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Facts and Truth-making

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Abstract

This essay is a reflection on the idea of truth-making and its applications. I respond to a critique of my 1986 paper on truth-making and discuss some key principles at play in the Truth-maker Program as it has emerged over the past 25 years, paying special attention to negative and general truths. I maintain my opposition to negative and general facts, but give an improved account of how to do without them. In the end, I accept Truth-maker Maximalism and a weakened form of Truth-maker Necessitarianism, reject the assumption that truth-makers must be entities, and urge that the idea of a truth-maker be broadened and loosened so that it applies to anti-realistic as well as realistic truths.

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Notes

  1. “Of course, statements and facts fit. They were made for each other. If you prize the statements off the world you prize the facts off it too; but the world would be none the poorer.” (Strawson 1950/1964, pp. 38–39)

  2. Some philosophers who are committed to truth-making facts prefer to identify them by means of other terms—e.g., “states of affairs” (Armstrong 1989a, 1997, 2004) and “facta” (Mellor 1995, p. 162)—in order to avoid confusing them with truths.

  3. For a critique of Lewis's view that all composition is mereological, see Hofman (2006).

  4. The bulk of the paper was written in 1979 and included as an appendix in my PhD dissertation (Pendlebury 1980, pp. 231–243).

  5. I concede that I excluded the possibility of a negative predication’s being made true by the relevant individual’s having a property incompatible with another property in virtue of which it would have satisfied the relevant predicate. However, I do not think that it is possible to explain all truths involving negation in this way. I therefore do not consider property incompatibility further in this essay.

  6. Two observations: First, I could not have treated a possible world as pretty much any set of situations without taking different situations to be mutually independent. This independence was secured in the model by the assumption that all situations are atomic. Second, although I represented my truth-makers set-theoretically, I did not mean to suggest that facts and collections of facts are set-theoretical entities. I have never been a realist about set-theoretical talk even though I regard many set-theoretical claims as objectively true or false (see Sect. 4).

  7. Thus true atomic sentences in L mirror the structure of atomic facts that make them true. This is naïve. In section B of the paper (pp. 183–187), I modified the model to avoid this consequence, but I won’t go into the details here. It is, however, important to recognize that there is no straightforward correspondence between everyday predicates and real-world properties.

  8. In my formal definition, I treated the quantifiers objectually because I did not assume that L contained a singular term for every individual. Here I pretend that they do and express (d), (e), and (g) in terms of substitution for ease of exposition.

  9. In fact, the model does permit alien properties, but not non-actual individuals. This flaw is easy to correct.

  10. The limitation to truths that are unconditionally necessary is meant to exclude necessary truths that piggyback on contingencies, e.g., the truth that Obama is Obama. To avoid distracting qualifications, I will count these as contingent.

  11. For the sake of the argument, let us count the classical quantifiers as operators that express infinite truth functions and pretend (but only for the moment) that truths resulting from their application can be explained on the basis of the truth-values of the relevant atomic propositions.

  12. Despite superficial similarities with Bigelow’s supervenience principle (1988, p. 133), which I endorse below, this principle has not to my knowledge been advocated in the literature.

  13. As previously indicated, Mellor holds that negative truths lack truth-makers. I don’t see the benefits of this position to anyone who thinks that general truths have truth-makers.

  14. Although he accepts Truth-maker Necessitarianism, Lewis denies that “a Truth-maker Principle… must yield informative explanations” (2001, p. 611). Emphasizing “informative,” I agree. But a truth-maker must account for the relevant truth. Insofar as it does so, it explains it, even if the explanation is so obvious as to be uninformative.

  15. Two observations: First, Lewis has to weaken Truth-maker 3 further because of his wholesale rejection of facts, which deprives him of some of the entities needed to make the principle work (2001, pp. 612–614). Given my commitment to particular facts, there’s no need for me to follow suit. Second, my endorsement of Lewis’s principle should not be taken as an endorsement of his modal realism. None of my talk about possible worlds in this essay is meant to be understood realistically.

  16. In order to adjust my simple model to accommodate Truth-maker 3, it would be necessary to replace the definition of truth-making with a definition of truth in which the base clause says that an atomic sentence φ is true in W iff the situation assigned to φ is a fact in W. The other clauses would be the same as in standard truth definitions. To avoid the implausible assumption of a 1–1 correspondence between atomic sentences and situations, an atomic sentence φ could be assigned an ordered pair < S 1, S 2 > of disjoint sets of situations and defined as true in W iff all situations in S 1 are facts in W and no situations in S 2 are facts in W. Again, the other clauses would be the same as in standard truth definitions.

  17. Pendlebury (2007) argues that, independently of whether they are to be understood realistically, judgments of minimal practical reasons can be objectively true; 2010 makes the case for a new form of normative expressivism that, notwithstanding its anti-realism, allows for the possibility of normative judgments being objectively true or false; and 2009 explains and offers a general defense of my distinction between objectivism and realism. Here I draw mainly on 2009.

  18. In Pendlebury (2009) I describe the kinds of things with respect to which one can be a realist or objectivist as “affirmations.” Here I prefer “propositions” (even though it is less flexible) because it fits better with the vocabulary of the Truth-maker Program.

  19. Thanks to David Austin, John Carroll, Randy Carter, Stavroula Glezakos, Johannes Hafner, Stephen Puryear, and Michael Veber for useful questions and comments on earlier versions of all or part of this work.

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  1. Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, North Carolina State University, Campus Box 8103, Raleigh, NC, 27695-8103, USA

    Michael Pendlebury

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Pendlebury, M. Facts and Truth-making. Topoi 29, 137–145 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-009-9073-4

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