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WorkF. H. Bradley

Essays on Truth and Reality

The papers in which Bradley fought the pragmatists, gave up the idea that a true thought copies a fact, and said what he took truth to be instead.

by F. H. Bradley622 passages held

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First published
(aged 68)
Original language
English

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Overview

The pragmatists had proposed that a belief is true when believing it works, and Bradley — who held that truth and reality are finally the same thing — spent years answering them in the pages of Mind, paper by paper, including "On Truth and Coherence" in 1909. In 1914 the Clarendon Press gathered those papers, with several appendices, into a volume. It is not a fourth treatise but a file: essays on truth and copying, on truth and practice, on faith, memory, error and God, with appendices that take up William James's The Meaning of Truth and his radical empiricism separately. One chapter is given over to an argument with Bertrand Russell, by then leading the attack on idealism. What holds the file together is a retreat Bradley had been conducting since the logic of 1883. He had begun by assuming that a true idea copies a fact; here he gives that up, on the ground that an idea can copy a fact only by stripping away the conditions that hold that fact in place, and so falsifies it in the very act of matching it. Truth and reality, he argues instead, are one thing at differing degrees of completeness. Coherence on this account is the test you apply, not what truth consists in — a distinction readers have gone on missing, which is why Bradley is still catalogued as a coherence theorist. Scholars cite these versions today rather than the journal printings. The British philosopher Timothy Sprigge judged the collection in some respects a better statement of Bradley's absolute idealism than Appearance and Reality itself.

Key concepts

What is the copy theory of truth Bradley gave up?

The assumption that a true idea reproduces a fact standing over against it. Bradley had worked with that assumption since the logic of 1883 and abandons it here, on the ground that an idea can be made to fit a fact only by stripping away the conditions holding the fact in place — so the fit is bought by leaving out what made it a fact.

What does Bradley mean by immediate experience?

A felt whole in which nothing yet stands apart as an object. It is not emotion and not a private inner glow: it is the stage at which diversity is present without being divided into related terms. Thought works by breaking that whole up, and never wholly leaves it behind, since it stays as the background every judgment is cut out of.

What are degrees of truth?

A scale of completeness rather than a pair of boxes. Every judgment abstracts from conditions it cannot state, so none is wholly true; and every judgment holds of reality somehow, so none is wholly false. Truth and reality differ only in how complete they are on this account, and a belief improves by taking in more of what it had left out.

What did the pragmatists mean by saying a belief is true if it works?

That the value of holding a belief is what its truth consists in — satisfaction, successful prediction, a practice that pays. Bradley does not deny that working can be evidence of truth; he denies it can be the nature of truth. William James is the opponent throughout, and an appendix takes up his book “The Meaning of Truth” on its own.

What is the radical empiricism Bradley answers in the appendices?

James's claim that relations are given in experience as directly as the things they relate. Bradley answers on ground James had chosen: what is directly felt is a whole not yet split into terms at all, so the continuity James points to counts against relations being found in experience rather than for it.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

The quarrel with pragmatism

Is a belief true because holding it works? Refusing that occupied Bradley for years in the journals, and what he defends against William James is a truth answerable to reality rather than to what following it produces.

Practice is not denied a role — the test of a belief may well be whether it works — but the test of truth and the nature of truth are separated, and pragmatism to his eye collapses the two. Appendices take James’s “The Meaning of Truth” and his radical empiricism in turn, and one chapter argues with Russell, who was attacking idealism from the opposite side.

  • pragmatism
  • truth
  • knowledge
  • objectivity
  • reality
  • epistemology

Enter a dialogue

Truth does not copy the world

Can a true idea be one that copies a fact? Giving that up is the retreat Bradley had been conducting since the logic of 1883, and it leaves him owing an account of what truth is instead.

Copying fails on its own terms: an idea matches a fact only by stripping away the conditions that hold the fact in place, so it falsifies in the very act of matching. Truth and reality are offered instead as one thing at differing degrees of completeness, no judgment wholly true and none wholly false. Coherence is the test applied, not what truth consists in — a distinction readers keep missing, which is why the coherence-theorist label has stuck to him.

  • truth
  • judgment
  • reality
  • identity
  • abstraction
  • skepticism
  • holism
  • metaphysics

Enter a dialogue

Immediate experience

Underneath every judgment, is there a felt whole not yet split into subject and object? Bradley says there is, and much of the system leans on it: without that base the Absolute would be a postulate rather than something met.

Feeling, in this technical sense, is not emotion but a stage in which diversity is present without relations — and it is never wholly left behind, persisting as the background against which thought does its dividing. The point answers James's radical empiricism on ground James had chosen. Continuity of consciousness, and with it the sense of one life rather than a chain of states, is made to rest here; so is the claim that thought aims at a whole it cannot reach discursively.

  • immediate experience
  • feeling
  • consciousness
  • experience
  • continuity
  • unity
  • philosophy of mind
  • perception
  • relations

Enter a dialogue

Memory, error and the past

What entitles anyone to a past? Memory cannot be checked against the events it reports, and Bradley treats that as one case of the general problem of error rather than a local worry about reliability.

Every recollection is a construction made in the present, so its warrant lies in fitting the rest of what is held — the same coherence test doing work here that it does for truth at large. Error is handled alike: a mistaken judgment is not simply false but a truth torn from its conditions, correctable by restoring them rather than by deletion. Scepticism about the past is therefore met with degrees, never with a guarantee.

  • memory
  • personal identity
  • judgment
  • imagination
  • skepticism
  • knowledge
  • identity
  • contradiction

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
622
distinct concepts
614
by passages held, corpus-wide
#111

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “pragmatism” and “truth”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 25 pairings. 86 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
pragmatismtruth53
realitytruth38
knowledgetruth28
epistemologytruth25
judgmenttruth19
epistemologymemory18
knowledgereality18
epistemologyreality15
judgmentmemory14
epistemologyknowledge13
metaphysicstruth11
judgmentreality8
knowledgepragmatism6
pragmatismreality6
memorytruth5
metaphysicsreality5
epistemologyjudgment4
epistemologymetaphysics4
epistemologypragmatism4
judgmentknowledge4
knowledgemetaphysics4
knowledgememory3
metaphysicspragmatism2
judgmentpragmatism1
memoryreality1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1876 Ethical Studies

    Not a treatise but a chain of essays, and the only book Bradley gave to morals. He never revised the text in the remaining forty-eight years of his life, so this is his ethics entire; the posthumous second edition only added matter around it.

     EN
  2. 1883 The Principles of Logic

    Ten years separate this book from Appearance and Reality, and the metaphysics grows out of it. The later book applies what the logic establishes about judgment — that it always refers beyond itself to a reality — to space, time, cause and the self.

     EN
  3. 1893 Appearance and Reality

    The book that made him, and for two decades after 1893 the centre of English philosophy. It is also the centre of his own system: the logic leads into it, and the essays of 1914 defend what it claims.

     EN
  4. 1914 Essays on Truth and Reality you are here EN
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