162 A CATECHISM CONCERNING TRUTH 



were already true; or possessed of the truth rela 

 tion prior to its discovery in verification. But the 

 pragmatist holds that the act of finding out that 

 ideas are true creates the thing that is found. 

 In short, you confuse the psychology of finding 

 out with the reality found out. 



Teacher: Reply. Many intellectualists have 

 now gone so far as to admit that verification is 

 the testing of a judgment by the consequence it 

 imports, the difference it makes its working. But 

 they still deny any organic connection between the 

 &quot; antecedent &quot; truth property of ideas and the 

 verification (or &quot; making true &quot;) process. Surely 

 they admit either too much or too little, (i) If 

 an idea about a past event is already true because 

 of some mysterious static correspondence that 

 it possesses to that past event, how in the world 

 can its truth be proved by the future consequences 

 of that idea? Why is it that the intellectualist 

 has not produced any positive theory about the 

 relation of verification to his notion of truth? 

 (ii) Moreover, if verification consists in the ex 

 perimental working out of a belief, the intellectu 

 alist thereby admits that his own theory of truth 

 can be known to be true only as it is verified by its 

 workings. But if the theory that truth is a ready- 

 made static property of judgments is true, how 

 in the world can it be verified by making any spe 

 cific differences in the course of events? Every- 



