Franz Brentano_The True and the Evident.pdf

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The True and the Evident
When does one person believe that another judges correctly?— When the other person
judges in the way in which he judges himself. If a man judges “A is not”, for example, and
notes that someone else rejects A, then he believes that the other person judges correctly.
Everyone who believes or rejects something, believes of himself that he believes or rejects
correctly; if he did not believe this of himself, he would not be judging at all.
Of course, believing is not the same as knowing; one may believe without knowing
that the judgement in question is correct. To know that a judgement is correct, whether
the judgement is mine or that of someone else, I must be able to see that it corresponds, in
object, form, tense, and perhaps also modality, to a judgement which is directly or indirectly
evident to me. 19
Doubtless a judgement may change from correct to incorrect by virtue of some change
that occurs in reality. But the latter change is a real occurrence and not a matter of an ens
rationis coming into being or passing away. That is to say, the being of A need not be
produced in order for the judgement “A is” to be transformed from one that is incorrect to
one that is correct; all that is needed is A. And the non-being of A need not come into being
in order for the judgement “A is not” to be transformed from one that is incorrect to one that
is correct; all that is required is that A cease to be. If A were thus to cease (note that we are
concerned here only with things), nothing further would be needed for my judgement to be
correct; there would be no point in dreaming up other processes, involving ostensible entia
rationis. After all, it is admitted that, in the cessation of the thing which is A, we have the
equivalent of the supposed coming into being of that non-thing which is the non-being of A. 20
4. The doctrine that such non-things exist, therefore, has nothing whatever in its favour.
Moreover, it doesn’t even have the authority of Aristotle and the others in his tradition who
defined truth as the correspondence of intellect and res. They did not consider res as an ens
rationis corresponding to the content of the judgement; they considered res as the thing
which is the object of the judgement.
5. The case against the view in question becomes even clearer when we consider the
absurdity of some of the consequences. Consider, above all, the regressus ad infinitum
which would be involved if a man wished to know, or to judge with evidence, that “A
is”. He could not affirm or acknowledge A with evidence unless he could also affirm or
acknowledge the “being” of A with evidence. For if he could not convince himself of the
existence of this second object, he would be unable to know whether his original judgement
corresponds with it. Did he affirm “the being of A” before he affirmed A with evidence?
Surely not. Hence the affirmations were simultaneous. And therefore he had “the being of
A” as content and as object at one and the same time. In which case there must also have
been a content of the second judgement. And he must have affirmed this second content
either at the same time or prior to affirming the being of A. This second content would be
the being of the being of A. And this, too, must have been thought, not merely as content,
but also as object, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum. 21 This infinite regress, or rather this
infinite multiplication of simultaneous affirmations—“There is A”, “There is the being
of A”, etc., etc.—cannot possibly be avoided. Bergmann writes to me that this infinite
multiplication seems to him to be avoidable, just as it is in the case of our apprehension of
secondary objects He does not see the dissimilarity of the two cases. The inner