II.—TRUTH AND FALSITY

Abstract

I FEEL very grateful to Mr. Hoernle for his criticism I of my essay on Real Being and Being-for-Thought. His' 'difficulties' seem to me all to be due to defects in my essay; partly to defects of exposition, but also to defects in the way in which I have worked out my theory. In what follows, I approach the questions at issue in the same spirit as Mr. Hoernle. I shall not attempt to defend what I have already written just because I have written it. While maintaining my central position more stronglv than ever, I shall mainly try to meet Mr. Hoernles difficulties by correcting and by developing farther my previous statement of'it. Mr. Hoernle's difficulties are evidently in part due to the absence in my essay of a sufficiently precise terminological scheme. I begin therefore by fixing more exactly, at least for the purpose of the present discussion, the sense in which I propose to use such terms as real, actual, objective, etc. About real and possible being I shall have more to say presently. It is sufficient to say at this point that for me possible and real are correlative terms, so that each possibility is relative to its own realitv, as every question is relative to its own answer. Further, what is real is a fortiori possible. Hence my distinction between mere possibilities and fulfilled possibilities. All possibilities have a certain distinctive character which we distinguish by speaking of the possibility of this or of that of pigs flying, of water's freezing, of finding gold by digging at a certain place and time. WVhen this character is a character of the relevant real being, I speak of a fulfilled possibility; a possibility which is identical with the relevant reality so far as it is thus determined. There are other ways in which the term 'real' is used in ordinary language and by philosophers. Reality is frequently contrasted with deceptive appearances. This use of the term is easily connected with and derived from mine. A deceptive appearance is a possibility which in some way claims to be real though it is not so.