Book Description:
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III CORRESPONDENCE : THE PARTICULAR AND THE UNIVERSAL It is to be remembered that our thesis is not that correspondence between two wholes is truth, nor that it is knowledge, but that such correspondence is possible. The establishment of correspondences is strictly not a portion of logic, but the ' application ' of logic to anything whatsoever seems to depend entirely on the possibility of there being such correspondences. And logic avers this possibility. In regard to the relation of correspondence to truth, as when a theory is said to be ' true' if it corresponds to some ' real' manifold, it seems to me that nothing is here meant beyond the statement that the correspondence is true, i.e. that it is in greater or less measure. If that which is wanted, as truth, is an abstract system that corresponds in its structure to some more concrete ' real' system, then ' truth ' is found if such corresponding abstract system is found. And truth means, as here appears, consistency ; means, namely, that in the correspondence there is no feature of one system that contradicts any feature of the other. But for this, in this case, correspondence itself must be possible. Now it is urged by Joachim that correspondence ' is simply a name for identity of purpose expressed throughmaterially different constituents as an identical structure, plan, or cycle of functions ' (op. cit., p. 10). ' Now if there is no difference in the two factors, there clearly is no ' correspondence ' there is identity. But if there is a difference, e.g. what we loosely call a ' material' difference, how can there also be identity of structure ? For ' structure' is a name for scheme of inner relations, and relations which really relate different elements cannot be identical, i.e. cannot be identical if the d...
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