The reality of absences

Australasian Journal of Philosophy 84 (1):21 – 37 (2006)
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Abstract

In this paper, I make a contribution to a naturalistically-minded theory of truthmakers by proposing a solution to the nasty problem of truthmakers for negative truths. After formulating the difficulty, I consider and reject a number of solutions to the problem, including Armstrong's states of affairs of totality, incompatibility accounts, and JC Beall 's polarity view. I then defend the position that absences of truthmakers are real and are responsible for making negative truths true. According to the positive account of absences I offer, absences of contingent states of affairs are causally relevant mind-independent features of the physical world, located within space and time, and capable of being discovered by scientific inquiry. Recognition of the reality of absences strengthens truthmaker theory as a naturalistic metaphysics, as truth and falsity of each and every contingent proposition finds an ontological grounding in some region of the physical universe

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Citations of this work

How to Be a Truthmaker Maximalist.Ross P. Cameron - 2008 - Noûs 42 (3):410 - 421.
Intentional omissions.Randolph Clarke - 2010 - Noûs 44 (1):158-177.
Seeing empty space.Louise Richardson - 2009 - European Journal of Philosophy 18 (2):227-243.
Truthmaking without necessitation.Rachael Briggs - 2012 - Synthese 189 (1):11-28.

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References found in this work

Tractatus logico-philosophicus.Ludwig Wittgenstein, G. C. M. Colombo & Bertrand Russell - 1933 - New York,: Harcourt, Brace. Edited by C. K. Ogden.
A World of States of Affairs.D. Armstrong - 1993 - Philosophical Perspectives 7:429-440.
Universals and scientific realism.David Malet Armstrong - 1978 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
A Combinatorial Theory of Possibility.David Malet Armstrong - 1989 - Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Truth-Makers.Kevin Mulligan, Peter Simons & Barry Smith - 1984 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 44 (3):287-321.

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