They forget that in any concrete account of what is denoted by 'truth' in human life, the word can only be used relatively to some particular trower. Thus, I may hold it true that Shakespere wrote the plays that bear his name, and may express my opinion to a critic. But most anti- pragmatist critics take the word 'truth' as something absolute, and easily play on their reader's readiness to treat his own truths as the absolute ones. The old notion of truth reappears,'he adds -that notion being, of course, that when a belief is true, its object does exist. It is, of course, bound to exist, on sound pragmatic principles.
Concepts signify consequences.
Second, such an opinion must not be contradicted by anything else I am aware of. But in spite of the obvious pragmatist requirement that when I have said truly that something exists, it shall exist, the slander which Mr. Russell repeats has gained the widest currency. Being nothing if not mathematical and logical, he must prove the accusation secundum arten, and convict us not so much of error as of absurdity. The abstract world of mathematics and pure logic is so native to Mr. Russell that he thinks that we describers of the functions of concrete fact must also mean fixed mathematical terms and functions. A mathematical term, as a, b, c, x, y, sin.