THE UNITY OF IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE AS THE ...

insists that truth comes in degrees. 81 Of course Hegel allows for the more traditional
sense of truth as the agreement between a proposition, sentence, or thought and some
object in the world. However, he ascribes relatively little importance to this conception
of truth.
Hegel explains his idiosyncratic conception of truth in the following passage from
the Encyclopedia Logic:
In common life truth means the agreement of an object with our conception of it.
We thus presuppose an object to which our conception must conform. In the
philosophical sense of the word, on the other hand, truth may be described, in
general abstract terms, as the agreement of a thought-content with itself. This
meaning is quite different from the one given above. At the same time the deeper
and philosophical meaning of truth can be partially traced even in the ordinary
usage of language. Thus we speak of a true friend; by which we mean a friend
whose manner of conduct accords with the notion of friendship. In the same way
we speak of a true work of Art. Untrue in this sense means the same as bad, or
self-discordant. In this sense a bad state is an untrue state; and evil and untruth
may be said to consist in the contradiction subsisting between the function or
notion and the existence of the object. 82
Our interpretation of this passage must guard against a potential misunderstanding, one
that leads to an unduly subjective interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy. This passage may
seem to endorse a coherence theory of truth. The first sentence clearly lays out a
correspondence view of truth, speaking of truth as the “agreement of an object with our
conception of it.” Hegel’s own view, expressed in the third sentence, might seem to
present a coherence theory of truth. In this sentence Hegel speaks of truth as the
81 See Chapters XIII and XIV of G.R.G. Mure’s An Introduction to Hegel. Mure presents a
discussion of Hegel’s conception of truth that largely follows the interpretation presented here. Mure
helpfully summarizes Hegel’s position as follows: “Truth in the full sense of the word (a) applies to the
object, and (b) is a value, a good” (p. 165).
82 Encyclopedia Logic, paragraph 24Z. In Objektives Denken, Christoph Halbig presents an
interpretation of this passage similar to the one provided here (see specifically pp. 183 – 195). Halbig
argues that (a) Hegel ascribes truth to objects, and (b) that truth comes in degrees. He also shows how this
conception of truth leads directly to Hegel’s appropriation of the traditional notion of the scala naturae (p.
193).
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