p. 147).
Conclusion Bradley’ s theory of truth then has been widely misunderstood and suffered historically for another of Russell’ s conflations. In reality, the theory does contravene some of our intuitions about the nature of truth and falsehood, but Bradley would not have been unduly perturbed by this fact. Bradley’ s identity theory is a nuanced approach to the subject of truth which draws from his holistic metaphysics in a suitably unique fashion.
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