In § III, it is argued that Bentham’s concept of truth combined both an objective element, according to which truth was understood as correspondence with reality, and a subjective element, according to which truth is simply an adjunct to subjective belief, while veracity relates to the accurate reporting of belief. In § II an attempt is made to paraphrase ‘truth’, and the result indicates that Bentham did indeed interpret true as meaning ‘corresponds to the real’. It is argued further that the processes of phraseoplerosis and paraphrasis revealed which propositions relating to fictitious entities could be translated into propositions capable of bearing truth (i.e. § I presents the textual evidence that Bentham believed that truth was communicable in propositions relating to real entities, and discusses the limits to the information which true propositions could impart. This paper argues that whilst Bentham’s logic, like all human activity, had pragmatic goals, so that all knowledge was subject to utilitarian evaluation, he clearly distinguished between utility and truth.
