Franz Brentano_The True and the Evident.pdf

On the Concept of Truth 3
equivocations due to analogy, and equivocations based upon relations of a set of terms to a
given term which bears the name in its strict or proper (eigentlichen) sense.
5. Accidental equivocations are, for the most part, limited to one language. Plays on words
are usually lost in translation. Other equivocations, based on a kind of connection among
ideas shared by various nations, are likely to be found in the languages of all of them.
6. So it is with the equivocations which Aristotle pointed out in the traditional, important
term What he says about this term would hold equally well had he said it about the
Latin “verum” or the German “wahr”. Thus Aristotle’s distinctions between the different
senses of “the True”, as well as what he has to say about the concept of truth itself, could
become authoritative far beyond the confines of Hellas, and throughout the ages during
which the torch of philosophy passed into the hands of other nations.
7. Let us see, then, how the most powerful scientific mind ever to influence the fate of man
explained the term “truth”.
The expressions “true” and “false”, he said, are ambiguous; and their ambiguity is of
the type, already mentioned, in which a term has a variety of senses, but each standing in a
certain relation to one strict or proper sense.
We call many thoughts, ideas, or presentations (Vorstellungen) true, and we call others
false (hallucinations, for example, we call false); we call concepts true or false, we call
judgements true or false; we call conjectures, hopes, and anxieties true or false; we call
a heart, a mind, true or false (un esprit faux); we call external things true or false; we
call sayings true or false; we call conduct true or false; we call expressions, letters of the
alphabet, and many other signs, true or false; we call a friend, we call gold, true or false. We
speak of true happiness and of false happiness, and the latter locution, in turn, we may use
for very different purposes, sometimes because we only seem to be happy, and sometimes
because the happiness we have had has treacherously forsaken us. Similarly, we say on
occasion: a false woman, namely when she is a flirtatious girl teasing us; but in another
sense a false woman would be a man posing as a woman, as in the case of a thief who was
wearing women’s clothes when he was arrested; and still in another sense a false woman
would be a man who has no thought of pretending to be a woman but nevertheless is taken
for one, a thing that actually happened to me at dawn one morning in the entrance to the
Würzburg fortress. At the time I was wearing a cassock, and the horror and bafflement of
the man was all the greater, and the more comic..
8. When we thus spell out the various uses of the expression “true” its ambiguity leaps
to the eye. But it is equally obvious that these multifarious uses are all related to one
use which is standard for all the others. A comparable case is provided by the expression
“healthy”, an expression we sometimes use in connection with a body, at other times in
connection with a complexion, and then again in connection with food, medicine, a region,
or a walk. It is the healthy body that is healthy in the strict or proper sense; other things are
called healthy because they impart, enhance, or establish health.