![]() ![]() Russell urged that if this were so, then “Bishop Stubbs wore ecclesiastical gaiters,” held with total confidence, would be deemed erroneous, whereas “Bishop Stubbs died on the gallows,” held as a hypothesis with only modest confidence, might be part of an interlocking coherent story about the man’s life, and would therefore count as true. Individual beliefs were only ever partially true, and error consisted in misplaced certainty, when we take what is partially true to be wholly true. Joachim had urged that real truth belonged not to individual beliefs but only to the interlocking, godlike “whole truth” that we shall never obtain. There is a standard objection to the coherence theory of truth, canonized as the “Bishop Stubbs objection” because of an example used by Bertrand Russell in his Philosophical Essays of 1910. This Kantian doctrine gave a satisfactorily pious, religion-friendly tinge to philosophy in the Victorian age (“now we see through a glass darkly. ![]() ![]() In Kant’s jargon the ordinary world of chairs and tables, cars and buses, is “empirically real” – it is what our senses tell us is real – but “transcendentally ideal” – the product of the way our minds structure a reality of which we can form no idea, since in forming any such idea we would be back deploying the structuring powers of the mind. ![]() The thought is that however much we may be at home with it, the empirical world of common sense and science is but the appearance of a hidden reality of a different nature. Again the idea arises that we might be faltering along on the wrong track, disconnected from the real world. Coherence is the best we can achieve, but our coherence might not be that of the gods. These thoughts might reintroduce a kind of pessimism or skepticism. Anything like it could arrive only at the endpoint of the progress of the Human Spirit, but like the endpoint of the rainbow that could never be reached by mere mortals. In nineteenth-century hands the coherence theory had a semi-religious flavour: ideal coherence, it was thought, could belong only to the thoughts of an infinite mind, a mind capable of encompassing an infinity of interlocking beliefs, something like God’s mind, which the idealists christened the Absolute. You learn a whole system and a whole set of interconnected implications and applications, and then, as Wittgenstein put it, “light dawns gradually over the whole.” You do not learn, one at a time, that thirteen is greater than eleven, or that twenty-six is an even number. As an illustration, think of learning elementary arithmetic. This idea, called the holism of belief systems, diverts attention from the single sentence expressing a single truth, to whole theories or systems of belief. Rather, they belong organically to whole systems or theories of the world in the way that a hand belongs to an arm or an arm to a body: the interlocking system has the character of a living body, an organic whole in which each part gains its value precisely by its being a part of the whole. One of its implications is that beliefs do not belong to whole systems in the way that pebbles lie on a beach, dis- connected from each other and independent of their neighbours. The coherence theory of truth gained a strong following in the nineteenth century, partly due to the influence of Kant and Hegel, and especially in the thought of the British philosophers influenced by them, known as the British Idealists. ![]()
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