How did F.H. Bradley and H.H. Joachim connect truth with idealism?

Created from Britannica articles using AI. AI can make mistakes, so verify using Britannica articles.

F.H. Bradley and H.H. Joachim, as prominent British idealists, connected truth to idealism by rejecting the correspondence theory of truth, which posits that truth consists of a relationship between beliefs and mind-independent facts.1

Instead, they championed a coherence theory of truth. In this framework, truth is viewed as a feature of an overall system of beliefs—often described as a "web of belief"—rather than a property of individual, isolated assertions. For these philosophers, a belief is considered true if it sufficiently coheres with, or makes rational sense within, a comprehensive system of other beliefs.1

This approach is fundamentally rooted in the idealist doctrine that reality is not composed of external, mind-independent objects, but is instead knowable only through ideas or judgments. By defining truth as the internal harmony or coherence of a belief system, Bradley and Joachim aligned their logic with the broader metaphysical view that mind is a fundamental feature of the universe.2134