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III.-THE
A. C. EWING:
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A. C. EWING:
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A. C. EWING:
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A. C. EWING:
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A. C. EWING:
say that, if I had not come to know it, the law of noncontradiction or any other object of knowledge would have
been different, provided we add the reservation, "all other
conditions remaining unchanged," or provided we mean that,
if I had really known it and known it as different, it would
have been different.
But what about the second aspect of knowing or believing?
"I know that S is P " means something more than " I think
with certainty that S is P," it means also that I am right in
this. So we have another relation between knowing and its
object, namely the relation involved in rightness. Similarly
belief or opinion is right only through standing in this
relation to its object. It is this relation to which the term,
" correspondence," is often applied. I am well aware that it
is frequently denied that truth depends on such a relation to
its object and maintained that it consists in the relation of
coherence with other truths and not with objects separable
from our judgments, but there is no need to discuss that
position here. For coherence is obviously an internal relation, at least a relation without which its terms would be
different, and the coherence view as a whole involves a
complete repudiation of the doctrine that the cognitive relation
is external. The doctrine of external relations has quite a
different rnetaphysical background and depends on a sharp
distinction between truth and fact such as an advocate of the
coherence theory would decline to make.
If we are right in our previous contentions, indeed, the
object of knowledge or belief and our experience of knowing
or believing muist be internally related, but it might still be
maintained that the relation of correspondence was the
specific cognitive relation and that this was essentially
,external. It might be admitted that the object known would
have been different apart from the knowing of it, but asserted
that the difference could not be connected with the specifically
cognitive relation itself, that both the experience of knowing
and the object of knowledge were unaffected by the relation
of correspondence between them. It might be said that this
relation of correspondence was the only direct relation
between knowing qua knowing and the object known, and
that, although knowing might be internally related to its
object in an indirect fashion, it was implied in the very
nature of knowing that the direct relation between it anrdits
object must be external and not in any sense internal. I
think this argument derives a great deal of its plausibility
from the identification of "being internally related to " and
"causing a change in," but even when the fallacy of this
identification had been admitted it might be urged.
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A. C. EWINu: