in TRUTH 55 



beautiful and ugly, pleasant and unpleasant So 

 continuous is this habit that existence without appreci 

 ation/ fact without value, is rather a figment of 

 abstraction than a psychical experience. Now it is the 

 de facto existence of this habit of valuation that gives rise 

 to the normative sciences, and the function of logic as a 

 normative science is to regulate and systematise our 

 valuations of true and false. For of course thes^ 

 logical valuations also will need normative treatmen 

 At first they are bestowed by individuals pretty much at 

 random. Anything may commend itself to anybody, as 

 true, nay, even as the truth, 1 and there are no guarantees 

 that any man s valuations will be consistent with any 

 other man s, or even with his own at other times. It is 

 only as the needs of social intercourse and of consistent 

 living grow more urgent that de facto truth grows 

 systematic and objective, i.e. that there come to be 

 truths which are the same for all. And finally, when 

 most of the hard work has actually been done, the logician 

 arises and reflects on the genesis of truth, which, in the 

 end, he mostly misrepresents. 



It is fairly plain, therefore, that the psychical fact of 

 the existence of truth-valuation must be the starting-point 

 of the psychological account of truth. Whether it should 

 be called the foundation of the whole structure, or whether 

 it should not be likened to the intrinsic nature of the 

 bricks of which the structure is built up, seems to be a 

 matter of the choice of metaphors. It is clear at any 

 rate that without this valuation there would be no 

 truth at all. 



Of course, however, further psychological questions 

 may be raised about it. We may ask, for instance, 

 whether the fact that we judge things true and false is 

 psychologically simple and ultimate, or whether we could 

 not analyse out a common element of value from our 

 various valuations. The answer to such questions might 

 grow long and somewhat intricate, but we are hardly 

 bound to go into them very deeply. It will suffice to 



1 Cp. the inexhaustible variety of the systems of religion and philosophy. 



