How to Be a Truthmaker Maximalist
Noûs 42 (3):410 - 421 (2008)
| Abstract | 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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Stephen Mumford (2007). Negative Truth and Falsehood. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 107 (1pt1):45-71.
Ross P. Cameron (2005). Truthmaker Necessitarianism and Maximalism. Logique Et Analyse 48 (189-192):43-56.
Julian Dodd (2007). Negative Truths and Truthmaker Principles. Synthese 156 (2):383-401.
Michael Veber (2008). How to Derive a 'Not' From an 'Is': A Defense of the Incompatibility View of Negative Truths. Metaphysica 9 (1):79-91.
Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra (2006). Truthmakers. Philosophy Compass 1 (2):186–200.
Ross P. Cameron (2008). Comments on Merricks'struth and Ontology. Philosophical Books 49 (4):292-301.
Mark Jago (2012). The Truthmaker Non-Maximalist's Dilemma. Mind 121 (484):903-918.
Timothy Pawl (2010). The Possibility Principle and the Truthmakers for Modal Truths. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 88 (3):417-428.
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