ABSTRACT
AFTER much apparently roundabout discussion, we have now settled on a reasonably straight-forward answer to the question of what it means to say that something is good. In this chapter we have left ourselves with the question of what it might mean to say that such an assertion was true. To answer this we now have to try and sort out some of the main ways in which this word ‘true’ is used. It is, in fact, like ‘good’ in a number of ways. It is a simple word used frequently by nearly everybody and used, in the ordinary way of things, without giving rise to difficulties or to misunderstandings; it is a word whose meaning people find strangely difficult to make explicit; it has, too, been the centre of many celebrated philosophic enquiries. We have seen that one of the most characteristic features of the word ‘good’ is that it is impossible to distinguish between any two things no matter what they may be, simply on the grounds that one of them is good while the other is not. This is yet another and more important point that the words ‘good’ and ‘true’ have in common. Inevitably, though, the matter is not quite straight-forward and needs looking at with some care.
