When a man tells you that he knows the exact truth about anything you are safe in inferring that he is an inexact man.
The question of truth and falsehood has been wrapped in unnecessary mystery owing to a number of causes. In the first place, people wish to think that their beliefs are more apt to be true than false, so that they seek a theory that will show that truth is normal and falsehood more or less accidental.
In the second place, people are very vague as to what they mean by “belief” or “judgment”, though persuaded that they know beliefs or judgments to be the objects to which the predicates “true” or “false” apply. In the third place, there is a tendency to use “truth” with a big T in the grand sense, as something noble and splendid and worthy of adoration. This gets people into a frame of mind in which they become unable to think. But just as the grave-diggers in Hamlet became familiar with skulls, so logicians become familiar with truth. “The hand of little employment hath the daintier sense,” says Hamlet. Therefore it is not from the logician that awe before truth is to be expected.
There are two questions in our present subject: What are the objects to which the predicates “true” and “false” apply? What is the difference between such as are true and such as are false? We will begin with the first of these questions.
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell OM FRS (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) was a British philosopher, logician, and social critic. As an academic, he worked in philosophy, mathematics, and logic. His work has had a considerable influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, linguistics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science, and various areas of analytic philosophy, especially philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics. He was a public intellectual, historian, social critic, political activist, and Nobel laureate. He was born in Monmouthshire into one of the most prominent aristocratic families in the United Kingdom.
In Public Domain
First published 1917
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