In the last clause he does not simply say, as he does analogously in the first three cases, that a proposition is actual when it is valid, but when it is actually true. He claims that actuality is an additional determination of truth. That is: When this actuality of the true proposition gets identified with validity, and when validity is understood fundamentally as the affirmedness of a truth, then an additional determination (“true”) is given to the true proposition [74] without anything being said about the truth that makes the true thing be true.

So already in the way we get to the expression “validity” within the distinct forms of actuality, we can see that Lotze establishes nothing at all about truth as such. Instead, something is said about what is true, i.e., about the possible form of its actuality. But when he says straightforwardly, but unclearly, that truth means validity, the statement conceals a seductive ambiguity—and modern logic, the logic of validity, has completely fallen victim to it. Appealing to Lotze, people say: “to be true” = “to be valid,” and therefore, truth = validity. But the ambiguity lies in this expression “to be true.” In Lotze’s derivation, “being-true” means ambiguously the same as “the being of the true,” i.e., the being of the true proposition; but one also understands this ambiguous “being-true” as what truth itself is, or the essence of truth. And then the two are taken as identical: being-true as the actuality of true propositions, and being-true as the essence of truth. And because the first of these two is defined as validity, one also says that the essence of truth is validity.

Lotze provides no answer to the question about what truth itself is, but merely tells us how true propositions are actual. He gets this form of the actuality of validity by differentiating it from things, events, and relations. Even propositions get fitted into this plurality of actualities. Here we cannot discuss further the correctness or incorrectness of this division into: things that are, events that happen, relations that subsist, and propositions that are valid. It is very problematic because propositions are already relations, and because the being of things that allegedly are mostly consists in the fact that something happens in and with them. All these distinctions that Lotze adduces intersect each other. To begin with, these distinctions between the forms of actuality, among which validity itself is found, are not clearly distinguished. Above all, what is not clarified is why the idea of actuality can and must be obtained by using affirmation as the key; [75] or why the correlate of affirmation, namely affirmedness, is what we are to call actuality; and therefore, exactly why being (or in Lotze’s terminology, “actuality”) in the widest sense must be interpreted with reference to affirmation. That is a pure assertion on the part of Lotze. He introduces it without a demonstration, and as a result his deduction of the various forms of actuality rests on an unspecified foundation.

Lotze might think that he has brought forth something new for clarifying