Footnote ce71

ce71. Facts, argued F.H. Bradley, are founded on fallible human perception. Hence any human-perceived fact or truth is subject to the possibility of error.

The absolute indispensable fact is in my view the mere creature of false theory. Facts are valid so far as, when taken otherwise than as real, they bring disorder into my world. And there are to-day for me facts such that, if I take them as mistakes, my known world is damaged and, it is possible, ruined. But how does it follow that I cannot to-morrow on the strength of new facts gain a wider order in which these old facts can take a place as errors? The supposition may be improbable, but what you have got to show is that it is in principle impossible. A foundation used at the beginning does not in short mean something fundamental at the end, and there is no single fact which in the end can be called fundamental absolutely. It is all a question of relative contribution to my known world-order.

'Then no judgement of perception will be more than probable?'  Certainly that is my contention. Facts are justified because and as far as, while taking them as real, I am better able to deal with the incoming new facts and in general to make my world wider and more harmonious. The higher and wider my structure, and the more that any particular fact or set of facts is implied in that structure, the more certain are the structure and the facts. And, if we could reach an all-embracing ordered whole, then our certainty would be absolute. But, since we cannot do this, we have to remain content with relative probability.

So here Bradley not only reveals himself as a probabilist, we also see that he insists on the relativity of truth despite his strong disagreement with Pragmatism. Bradley was writing in "On Truth and Coherence," which first appeared in Mind, July 1909, and which was republished in Bradley's Essays on Truth and Reality  (Oxford 1914).

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