'眞理'에 관한 一考

Abstract

In everyday life, each of us constantly characterizes certain types of judgment as true ann others as false. This characterization presupposes that we know how to distinguish truth from falsity. In other words, whenever we judge certain types of proposition as true, we either knowingly or unwittingly emply the criteria of truth and falsity. To answer the question "What is truth?", in this paper I proceeded to consider the merits of the tests(criteria) of truth and falsity that are actually used by human being in distinguishing what is true from owhat is false. Through critical evaluation of all the criteria, I have shown difficulties in each of the criteria and I concluded as follows : We have been misquided and have gone astray by the lack of clarity in the forms of our language. The question is not about facts but about words. Surveying those difficulties found in each of the criteria, it is perfectly clear that a way out of this problem could only be found by turning away from the world of facts to a consideration of the comcept 'truth'. The difficulty was precisely due to the fact that we regarded what is only a matter of definition as a matter of observation. The first step in resolving the problem lise in turning from the question "What is truth?" to the question "what do you mean by the word 'truth'?" The question can be answered only by "pointing out the normal usage of the word employed and the normal grammatical form of the sentences in which the word 'truth' appears."