Brentano, Franz Clemens (1838–1917)

5. Truth

Like Aristotle, Brentano holds that the primary sense of ‘true’ is its application to beliefs or judgments; a secondary sense is its application to sentences. This theory of truth is properly called a ‘doxastic theory’. Brentano originally upheld a version of the correspondence theory of truth, but since his mature ontology has no place for such entities as facts or propositions, his final theory is not a correspondence theory as it is usually understood (see Truth, correspondence theory of §§1–2).

By reflecting upon judgments that are certain, according to Brentano, we obtain the concept of the ‘correctness’ of judgment. Once we have this concept, we are able to extend it beyond the sphere of the certain and thereby derive the broader concept of truth. We may speak, then, of a strict sense and of an extended sense of ‘correct’. In its strict sense, ‘correct’ will mean the same as ‘certain’. (Actually, Brentano uses ‘evident’ in place of ‘certain’; but he uses it in the way in which most epistemologists now use ‘certain’.) If, however, we use ‘correct’ in its extended sense, then we may also say that a judgment is correct if it agrees with a judgment that is certain – that is, if it accepts what a judge who has certainty would accept or rejects what such a judge would reject. In Wahrheit und Evidenz (The True and the Evident), Brentano defines truth thus:

The concept of correctness also plays an essential role in Brentano’s moral philosophy and general theory of value.