Franz Brentano_The True and the Evident.pdf

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The True and the Evident
of certain features, obtains between, say, Peter and Paul. If the judgement asserting Peter’s
existence corresponded no more closely to Peter than Peter corresponds to Paul, then it
would not be true, or at least it would not be a truth about Peter. But if the judgement
completely corresponded to Peter, it would be identical with him and would be Peter
himself. Yet Peter is outside my mind, not in it. Thus Professor Dilthey of Berlin uses this
position to argue against the possibility of our knowledge of the external world as it really
is. In his Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften* he justifies this thesis in the following
words: “For an idea or presentation [Dilthey conceives judgement as a connection of
ideas] can never be identical with a thing, inasmuch as the thing is conceived as a reality
independent of the idea. The idea is not the thing brought inside the mind, and it cannot
be made to coincide with an object. If one weakens the concept of sameness to that of
similarity, then this concept too, in its precise meaning, cannot be employed: thus the idea
of correspondence vanishes into the indefinite.”
But, surprisingly enough, Dilthey does not deny the possibility of our knowing the
intentions and convictions of others, as these are in themselves. A critic has shrewdly
remarked that, in order to remain consistent, Dilthey would have to maintain the
impossibility of the knowledge of someone else’s error. 4 “In order to recognize the error of
another person, this error would have to be put into my mind. But this is impossible. And
even if it were possible, we could hardly notice the error, since we would have participated
in it ourselves.” If this reasoning were correct, it would be better to reject altogether the
definition of truth in terms of the correspondence of thought and its object. As a matter of
fact, if Sigwart in his Logic seems prepared to reject the definition, he is compelled by a
consideration of this sort—one which seems to have influenced Windelband himself.
29. But the argument is completely fallacious. It stems from a failure to recognize the
distinction, which Descartes had described as the distinction between formal and objective
reality, but which had been brought fully to light long before by Aristotle, who used it
in overcoming the absurdities and sophistries of Parmenides, Gorgias, Protagoras, and
others.
If I believe something, then this belief is “formally” in me. When I later recall the belief,
then, according to Descartes’ way of speaking, the value is “objectively” in me. In each
case the same particular act of belief is involved; but in the one case it is my act itself and
in the other it is only the immanent object of my remembering. Similarly for every other
mental function—volition, desire, aversion, and the like. Every mental act, in itself given
formally, has its immanent object which, in Descartes’ terms, is given objectively. To avoid
misunderstandings, we might express this better by saying that the immanent object is
given intentionally. It is obvious that no contradiction is involved in saying that something
is in me intentionally but not formally, or vice versa, a fact that can be illustrated by the
example of remembering, and by thousands of others. A mistake on this point would be a
relapse into the crudest stages of the development of the theory of knowledge.
* Dilthey’s Gesammelte Schriften, Leipzig 1922, Vol. I, p. 318.