ABSTRACT
Most philosophical accounts of truth start with a warning against confusing two different but closely allied questions: what is truth? and how do the philosopher find out what beliefs are true? To such over-general questions, one can only reply with the vacuous formula: ‘Some in one way, some in another.’ Some of our beliefs are verified by personal observation, some by inference from known facts, some by checking authorities and so on. There can be no general formula. Some statements indeed may reasonably be held to have a truth value even though the philosopher do not know or cannot apply a procedure of testing for that value. But it must be conceded that the fact that logically distinct types of statement are held to be distinct partly in virtue of their distinct logical structures does raise serious problems for the notion of correspondence as a basis for the truth-relation.
