Footnote ug76

ug76. F.H. Bradley has a sharp retort to the correspondence theory of truth, which he dubs the "copying theory."

...the whole theory goes to wreck in principle and at once on a fatal objection. Truth has to copy facts, but on the other side the facts to be copied show already in their nature the work of truth-making. The merely given facts are, in other words, the imaginary creatures of false theory. They are manufactured by a mind which abstracts one aspect of the concrete known whole, and sets this abstracted aspect out by itself as a real thing. If, on the other hand, we exaggerate when we maintain that all facts are inferences, yet undeniably much of given fact is inferential. And if we cannot demonstrate that every possible piece of fact is modified by apperception, the outstanding residue may at least perhaps be called insignificant. Or (to put it from the other side) if there really is any datum, outward or inward, which, if you remove the work of the mind, would in its nature remain the same, yet there seems no way of our getting certainly to know of this. And, if truth is to copy fact, then truth at least seems to be in fact unattainable. ¹

In other words, we have a circular definition here. I believe that Russell said the circularity was "harmless," as no infinite regress is apparent. I see Bradley's observation as pointing to the "negative feedback" of the brain's contact with "the other," something I discuss in

Toward a Signal Model of Perception
https://web.archive.org/web/20200430052605/http://www.angelfire.com/ult/znewz1/qball.html .

This is an old page, which I am anxious to update but thus far have not found the time to do so.

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1. First appeared in Mind, April 1908, and reprinted in  Bradley's Essays on Truth and Reality (Oxford 1914).