This essay offers Russell’s version of a correspondence theory of truth. His views had been changing in the preceding few years, and he substituted this essay for the discussion that had appeared as the third section of the paper of 1906 whose first two sections formed the critique of Joachim we discussed on Wed. His views had stabilized somewhat by the time he published this in 1910 because a very similar account appears in The Problems of Philosophy (in ch. 12 following the critique of the coherence theory we discussed Wed).
• Russell begins this essay with a discussion of what are sometimes called “truth bearers,” the sorts of things which are said to be true or false. In these terms, a correspondence theory analyzes truth as a correspondence between truth-bearers and “truth-makers.” Russell identifies belief and judgment as the truth bearers and proceeds to discuss these ideas (a discussion that has been the focus of attention when ch. 12 of The Problems of Philosophy is discussed in PHI 346).
• The tie between the nature of belief and judgment and the nature of truth appears in the latter part of the first half of the paper (pp. 174-177), where Russell formulates and criticizes what is sometimes referred to as an “identity” theory of truth. If belief or judgment is seen as a relation to a single object, what is believed or judged, a true belief might be held to be a relation to the fact that makes it true. On this account, the truth-maker would be identical to the truth-bearer and “correspondence” would be nothing more than identity.
• After setting this approach aside, Russell devotes the second half of the essay to his own “multiple-relation” theory of belief and judgment and the associated theory of truth. As you read his account of this, think whether you take the sort of correspondence he describes to be a plausible view of truth.