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In his criticism of Armstrong’s argument against nominalism, Parsons (1999) makes a crucial use of a notion of truthmaking in terms of weak supervenience which assumedly: (i) does not entail truthmaker essentialism, (ii) is neutral as to the issue of nominalism, and (iii) is useful in Armstrong’s argument against Ryle. I will try to show that Parsons’ notion is defective because it does not preserve the explanatory character of truthmakers. Besides, I argue that the natural reformulation of the notion in terms of strong supervenience fails in two respects: (i) it is not neutral as to the issue of nominalism and (ii) it does not preserve the explanatory character of truthmakers if it succeeds in avoiding truthmaker essentialism. As a corollary, Armstrong’s truthmaker argument against nominalism is vindicated.

In this chapter I shall reply to a pair of articles in which the main contention of my “Why truthmakers” – namely, that an important class of synthetic true propositions have entities as truth-makers – is rejected. In §§1–5 I reply to Jennifer Hornsby’s “Truth without Truthmaking Entities” (2005) and in §§6–7 I reply to Julian Dodd’s “Negative Truths and Truthmaker Principles” (2007).

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..

It is twelve years since the publication of “Truthmakers, Entailment and Necessity,” and some of my views on the topics discussed have changed in that time. More recent work on truthmaking (in particular, Lewis’ “Truthmaking and Difference Making,” reprinted in this volume) has convinced me that the idea that truth depends on ontology can be captured in a number of different ways. Which ways we take to be most appealing will depend on a whole host of views or commitments, not the least being those concerning what different kinds of things there are.

In his criticism of Armstrong’s argument against nominalism, Parsons (1999) makes a crucial use of a notion of truthmaking in terms of weak supervenience which assumedly: (i) does not entail truthmaker es-sentialism, (ii) is neutral as to the issue of nominalism, and (iii) is useful in Armstrong’s argument against Ryle. I will try to show that Parsons’ notion is defective because it does not preserve the explanatory char-acter of truthmakers. Besides, I argue that the natural reformulation of the notion in terms of strong super-venience fails in two respects: (i) it is not neutral as to the issue of nominalism and (ii) it does not preserve the explanatory character of truthmakers if it succeeds in avoiding truthmaker essentialism. As a corollary, Armstrong’s truthmaker argument against nominalism is vindicated.

This bulletin contains a summary of the main topics of discussion in truthmaker theory, namely: the definition of truthmakers, problems with Truthmaker Necessitarianism and Truthmaker Maximalism, the ontological burden of truthmakers and the recalcitrant topic of truthmakers for negative truths.

According to one tradition in realist philosophy, ‘truthmaking’ amounts to necessitation. That is, an object x is a truthmaker for the claim A if x exists, and the existence of x necessitates the truth of A. In symbols: E!x ∧ (E!x ⇒ A). I argued in my paper “Truthmakers, Entailment and Necessity” [14], that if we wish to use this account of truthmaking, we ought understand the entailment connective “⇒” in such a claim as a relevant entailment, in the tradition..

In recent work on truth and truthmaking, D. M. Armstrong has defended a version of 'truthmaker necessitarianism', the doctrine that truths necessitate truthmakers. Truthmaker necessitarianism, he contends, requires the postulation of 'totality facts', which serve as ingredients of truthmakers for general truths and negative truths, and propositions, which function as the fundamental truth bearers. I argue that neither totality facts nor propositions need figure in an account of truthmaking, and suggest that both are artifacts stemming, albeit in different ways, from an ontologically shady 'linguisticizing' tendency to conflate features of descriptions and features of what is described.

Truthmaker theory begins with the idea that truth depends upon reality. When a truth-bearer is true, that is because something or other in the world makes it true. My dissertation offers a theory of truthmakers that shows how we should flesh out this thought while avoiding the contentious metaphysical commitments that are built into other truthmaker theories. Because of these commitments, many philosophers have come to view truthmaker theory as being essentially tied to correspondence theories of truth, and to metaphysical realism. I argue that, quite to the contrary, truthmaker theory is distinct from correspondence theory, and that the former actually undermines the motivation for the latter. In fact, truthmaker theory can be used to argue for a particular kind of deflationism about truth. I also argue that debates about realism and anti-realism are best viewed through the lens of truthmaker theory, which is not—contrary to what many have thought—an essentially realist approach to metaphysics. Anti-realists of various stripes can also make use of truthmakers. The anti-realism of such views depends upon either the nature of the truthmakers they use, or the nature of the truthmaking relation itself.

Truthmaker theory promises to do some useful philosophical work: equipping us to argue against phenomenalism and Rylean behaviourism, for instance, and helping us decide what exists (Lewis 1999, 207; Armstrong 1997, 113-119). But it has proved hard to formulate a truthmaker theory that is both useful and believable. I want to suggest that a neglected approach to truthmakers – that of Ian McFetridge – can surmount some of the problems that make other theories of truthmaking unattractive. To begin with, I’ll outline some of the most prominent accounts of truthmaking in the current literature. Then the second part of the paper will explain McFetridge’s theory and argue for its superiority over these accounts.