Online research in philosophy

It is argued that, if Armstrong is correct and truthmakers necessitate the truths they make true, then the truthmakers must include facts about the meanings of the words used to express those truths, and nominalism apparently results. This conclusion, no doubt unpalatable to Armstrong, is, it is claimed, the result of his having failed to distinguish sufficiently the meanings of words and the properties of things.

Truths are determined not by what we believe, but by the way the world is. Or so realists about truth believe. Philosophers call such theories correspondence theories of truth. Truthmaking theory, which now has many adherents among contemporary philosophers, is the most recent development of a realist theory of truth, and in this book D. M. Armstrong offers the first full-length study of this theory. He examines its applications to different sorts of truth, including contingent truths, modal truths, truths about the past and the future, and mathematical truths. In a clear, even-handed and non-technical discussion he makes a compelling case for truthmaking and its importance in philosophy. His book marks a significant contribution to the debate and will be of interest to a wide range of readers working in analytical philosophy.

My aim is to show that theories which try to construct truthmakers out of objects and properties/relations alone are not tenable: The Frege–Wittgenstein idea of incompleteness does not yield truthmakers. Armstrong’s theory of partial identity and the theory of moments, i.e., of non-transferable properties, yield truthmakers, but these theories have counter-intuitive consequences. I conclude that the notion of a truthmaker makes ontological demands beyond objects and properties/relations and propose that truthmakers are exemplification relations which are necessarily tied to objects and properties/relations.

When there is truth, there must be some thing (or things) to account for that truth: some thing(s) that couldn’t exist and the true proposition fail to be true. That is the truthmaker principle. True propositions are made true by entities in the mind-independently existing external world. The truthmaker principle seems attractive to many metaphysicians, but many have wanted to weaken it and accept not that every true proposition has a truthmaker but only that some important class of propositions require truthmakers.1 Let us, following Armstrong, call the claim that all true propositions, without exception, have a truthmaker, Truthmaker Maximalism. Why might one be tempted to the spirit of truthmaker theory but reject Truthmaker Maximalism? Well, you might deny that necessary truths need truthmakers, for one, and insist that only contingent truths have truthmakers. But I think it’s fair to say that the most common motivation for rejecting maximalism concerns negative truths. The thought that negative truths are exempt from the demand for truthmakers could be justified in one of two ways: there is the claim that we don’t need truthmakers for negative truths, and there is the claim that we can’t have..

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A necessary part of David Armstrong's account of truthmakers for modal truths is his Possibility principle: any truthmaker for a contingent truth is also a truthmaker for the possibility of the complement of that contingent truth (if T makes _p_ true and _p_ is contingent, then T makes ⋄∼_p_ true). I criticize Armstrong's Possibility principle for two reasons. First, his argument for the Possibility principle both relies on an unwarranted generalization and vitiates his desire for relevant truthmakers. His argument undercuts relevant truthmakers by entailing that each contingent being is a truthmaker for all modal truths. Second, even if the argument seems successful, the Possibility principle is subject to counterexamples. Armstrong's being composed of more than fifty atoms makes it true _that something composed of more than fifty atoms exists_ and that truth is contingent, but his being composed of more than fifty atoms does not make it true _that it is possible that it is not the case that something composed of more than fifty atoms exists_.

This paper attempts to locate, within an actualist ontology, truthmakers for modal truths: truths of the form or . In Sect. 1 I motivate the demand for substantial truthmakers for modal truths. In Sect. 21 criticise Armstrong's account of truthmakers for modal truths. In Sect. 31 examine essentialism and defend an account of what makes essentialist attributions true, but I argue that this does not solve the problem of modal truth in general. In Sect. 41 discuss, and dismiss, a theistic account of the source of modal truth proposed by Alexander Pruss. In Sect. 5 I offer a means of (dis)solving the problem.

In 1997, David Armstrong argued that the world is a world of states of affairs. In his latest book, Truth and Truthmakers, he remains strongly committed to the existence of states of affairs, despite now advocating an ontology in which they are not needed, 'as an ontological extra'. States of affairs remain needed, Armstrong says, 'to act as truthmakers for predicative truths'. In this paper, I attempt to shed light on what Armstrong might mean by this claim. While there is a straightforward sense in which states of affairs are not needed in Armstrong's amended ontology, I suggest that Armstrong might be charitably interpreted in a manner that justifies his claim. However, in clarifying the manner in which states of affairs remain needed in Armstrong's ontology, it becomes unclear whether they are needed in any 'deep' sense, or rather are merely parochial to his ontology. I examine Armstrong's rejection of Resemblance Nominalism on the grounds that it does not provide adequate 'minimal' truthmakers. I then argue that he has significant additional work to do in explaining this concept before his rejection of Resemblance Nominalism can be justified, and thus before the need for states of affairs can be asserted generally, rather than just within particular ontologies, such as Armstrong's amended one.