ABSTRACT
We have reviewed ehe ineelleceual pressures which led some Greeks co affirm ehae neither thoughts nor statements can ever be false. What we have not done is explain why Plato wished co resist those pressures. If whatever we say or ehink is guaranteed to be teue, then is not the world in a wonderful state? Why should anyone be so churlish as to wish to spoil its epistemological perfection? Why above all should not modern philosophers, anxious as so many of them are co establish the teuth of our beliefs, be only coo happy co acquiesce in the idea that we can never think or state anything false? There is good reason why we should be unwilling co acquiesce. It is that if the truth of all our thoughts and statements were guaranteed by the Euthydemus' argument, then truth would be had coo easily to be worth having. To put it less epigrammatically, if our thoughts are bound to be true for ehe simple reason that we think them, ehen our ehoughts can hardly aspire co being objeceive knowledge. We pay a price for ehe possibility of having a knowledge which is objeceive, and the price is ehat ie is possible also for us co make miscakes. A principle requiring all beliefs to be teue would obliterate ehe distinction between truth and falsehood no less thoroughly than a principle requiring ehern all to be false. And chis, I think, would be acknowledged by chose who have concerned themselves with the Problems of the External World, Other Minds, the Reality of the Past and Induction. Whatever so me unfortunaee choices of words might suggest, they do not really wish to demonscraee the truth of absolutely all beliefs on those copics; they wish to leave some room for falsehood as weIl.
