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Here we propose to examine the Indian theories of truth, as explained above, in the light of parallel Western theories. With regard to truth there are two main questions, namely, how truth is constituted, and how truth is known. The first question relates to the nature of truth and the answers to it give us the definitions of truth. The second question refers to the ascertainment of truth and the answers to it give us the tests or criteria of truth.

ith regard to these two questions there seem to be two possible answers. Thus it may be said that truth is a self-evident character of all knowledge. Every knowledge is true and known to be true by its very nature. Knowledge does not depend on any external conditions either to be made true or to be known as true. This is the theory of the intrinsic validity (svalah pramanya) of knowledge as advocated by the Sankhya, Mimamsa and Advaita Vedanta systems of Indian Philosophy. According to the last two schools, the truth of knowledge consists just in its being uncontradicted (abadhita). The absence of contradiction, however, is not a positive but a negative condition of truth. Knowledge is both made true and known to be true by its own internal conditions. It is only falsehood that is externally conditioned. So truth is self-evident, while falsity requires to be evidenced by external grounds. The Sankhya goes further than this. It maintains that both truth and falsehood are internally conditioned and immediately known, i.e. are self-evident. There is no exact parallel to the above theory of truth in Western philosophy. It is true that in modern European philosophy knowledge, in the strict sense, is always taken to mean true belief. But truth or validity is not regarded as intrinsic to all knowledge, independently of all external conditions. It is in the writings of Professor L. A. Reid, a modern realist who owns no allegiance to the current schools of realism, that we find some approach to the view that truth is organic to knowledge. But even Reid makes it conditional on knowledge efficiently fulfilling its function, namely, the apprehension of reality as it is. He thinks that truth is nothing else but knowledge doing its job. Thus he says: "Truth is, indeed, simply, ... the quality of knowledge perfectly fulfilling its functions. Again he observes: "If knowledge were not transitive, if we were not in direct contact, joined with reality, then all our tests, coherence, correspondence, and the rest, would be worthless."" Here truth is admitted to be a natural " 1 L. A. Reid, Knowledge and Truth, pp. 185, 199, 204,

function of knowledge, but not as inherent and self-evident in all knowledge. In the theory of intuitionism, we find a close approach to the view of self-evident validity. To the question 'How do we know that a belief is true or valid?' intuitionism has a simple answer to give, namely, that we know it immediately to be such. As Hobhouse puts the matter: "Intuitionism has a royal way of cutting this, and indeed most other knots for it has but to appeal to a perceived necessity, to a clear idea, to the inconceivability of the opposite, all of which may be known by simply attending to our own judgment, and its task is done." Among intuitionists, Lossky has made an elaborate attempt to show that truth and falsity are known through an immediate consciousness of their objectivity and subjectivity respectively. For him, truth is the objective and falsity the subjective appearance of the object. But how do we know that the one is objective and the other is subjective? The answer given by Lossky as also by Lipps is that we have "an immediate consciousness of subjectivity" and "an immediate consciousness of objectivity." To quote Lossky's own words: "It is in this consciousness of objectivity and subjectivity, and not. . . in the laws of identity, contradiction, and excluded middle, that our thought has a real and immediate guide in its search for truth." It should be remarked here that the above theories of selfevident truth or intrinsic validity give us a rather jejune and untenable solution of the logical problem of truth. They leave no room for the facts of doubt and falschood in the sphere of knowledge. But any theory of truth which fails to explain its correlate, namely, falsehood, becomes so far inadequate. Further, it makes a confusion between psychological belief and logical certainty. Psychologically a wrong belief may be as firm as a right one. But this does not mean that there is no distinction between the two. Subjective certitude, as such, cannot be accepted as a test of truth. It is true that the theory of 1 Hobhouse, Theory of Knowledge, p. 488. 2 Lossky, The Intuitive Basis of Knowledge, pp. 227-29.

intrinsic validity does not appeal to any test of truth other than the truth itself. It assumes that the truth of knowledge is selfevident, and that we cannot think of the opposite. In fact, however, there is no such self-evident truth. It is only in the case of the self that we can speak of self-evidence in this sense. The self is a self-manifesting reality. It is manifest even in any doubt or denial of its reality. Hence self-evidence belongs really to the self only. It is on the analogy of the self that we speak of the self-evidence of any other truth. A truth is self-evident in so far as it has the evidence of the self or is evident like the self. But as we have just said, there is no such self-evident truth other than the self itself. In the case of any other truth, we can always think of the opposite in a sensible way. That 'two and two make five' is not as nonsensical as 'abracadabra.' Even if the opposite of a certain belief be inconceivable, it does not follow that the belief is infallible. What was once inconceivable is now not only conceivable but perfectly true. Hence we cannot say that self-evident validity is intrinsic to all knowledge. The second answer to the question 'How is truth constituted and known?' leads us to the theory of extrinsic validity (paratah pramanya). According to this, the truth of any knowledge is both constituted and known by certain external conditions. As a general rule, the validity of knowledge is due to something that is not inherent in it. So also the knowledge of validity depends on certain extraneous tests. Validity is thus assigned to one knowledge on the ground of some other knowledge. This is the theory of extrinsic validity as advocated by the Nyaya and the Bauddha systems. In Western philosophy, the correspondence, the coherence and the pragmatist theories of truth all come under the doctrine of extrinsic validity. In each of them the truth of knowledge is made to depend on certain external conditions other than the knowledge itself. According to almost all realists, old and new, it is correspondence to facts that constitutes both the nature and the

2 NYAYA THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE 5 8 test of truth.' Of course, some realists differ from this general position and hold a different view of the matter. Thus Alexander makes coherence the ground of truth. But in speaking of coherence as determined by reality, he accepts indirectly the theory of correspondence. Reid, on the other hand, treats correspondence to the given only as a test of truth. Russell defines truth in terms of correspondence and accepts coherence as a test of some truths, while others are said to be self-evident. In the philosophy of objective idealism, coherence in the sense of the systematic unity of all experiences is made both the ground and the test of truth. The truth consists in the coherence of all experiences as one self-maintaining and all-inclusive system. It is in this sense that Bosanquet' says that 'the truth is the whole and it is its own criterion. Truth can only be tested by more of itself.' Hence any particular knowledge is true in so far as it is consistent with the whole system of experience. On this view, the truth of human knowledge becomes relative, since coherence as the ideal of the completed system of experience is humanly unattainable. For pragmatism, truth is both constituted and known by practical utility. The truth of knowledge consists in its capacity to produce practically useful consequences. So also the method of ascertaining truth is just to follow the practical consequences of a belief and see if they have any practical value. With this brief statement of the realistic, the idealistic and the pragmatist theories of truth, we proceed to examine the Buddhist and the Nyaya theories of extrinsic validity. 7 From what we have said before it is clear that the Buddhists adopt the pragmatist theory of truth and reality. 1 Vide The New Realism and Essays in Critical Realism. Space, Time and Deity, Vol. II, pp. 251 f. 3 Knowledge and Truth, Chap. VIII. A The Problems of Philosophy, Chaps. XII, XIII; Our Knowledge of the External World, p. 58; The Analysis of Mind, p. 165. 5 Vide Joachim, The Nature of Truth, Chap. III. 6 Logic, Vol. II, pp. 265-67. * James, Pragmatism, Lect. VI; Perry, Present Philosophical Tendencies, Pts. IV and V.

or them, practical efficiency is the test of both truth and reality. The real is what possesses practical efficiency (arthakriya) and the true is the useful and so practically efficient (arthakriyasamarthya). But the pragmatic conception of truth is embarrassed by serious difficulties. The Nyaya criticism of the Bauddha conception of pramana has brought out some of these difficulties. Here we may note that to reduce the true to the useful is to make it almost meaningless. It is by no means the case that truth is only a matter of practical utility. The atomic and the electron theories of matter make very little difference in our practical life. Similarly, the different theories of truth involve no great difference in their practical consequences. But in the absence of any other test than that of practical utility we cannot say which one is true and which is false. Further, there are certain beliefs which are admittedly wrong but which are otherwise useful for certain purposes of life. of life. But no one would claim any truth for a wrong belief on account of its practical utility. Hence the Buddhist and the pragmatist theories of truth cannot be accepted as sound and satisfactory. The Nyaya theory of truth, it will be seen, combines the correspondence, the coherence and the pragmatist theories with certain modifications. According to it, the truth of knowledge consists in its correspondence with objective facts, while coherence and practical utility are the tests of truth in such cases in which we require a test. It defines the truth of all knowledge as a correspondence of relations (tadvati tatprakaraka). To know a thing is to judge it as having such-andsuch a character. This knowledge of the thing will be true if the thing has really such-and-such a character; if not, it will be false. The Nyaya view of correspondence is thus different from the new realistic idea of structural correspondence or indentity of contents.' That knowledge knowledge corresponds some object does not, for the Naiyayika, mean that the contents 1 Cf. Chapter III, Sec. 3, above. to 14 (O.P. 103)

of the object bodily enter into consciousness and become its contents. When, for example, I know a table, the table as a physical existent does not figure in my consciousness. This means only that I judge something as having the attribute of 'tableness' which really belongs to it. There is a subjective cognition of a physical object. The one corresponds to the other, because it determines the object as it is, and does not itself become what it is. If it so became the object itself, there would be nothing left on the subjective side that might correspond to the physical object. Nor again does the Nyaya follow the critical realist's idea of correspondence between charactercomplexes, referred to the object by the knowing mind, and the characters actually belonging to the object. When we know anything we do not first apprehend a certain logical essence or a character-complex and then refer it to the thing known. Our knowledge is in direct contact with the object. In knowing the object we judge it as having a relation to certain characters or attributes. Our knowledge will be true if there is correspondence between the relation asserted in knowledge, and that existing among facts. Thus my knowledge of a conchshell as white is true because there is a real relation between the two corresponding to the relation affirmed by me. On the other hand, the perception of silver in a shell is false because it asserts a relation between the two, which does not correspond to a real relation between them.' While truth consists in correspondence, the criterion of truth is, for the Nyaya, coherence in a broad sense (samvada). But coherence does not here mean anything of the kind that objective idealism means by it. The Nyaya coherence is a practical test and means the harmony between cognitive and conative experiences (pravrttisamarthya) or between different kinds of 1 Cf. "Smith's judgment that it is the light of a ship is true just because 'it," the light, is in fact so related to a real ship. Jones' judgment (that it is the light of a star), on the other hand, is false, because this thought is not an apprehension of the existing present complex fact, light-belonging-to-ship."Reid, Knowledge and Truth, pp. 209-10.

knowledge (tajjatiyatva). That there is truth in the sense of correspondence cannot, as a general rule, be known directly by intuition. We know it indirectly from the fact that the knowledge in question coheres with other experiences of the same object as also with the general system of our knowledge. Thus the perception of water is known to be valid when different ways of reaction or experiment give us experience of the same water. It is this kind of coherence that Alexander accepts as a test of truth when he says: "If truth is tested by reference to other propositions, the test is not one of correspondence to reality but of whether the proposition tested is consistent or not with other propositions." Hobhouse also means the same thing by ' consilience' as a measure of validity. According to him, validity belongs to judgments as forming a consilient system. Of course, he admits that such validity is relative and not absolute, since the ideal of a complete system of consilient judgments is unattainable. The Nyaya idea of samvada or coherence may be better explained as a combination of Reid's methods of correspondence and coherence. If we take the judgment that is the light of a ship,' we can test its truth by what Reid calls the correspondence method "of approaching the light and seeing a ship." This is exactly what the Nyaya means by pravrttisamarthya or successful activity. Or, we can employ, so says Reid, the cheaper coherence method "of comparing this knowledge with other kinds of knowledge and see if it is consistent with them." In this we have the Nyaya method of testing one knowledge by reference to some other valid knowledge (tajjatiyatva). But the Nyaya goes further than this and accepts practical utility also as a test of truth. Thus the validity of the perception of water may be known from correspondence and coherence in the above sense. But it may be further known from the satisfaction of our practical needs or the fulfilment of our practical purposes ' 1 Space, Time and Deity, Vol. II, p. 252. 2 The Theory of Knowledge, PP. 499-500. 3 Knowledge and Truth, pp. 203-4, 211-12.

in relation to water, such as drinking, bathing, washing, etc. But the Nyaya never admits the pragmatist contention that the truth of any knowledge is constituted by its utility or serviceableness. Knowledge is made true by its correspondence to some reality or objective fact. It is true not because it is useful, but it is useful because it is already true. Hence truth consists in correspondence and is tested by coherence and practical efficiency. But from the standpoint of the modern Nyaya, all truths. do not require to be tested. Some truths are known as such without any test or confirmation. These are manifestly necessary and so self-evident truths. Here the Nyaya view has some affinity with Russell's theory of truth.' In both, truth is defined by correspondence to fact, but in different ways. Although truth is thus externally conditioned, some truths are admitted by both to be self-evident. For the Nyaya, however, such truths are only necessary truths or what Russell calls a priori principles. Of the different kinds of knowledge by acquaintance-sensation, memory, introspection, etc.--which admitted by Russell to have self-evident truth, it is only introspection or self-consciousness (anuvyavasaya) that is admitted by the Nyaya as having self-evident validity. The validity of selfconsciousness is self-evident because there is a necessary relation between consciousness and its contents. When I become conscious of a desire for food, I find that my consciousness is necessarily related to the desire, it is the desire itself as it becomes explicit. Here I not only know something, but know that I am knowing it, i.e. the truth of my knowledge is selfevident. are The different theories of truth discussed above may be shown to supplement one another and be reconciled as comThe Problems of Philosophy, Chaps. XI, XII, XIII. 2 Cf. C. Hartshorne's article in The Monist (Vol. XLIV, No. 2, p. 171): "Must this (feeling) not be admitted to present an obvious dual aspect of being at once subjective and yet a content or object of consciousness, at once a mode and a datum of awareness?"

plementary aspects of a comprehensive theory. The first requisite of such a theory is the independent existence of a world of objects. If there were no such world, there would be no ground for the distinction between truth and falsehood. Some of our beliefs are true or false according as they are or are not borne out by independent objects or facts. It is because there are certain independent objects, to which our beliefs may or may not conform, that we distinguish between truth and error. Hence we say that truth consists in the correspondence of our knowledge with independent objects or facts. The difficulty on this view, it is generally remarked, is that if the objects are independent of knowledge, we cannot know whether our knowledge corresponds with them or not. How can we know what is outside and beyond knowledge, and see that true knowledge agrees with it? The reply to this is that in the case of external objects, physical things and other minds, we cannot straightway know the correspondence between our knowledge and its objects. Still, we cannot deny the reality of these external objects. But for the independent existence of other things and minds we cannot explain the order and uniformity of our experiences and the similarity of the experiences that different individuals may have under similar circumstances. That some of our experiences represent the real qualities of things may then be known from the fact that they are given in the same way to different persons, or to the same persons through different senses. As Professor Price has shown, sense-data cohere together in families, and families are coincident with physical occupants."" On the other hand, some of our experiences are not taken to represent the qualities of things, because they do not cohere with other experiences of the same individual or of different individuals. The first kind of experiences is considered to be true and objective, while the second is judged to be false and subjective. Similarly, our knowledge of other minds is true when it correctly represents " 1 Cf. Perception, p. 302. 100709

the contents of those minds. It will be false, if what we impute to them forms no part of their actual contents. This shows that it is correspondence to facts that constitutes the nature of truth, although we cannot directly know such correspondence in the case of physical things and other minds. To know this we have to consider if one knowledge coheres with others or the whole body of human knowledge, and also consider if we can successfully act on our knowledge. What is true works, although whatever works is not true. Thus we know the correspondence of knowledge with facts from its coherence and pragmatic value. But to know that a certain knowledge corresponds with facts is to know its truth. It does not constitute its truth. The knowledge becomes true if, and only if, it corresponds with facts. We know or test its truth when we find that it is coherent with other parts of our knowledge and our practical activities. So truth is constituted by correspondence with facts and is tested by coherence and practical activity. The Vedanta view of truth as uncontradicted experience logically implies the coherence theory of truth. That some experience is uncontradicted means that it is different from the contradicted. But to be different from the contradicted means to belong to the body of coherent knowledge. We do not and cannot rightly judge an experience to be uncontradicted unless we relate it to other experiences and find that it is congruous with them. A dream experience is wrongly judged by the dreamer to be uncontradicted and true, because he cannot relate it to his waking experiences. It cannot be said that a dream experience is true for the time being and becomes false afterwards. What is once true is always true. A dream experience may sometimes be judged to be true, but it is really false for all time. And its falsity appears from its incoherence with waking experience. Hence we are to say that an experience is really uncontradicted when it is related to other experiences and is found to be coherent with them. It may be urged against the above view that truth consists

in correspondence and is tested by coherence, that it either assumes the truth of the testing knowledge, or must go on testing knowledge ad infinitum. If knowledge is true when it corresponds with facts, and if the correspondence cannot be directly known, then the truth of every knowledge must be tested by its coherence with others. This, however, means that there can be no end of the process of proving knowledge and, therefore, no final proof of any knowledge. To solve this difficulty we must admit that there is at least one case in which knowledge is, by itself, known to be true. We have such a case in self-consciousness. While the truth of all other knowledge is to be tested by coherence, the truth of self-consciousness is self-evident and requires no extraneous test. The self is a self-manifesting reality. Hence the contents of our mind or the self are manifested by themselves. They are at once existent facts and contents of consciousness. To become conscious of the contents of one's mind is just to make them explicit. What we are here conscious of are not outside or beyond consciousness. Mental contents not only are, but are conscious of themselves. The state of knowledge and the object of knowledge being identical, we cannot strictly speak of a correspondence of the one with the other. Or, if we speak of a correspondence between them, we are to say that it is directly known and so need not be known or tested in any other way. When we feel pain, or know something, or resolve to do anything, we may be conscious of feeling it, or knowing it, or resolving to do it. What we are here conscious of as objects are the objects themselves as they become explicit or conscious of themselves. Similarly, necessary truths and a priori principles like the laws of thought, logical and mathematical truths seem to have self-evident validity. The reason for this is that these truths are or express the forms and contents of our own consciousness. They are inherent in or arise out of the nature of our own thought and consciousness, and in knowing them consciousness knows itself, i.e. its own forms. They are at once modes and objects of

consciousness. In any judgment or knowledge of them, the content and object of consciousness are the same and directly known to be the same. Such knowledge is, therefore, not only true, but also known to be true by itself. Hence we admit that the truth of self-consciousness is self-evident, while all other truths are evidenced by external tests like coherence and pragmatic utility or verification.