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date: 05 March 2021

Abstract and Keywords

Arguments about truth were central to the debates between British idealists such as Bradley and their analytic critics such as Russell. Bradley’s thesis of the “unreality” of relations led him to the holistic monism of the Absolute, within which truth is no relation between judgment and fact but the expansion of judgment until it becomes reality. Russell argued that this idealist monism rests on the mistaken assumption that all relations are internal, and should be replaced by a realist pluralism of facts. Initially Russell followed Moore in holding that truth is a simple property of judgments which are facts. But that position cannot deal sensibly with falsehood, so Russell then moved to his multiple-relation theory of judgment. But having been persuaded by Wittgenstein that this was not a tenable position, he adopted the semantic correspondence theory of logical atomism.

Keywords: coherence, correspondence, holism, identity, idealism, judgment, proposition, reality, relations

Thomas Baldwin

Thomas Baldwin, Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, University of York, Emeritus

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