 Here we have this video on Russell's chapter on truth and falsehood. You know, in this chapter he's asking the question, what is truth? How do we understand it? What's it going to mean for something to be true? He is not asking the question of which propositions or which beliefs are true or false. Just right now, he's just trying to give a theory of what truth is. We're only going to look at the first part of this chapter for now. This is where he rejects coherentism. And he rejects coherentism as a part of his three conditions for a theory of truth. So next we're going to look at these three conditions. Now what this means is here Russell is giving kind of the ground rules for any kind of theory of truth you're going to have. And if you're going to have a theory of truth, your theory has to meet these conditions. So the first condition he has is something like that your theory of truth must allow for the opposite. Meaning if you're going to have a theory that tells us that propositions are true, they've also got to say that other propositions are false. So I wouldn't do any good to have a theory that just tells you that everything is true. Because that would mean that there's no difference between what's true and what's false. Second condition he gives us is that the theory of truth has to be about beliefs. Truth is a property of belief. So the idea here is that truth is not just going to be free floating independent of us. The truths are at least going to be involved in our beliefs. The third condition is that truth is not just about beliefs. So that might sound kind of weird considering what we just said, but what he's saying is that truth has got to at least be about beliefs, but it can't just stay within beliefs. It's also going to involve the world. And remember Russell's project here, what he's been doing from the beginning, is our beliefs have to get outside of our head. Excuse me, truth has to get outside of our head. So these are the three conditions. First, that our theory of truth has to say something about what it means for a belief to be false. Second, that it's a property of beliefs. And third, that it's going to involve something else besides beliefs. Now this third condition is denied by a theory called a theory of truth called coherentism. Coherentism will say that truth just depends upon whether the belief is coherent amongst the web of other beliefs. So we have this kind of metaphor here of this web. Imagine each of these drops is a belief. As long as they fit together on this web, no belief is contrary to any other belief in the web of beliefs, your belief is true. Now Russell is going to consider this, but ultimately he considers this, and he's going to reject this theory. He's going to give two main objections to coherentism. The first rejection he gives against coherentism has to do with kind of what's involved with coherentism. So here we have, first is the statement of coherentism. A belief is true if and only if the belief is part of a coherent set of beliefs. This means that no belief within the set is contrary to any other. Now here's the thing about coherentism is it doesn't matter which coherent set of beliefs you have. You can have a wide variety of coherent sets of beliefs, and they're going to be different. And some coherent sets of beliefs, you know, you can have what? I mean the history of the philosophy of science is a really great example of this. You have these really nice coherent sets of beliefs, at least until New Heaven comes along the lines, but they all can't be true together. You know, when you look at the competing scientific theories that we have today, you know, they're both equally viable. They're both equally coherent, but there's going to be some difference between them. There's always going to be some way that one of the propositions in one set of the beliefs is going to be contrary to another. So this is kind of a problem in a coherent set of beliefs. I mean imagine these different webs of belief. Well in these different webs, a belief can be coherent in one set of beliefs, but it'd be contrary to a belief in a different web. But if we got this beliefs that are contrary to each other, then it follows that a true belief is contrary to another true belief. But this is false, right? The truth can't be contrary to itself. That would mean that, first of all, that there's no difference between what's true and what's false. So this kind of also is a problem, you know, butt's heads against the first condition. So it's false that a belief, so coherentism is false, right? So here it's false that a belief is true if and only if the belief is part of coherent sets of beliefs and a belief in one set of beliefs is contrary to another belief in a distinct set. So we've got a negation of this conjunction here, and if you have a negation of a conjunction, and this looks really complicated, but all this means is we have to choose either between coherentism or the claim that a belief in one set is contrary to another belief in a distinct set. But that, so that premise four, so we got to choose between premise one and premise four, but we can't deny premise four. That's giving up way too much. I mean, first of all, that give up the first condition that we talked about before. So Russell is going to reject coherentism on this ground. So this kind of the main idea of this argument is that a belief might be coherent within a set, but these sets of beliefs are not going to be, are not going to work well together. There's always going to be some kind of contrary belief between the two, and the truth cannot be contrary to the truth. The second objection takes issue with what coherence implies. So here we have, you know, just have this definition of coherence, but coherence relies upon the law of contradiction. So the idea is that two beliefs are not going to be, two beliefs or more beliefs are not going to be contrary to each other within a set of beliefs, but that's just the law of contradiction. We talked about that before with the laws of thought, but Russell points out if coherence implies the law of contradiction, then you're already working with the laws of thought. Now since we're, so this is kind of a big deal, coherence already implies the laws of thought, well Russell adds on to this, well if we're already dealing with the laws of thought, we're not dealing with coherence anymore. Now the laws of thought, and this is probably related to the first objection, are going to rule out coherence as a theory of truth. So coherence doesn't do it. So when we get to class we're probably going to practice with this idea of coherence and see and introduce what he does think give us a theory of truth. Now what he does think gives us a theory of truth is a correspondence between a belief and a fact. Now he goes into a lot of technical language as to what that means and we're going to go through it and we're going to go through it in class, or we're going to go through in the next video, I should say, go through in the next video, but this is going to get us through Russell's rejection of coherentism.