The text below was a baccalauréat subject. There was no need to know Bergson’s doctrine, but it could help you to understand this text.
Text to comment
What is a true judgment? We call true the assertion which agrees with reality. But in what can this concordance consist? We like to see in it something like the resemblance of the portrait to the model: the true assertion would be the one which would copy the
reality. But let us think about it: we will see that it is only in rare, exceptional cases that this definition of the real finds its application. What is real is such and such a determined fact taking place in such and such a point of space and time, it is singular, it is changing. On the contrary, most of our affirmations are general and imply a certain stability of their object. Let us take a truth as close as possible to experience,
this one, for example “Heat dilates bodies”. What could it be a copy of? It is possible, in a certain sense, to copy the dilation of a given body at given times, by photographing it in its various phases. Even, by metaphor, I can still say that the statement “This iron bar expands” is the copy of what happens when I witness the expansion of the iron bar. But a truth that applies to all bodies, without specially concerning any of those I have seen, copies nothing, reproduces nothing.
BERGSON, Thought and Motion, 1934
Correction of the extract of Henri Bergson
This text is about truth. Henri Bergson (1859–1941) wrote a lot about truth and duration.
For Bergson, we make assertions that are considered “stable” while reality never stops changing, in other words, reality is unstable.
We think of truth as a correspondence between the assertion and reality.
But as we have just seen, reality does not have the stability that we attribute to it. Our assertions therefore rarely correspond to reality.
→ All the other correction and topics for the French baccalauréat 2013
→ 1st subject of S the file au French baccalauréat 2013 corrected: Can we act morally without being interested in politics?
→ Second subject of S in French baccalauréat corrected: Does work allow for self-awareness?
