The present paper is intended to take up the basic issue in Marxist epistemology: does the development of human cognition include mechanisms that ensure the attainment of, or approximation to, the absolute truth?But to take up this issue we have to define the concept of absolute truth. This is why the paper begins with comment on the assumptions we adopt. This is followed by explanations of the concept of the absolute truth and that of relative truth and some of derivative (...) concepts, too. Section 3 is concerned with the problem of whether the absolute truth is attainable, and with the role played in the process by the correspondence principle, which is reconstructed in a specified way. (shrink)