ses, men of science endeavour
to find facts which will rule out all the hypotheses except one, there
is no reason why they should always succeed.

In philosophy, again, it seems not uncommon for two rival hypotheses
to be both able to account for all the facts. Thus, for example, it is
possible that life is one long dream, and that the outer world has only
that degree of reality that the objects of dreams have; but although
such a view does not seem inconsistent with known facts, there is no
reason to prefer it to the common-sense view, according to which other
people and things do really exist. Thus coherence as the definition
of truth fails because there is no proof that there can be only one
coherent system.

The other objection to this definition of truth is that it assumes the
meaning of 'coherence' known, whereas, in fact, 'coherence' presupposes
the truth of the laws of logic. Two propositions are coherent when both
may be true, and are incoherent when one at least must be false. Now in
order to know whether two propositions can both be true, we must
know such truths as the law of contradiction. For example, the two
propositions, 'this tree is a beech' and 'this tree is not a beech',
are not coherent, because of the law of contradiction. But if the law of
contradiction itself were subjected to the test of coherence, we should
find that, if we choose to suppose it false, nothing will any longer
be incoherent with anything else. Thus the laws of logic supply the
skeleton or framework within which the test of coherence applies, and
they themselves cannot be established by this test.

For the above two reasons, coherence cannot be accepted as giving the
_meaning_ of truth, though it is often a most important _test_ of truth
after a certain amount of truth has become known.

Hence we are driven back to _correspondence with fact_ as constituting
the nature of truth. It remains to define precisely what we mean by
'fact', and what is the nature of the correspondence which must subsist
between belief and fact, in order that belief may be true.

In accordance with our three requisites, we have to seek a theory of
truth which (1) allows truth to have an opposite, namely falsehood, (2)
makes truth a property of beliefs, but (3) makes it a property wholly
dependent upon the relation of the beliefs to outside things.

The necessity of allowing for falsehood makes it impossible to regard
belief as a relation of the mind t