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Anti-Prag.:–The truth does; the truth knows it; or rather not exactly that, but any one knows it who possesses the truth. Any true idea of the reality represents the truth concerning it.

Prag.:–But I thought that we had agreed that no knower of it, nor any idea representing it was to be supposed.

Anti-Prag.:–Sure enough!

Prag.:–Then I beg you again to tell me in what this truth consists, all by itself, this tertium quid intermediate between the facts per se, on the one hand, and all knowledge of them, actual or potential, on the other. What is the shape of it in this third estate? Of what stuff, mental, physical, or ‘epistemological,’ is it built? What metaphysical region of reality does it inhabit?

Anti-Prag.:–What absurd questions! Isn’t it enough to say that it is true that the facts are so-and-so, and false that they are otherwise?

Prag.:–‘It’ is true that the facts are so-and-so–I won’t yield to the temptation of asking you what is true; but I do ask you whether your phrase that ‘it is true that’ the facts are so-and-so really means anything really additional to the bare being so-and-so of the facts themselves.

Anti-Prag.:–It seems to mean more than the bare being of the facts. It is a sort of mental equivalent for them, their epistemological function, their value in noetic terms. Prag.:–A sort of spiritual double or ghost of them, apparently! If so, may I ask you where this truth is found.

Anti-Prag.:–Where? where? There is no ‘where’–it simply obtains, absolutely obtains.

Prag.:–Not in any one’s mind?

Anti-Prag.:–No, for we agreed that no actual knower of the truth should be assumed.

Prag.:–No actual knower, I agree. But are you sure that no notion of a potential or ideal knower has anything to do with forming this strangely elusive idea of the truth of the facts in your mind?

Anti-Prag.:–Of course if there be a truth concerning the facts, that truth is what the ideal knower would know. To that extent you can’t keep the notion of it and the notion of him separate. But it is not him first and then it; it is it first and then him, in my opinion.

Prag.:–But you still leave me terribly puzzled as to the status of this so-called truth, hanging as it does between earth and heaven, between reality and knowledge, grounded in the reality, yet numerically additional to it, and at the same time antecedent to any knower’s opinion and entirely independent thereof. Is it as independent of the knower as you suppose? It looks to me terribly dubious, as if it might be only another name for a potential as distinguished from an actual knowledge of the reality. Isn’t your truth, after all, simply what any successful knower would have to know in case he existed? And in a universe where no knowers were even conceivable would any truth about the facts there as something numerically distinguishable from the facts themselves, find a place to exist in? To me such truth would not only be non-existent, it would be unimaginable, inconceivable.

Anti-Prag.:–But I thought you said a while ago that there is a truth of past events, even tho no one shall ever know it.

Prag.:–Yes, but you must remember that I also stipulated for permission to define the word in my own fashion. The truth of an event, past, present, or future, is for me only another name for the fact that if the event ever does get known, the nature of the knowledge is already to some degree predetermined. The truth which precedes actual knowledge of a fact means only what any possible knower of the fact will eventually find himself necessitated to believe about it. He must believe something that will bring him into satisfactory relations with it, that will prove a decent mental substitute for it. What this something may be is of course partly fixed already by the nature of the fact and by the sphere of its associations. This seems to me all that you can clearly mean when you say that truth pre-exists to knowledge. It is knowledge anticipated, knowledge in the form of possibility merely.