Truthmakers

Edited by Jamin Asay (Purdue University)
About this topic
Summary Truthmakers are the things in the world in virtue of which truth bearers are true. For example, any individual human makes it true that humans exist. What's more controversial is what the truthmakers are for counterfactuals, and claims involving the past, modality, ethics, mathematics, and many others. Truthmaker theory explores the relationship between what is true and what exists. Central questions for truthmaker theory include whether or not all truths have truthmakers, what the nature of the truthmaking relation is, and what sorts of objects are needed to serve as truthmakers. The notion of truthmaking has been used to argue for particular kinds of ontologies (such as the existence of states of affairs or tropes), argue against certain metaphysical views (such as presentism and nominalism), and elucidate issues about the nature of truth (such as how truthmaker theory is related to correspondence theory).
Key works Contemporary truthmaker theory draws historical inspiration from Russell 1940. Classic papers on truthmaker theory include Mulligan et al 1984 and Fox 1987. David Armstrong has long advocated the idea of truthmaking, and Armstrong 2004 presents his most fully developed theory of truthmaking. Merricks 2007 is the most comprehensive critique of truthmaker theory. Two recent monographs that defend different approaches to truthmaking include Jago 2018 and Asay 2020. Classic papers concerned with the question of whether all truths require truthmakers include Molnar 2000 and Lewis 2001Restall 1996 discusses the nature of the truthmaking relation.
Introductions Rodriguez-Pereyra 2006 is an excellent general introduction to truthmaker theory. Two accessible on-line resources that cover a number of contemporary issues in truthmaker theory are Fraser MacBride's Stanford Encyclopedia article (MacBride 2013) and Asay 2014. Caplan & Sanson 2011 introduces the consequences of truthmaking for presentism. Lowe & Rami 2008 collects a number of classic papers on the subject. Simons 2000 presents an accessible dialogue between different philosophers discussing maximalism about truthmaking.
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  1. The Fundamental Facts Can Be Logically Simple.Alexander Jackson - manuscript
    I like the view that the fundamental facts are logically simple, not complex. However, many philosophers argue that some universal generalizations and negations are fundamental, because—allegedly—they cannot be explained by logically simple facts about particulars. I defend a natural response: what explains those universal generalizations and negations is that certain facts—call them —are the fundamental facts. I argue that this solution is only available given some metaphysical frameworks, some conceptions of metaphysical explanation and fundamentality. First it requires a ‘fitting’ framework, (...)
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  2. Truth-Maker Theory and the Stopped Clock: Why Heathcote Fails to Solve the Gettier Problem.Qilin Li - manuscript
    Adrian Heathcote has proposed a truth-making account of knowledge that combines traditional conditions of justified true belief with the truth-making condition, which would jointly provide us with the sufficient condition of knowledge, and this truth-maker account of knowledge in turn explains why a gettiered justified true belief fails to be regarded as a genuine instance of knowledge. In this paper, by the comparison of two different casual models that are illustrated by the thermometer and the clock respectively, however, it will (...)
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  3. A Quantificational Analysis of the Liar Paradox.Matheus Silva - manuscript
    It seems that the most common strategy to solve the liar paradox is to argue that liar sentences are meaningless and, consequently, truth-valueless. The other main option that has grown in recent years is the dialetheist view that treats liar sentences as meaningful, truth-apt and true. In this paper I will offer a new approach that does not belong in either camp. I hope to show that liar sentences can be interpreted as meaningful, truth-apt and false, but without engendering any (...)
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  4. Dependence Asymmetry between Truth and Reality.Jiamin Yu - manuscript
    The thesis aims to account for the pre-theoretic intuition of asymmetric dependence between truth and reality, namely, the intuition that truth depends on reality, but reality doesn’t depend on truth. I start by delineating a framework to answer this question: according to this framework, a proper theory of dependence asymmetry should explain why truth depends on reality (truth-reality dependence) and why reality doesn’t depend on truth (asymmetry). There are two readings of the second requirement: a strong reading and a weak (...)
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  5. On the Very Possibility of Historiography.Stephen Boulter - forthcoming - New Content is Available for Journal of the Philosophy of History.
    _ Source: _Page Count 25 The familiar challenges to historiographical knowledge turn on epistemological concerns having to do with the unobservability of historical events, or with the problem of establishing a sufficiently strong inferential connection between evidence and the historiographical claim one wishes to convert from a true belief into knowledge. This paper argues that these challenges miss a deeper problem, viz., the lack of obvious truth-makers for historiographical claims. The metaphysical challenge to historiography is that reality does not appear (...)
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  6. An Empirical Argument for Presentism.David Builes & Michele Odisseas Impagnatiello - forthcoming - Oxford Studies in Metaphysics.
    According to orthodoxy, our best physical theories strongly support Eternalism over Presentism. Our goal is to argue against this consensus, by arguing that a certain overlooked aspect of our best physical theories strongly supports Presentism over Eternalism.
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  7. Fundamental Truthmakers.Javier Cumpa & Otavio Bueno (eds.) - forthcoming - Oxford University Press.
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  8. Review of The Metaphysics of Relations, Edited by Marmodoro & Yates, OUP, 2015. [REVIEW]Fraser MacBride - forthcoming - Philosophy.
    In this review I take to task the related views of E.J. Lowe, John Heil and Peter Simons according to which relations don't exist because they're dispensable qua truth-makers. I argue that this view is methodologically unstable because we also have reason to believe that relations exist because our best mathematical and scientific theories say so, i.e. quantify over them.
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  9. Pretence Fictionalism about the Non-Present.Kristie Miller - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Presentists hold that only present things exist. But we all, presentists included, utter sentences that appear to involve quantification over non-present objects, and so we all, presentists included, seem to commit ourselves to such objects. Equally, we all, presentists included, take utterances of many past-tensed (and some future-tensed) sentences to be true. But if no past or future things exist, it’s hard to see how there can be anything that those utterances are about, which makes them true. This paper presents (...)
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  10. The Disjunction Thesis and Necessary Connection.Zamani Mohsen - forthcoming - Analytic Philosophy.
    In this paper I deal with the relation between the disjunction thesis—that the truthmaking relation is distributed over a disjunction—and the necessary connection thesis—that the existence of some entities requires the existence of other distinct entities. I will first show that because of this very relation, the arguments for and against the disjunction thesis that overlook its metaphysical considerations will fail. Finally, I will show that the commitment produced by truthmaker maximalism to totality states of affairs, or some relevantly similar (...)
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  11. How Truth-Making Distributes.Robin Stenwall - forthcoming - Erkenntnis:1-14.
    In this paper I argue against the traditional view that truth-making distributes over entailment and present a novel account that takes truth-making to distribute over grounding between the existence of facts, thereby avoiding the shortcomings of the traditional view.
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  12. Presentism without Truth-Makers.Barry Ward - forthcoming - Chronos.
    We construct a presentist semantics on which there are no truth-makers for past and future tensed statements. The semantics is not an expressivist or projectivist one, and is not susceptible to the semantical difficulties that confront such theories. We discuss how the approach handles some standard concerns with presentism.
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  13. Relevance Without Minimality.Stephen Yablo - forthcoming - In Andy Egan & Dirk Kindermann (eds.), Unstructured Content. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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  14. Alethic pluralism and truthmaker theory.Takeshi Akiba - 2023 - Theoria 89 (1):98-113.
    According to alethic pluralism, sentences belonging to different domains of discourse can be true by having different alethic (i.e., truth-constituting) properties. Against this pluralistic view, Jamin Asay has recently argued that pluralists' appeal to multiple alethic properties is ill-motivated because the main advantages of pluralism can already be obtained within the framework of standard truthmaker theory. In response to this objection, this paper argues that Asay's claim does not hold with respect to one of the central advantages of pluralism, namely, (...)
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  15. Truthmaking.Jamin Asay - 2023 - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    Truthmaking is the metaphysical exploration of the idea that what is true depends upon what exists. Truthmaker theorists argue about what the truthmaking relation involves, which truths require truthmakers, and what those truthmakers are. This Element covers the dominant views on these core issues in truthmaking. It also explores some key metaphysical topics and debates that are usefully approached by employing the tools of truthmaker theory: the debate between presentists and eternalists over the existence of entities from the past, and (...)
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  16. "Deflecting Ockham's Razor: A Medieval Debate on Ontological Commitment".Susan Brower-Toland - 2023 - Mind 133:fzad007.
    William of Ockham (d. 1347) is well known for his commitment to parsimony and for his so-called ‘razor’ principle. But little is known about attempts among his own contemporaries to deflect his use of the razor. In this paper, I explore one such attempt. In particular, I consider a clever challenge that Ockham’s younger contemporary, Walter Chatton (d. 1343) deploys against the razor. The challenge involves a kind of dilemma for Ockham. Depending on how Ockham responds to this dilemma, his (...)
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  17. On metaphysics’ independence from truthmaking. Or, Why Humean Supervenience is Compatible with the Growing Block Universe.Aldo Filomeno - 2023 - Erkenntnis 88 (4):1467-1480.
    This paper aims to support the claim that analytic metaphysics should be more cautious regarding the constraints that truthmaking considerations impose on metaphysical theories. To this end, I reply to Briggs and Forbes (2017), whoargue that certain truthmaking commitments are incurred by a Humean metaphysics and by the Growing-Block theory. First, I argue that Humean Supervenience does not need to endorse a standard version of truthmaker maximalism. This undermines Briggs and Forbes’s conclusion that Humean Supervenience and the Growing-Block theory are (...)
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  18. The Truth about Social Entities.Tobias Hansson Wahlberg - 2023 - In Andrés Garcia, Mattias Gunnemyr & Jakob Werkmäster (eds.), Value, Morality & Social Reality. Lund, Sweden: Media-Tryck, Lund University. pp. 483-497.
  19. The Problem of Truth in Quantum Mechanics.Adrian Heathcote - 2023 - Global Philosophy 33 (1):1-29.
    There is a large literature on the issue of the lack of properties (i.e. accidents) in quantum mechanics (the problem of “hidden variables”) and also on the indistinguishability of particles. Both issues were discussed as far back as the late 1920’s. However, the implications of these challenges to classical ontology were taken up rather late, in part in the ‘quantum set theory’ of Takeuti (Curr Issues Quant Logic 303–322, 1981), Finkelstein (in Beltrametti EG, Van Fraassen BC (eds) Current issues in (...)
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  20. Sentences Apparently About Composite Objects: True Even Without Composite Objects.Savvas Ioannou - 2023 - Metaphysica International Journal for Ontology and Metaphysics:1-21.
    A compositional nihilist believes that the only objects that exist are simples. However, a non-nihilist believes in the existence of composite objects and challenges the nihilist to explain why there are true sentences about chairs, tables, etc., if composite objects do not exist. Different nihilist views have been suggested to explain this (the paraphrase strategy and the truthmaker theory), but I believe that they are unsuccessful (either they do not successfully paraphrase every sentence apparently about composite objects, or they are (...)
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  21. Truthmaking cannot be done afar.Asher Jiang - 2023 - Synthese 201 (3):1-17.
    As concerns the explication of the intuitive notion of truthmaking, Barry Smith has an insight that deserves more attention. Basically, in his view, an object x makes a proposition true iff (i) x necessitates and (ii) is representationally closely tied with x. To be more specific, he suggests that (ii) is fulfilled only if x is among ’s ontological commitments. I appreciate his basic insight but reject his specific suggestion. I argue that we can make a more attractive proposal from (...)
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  22. Against Representational Levels.Nicholas K. Jones - 2023 - Philosophical Perspectives 36 (1):140-157.
    Some views articulate reality's hierarchical structure using relations from the fundamental to representations of reality. Other views instead use relations from the fundamental to constituents of non-representational reality. This paper argues against the first kind of view.
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  23. Humean Idealism.Daniel Kodaj - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (1):34-50.
    I outline a version of idealism that borrows from Humean Supervenience. The resulting theory is immune to what is often considered to be the most powerful anti-idealist argument, the gist of which is that the idealist can’t supply truthmakers (or an adequate supervenience base) for commonly accepted truths about the physical world. That charge has no purchase on Humean idealism.
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  24. Not every truth could have a truthmaker.John Stigall - 2023 - Theoria 89 (1):7-13.
    Mark Jago argues for truthmaker maximalism in some recent papers based on a key premise: that every truth could have a truthmaker. Jago contends that many would pretheoretically accept this principle and that counterexamples to it would be difficult to find. In this note, I show how truthmaker non-maximalists can use a modified version of Peter Milne's argument against maximalism to provide a counterexample to this key premise.
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  25. The Modal Basis of Scientific Modelling.Tuomas E. Tahko - 2023 - Synthese 201 (75):1-16.
    The practice of scientific modelling often resorts to hypothetical, false, idealised, targetless, partial, generalised, and other types of modelling that appear to have at least partially non-actual targets. In this paper, I will argue that we can avoid a commitment to non-actual targets by sketching a framework where models are understood as having networks of possibilities as their targets. This raises a further question: what are the truthmakers for the modal claims that we can derive from models? I propose that (...)
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  26. Non-Realist Cognitivism, Truthmaking, and Ontological Cheating.Farbod Akhlaghi - 2022 - Ethics 132 (2):291-321.
    Derek Parfit defended Non-Realist Cognitivism. It is an open secret that this metaethical theory is often thought at best puzzling and at worst objectionably unclear. Employing truthmaker theory, I provide an account of Non-Realist Cognitivism that dispels charges of objectionable unclarity, clarifies how to assess it, and explains why, if plausible, it would be an attractive theory. I develop concerns that the theory involves cheating into an objection that ultimately reveals Non-Realist Cognitivism faces a dilemma. Whether it can escape demands (...)
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  27. Ecumenical Truthmaking: A Précis of A Theory of Truthmaking.Jamin Asay - 2022 - Asian Journal of Philosophy 1 (1(3)):1-5.
    The theory of truthmaking has long aroused skepticism from philosophers who believe it to be tangled up in contentious ontological commitments and unnecessary theoretical baggage. I argue in A Theory of Truthmaking that this suspicion is unfounded. Philosophers across the spectrum can take advantage of truthmaking, and use it to better understand the ontological implications of topics that arise all over the philosophical landscape. Challenging the current orthodoxy that truthmaking's fundamental purpose is to be a tool for explaining why truths (...)
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  28. Replies to critics.Jamin Asay - 2022 - Asian Journal of Philosophy 1 (1):1-15.
    The author replies to the critics of the symposium.
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  29. Truthmaker puzzles for one-level physicalists.Umut Baysan - 2022 - Synthese 200 (5):1-17.
    According to one-level physicalism, reality is exhausted by fundamental physical entities and properties. This position is sometimes defended on the basis of the truthmaker view of ontological commitment. Accordingly, physicalists can affirm higher-level truths without ontologically committing to any higher-level properties or states of affairs; fundamental physical states of affairs serve as truthmakers of all truths that have truthmakers, and a physicalist’s ontology should consist of nothing but the fundamental physical states of affairs and their constituents. In this paper, I (...)
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  30. A Short Argument against Truthmaker Maximalism.Oleh Bondar - 2022 - Metaphysica 23 (1):27-36.
    Mark Jago has introduced a short Fitch-style argument for truthmaker maximalism – the thesis that every truth has a truthmaker. In response to Jago, Trueman argues that the Fitch-style reasoning allows us to prove the opposite – no truth has a truthmaker. In the article, we consider the debates between Jago’s truthmaker maximalism and Trueman’s truthmaker nihilism. Also, we introduce a short Grim-style argument against Jago’s truthmaker maximalism.
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  31. Metafísica para Juristas.Samuele Chilovi - 2022 - In D. Lagier & G. Lariguet (eds.), Filosofía. Una Introducción para Juristas. Madrid: Trotta.
  32. Review of Jamin Asay, A Theory of Truthmaking: Metaphysics, Ontology, and Reality[REVIEW]Fabrice Correia - 2022 - Philosophical Review 131 (1):115-119.
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  33. True by Default.Aaron Griffith - 2022 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 8 (1):92-109.
    This paper defends a new version of truthmaker non-maximalism. The central feature of the view is the notion of a default truth-value. I offer a novel explanation for default truth-values and use it to motivate a general approach to the relation between truth-value and ontology, which I call truth-value-maker theory. According to this view, some propositions are false unless made true, whereas others are true unless made false. A consequence of the theory is that negative existential truths need no truthmakers (...)
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  34. Presentism, truthmaking, and the nature of truth.Aaron M. Griffith - 2022 - Analytic Philosophy 63 (4):259-267.
    A recent presentist strategy has been to deny that truths about the past need presently existing truthmakers. These presentists do not deny that such truths need grounding; they hold that each truth about the past is true because of how the world was, not how it is. This paper argues that this position faces two problems, one of which can be overcome by adopting a certain view of the property of truth for propositions about the past. The second problem cannot (...)
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  35. Metaphysics of States of Affairs: Truthmaking, Universals, and a Farewell to Bradley’s Regress, by Bo R. Meinertsen, Singapore: Springer, 2018. 174 + xviii pp. [REVIEW]Landon Hobbs - 2022 - Philosophia 51 (1):389-394.
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  36. Truthmaking in a realist fashion.Mengyu Hu - 2022 - Asian Journal of Philosophy 1 (1):1-10.
    A large part of Asay’s book, A Theory of Truthmaking, is dedicated to show the benefit of applying the truthmaking method to various debates in philosophy. In this paper, I will focus on Asay’s discussion of realism in chapter 8, where he aims to define “realism” in terms of truthmaking and proposed three conditions to satisfy for an account to be realist. The third condition, “to maintain that those truths are true in virtue of that ontology in a relevant fashion”, (...)
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  37. Presentism.David Ingram & Jonathan Tallant - 2022 - The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Presentism is the view that only present things exist. So understood, presentism is primarily an ontological doctrine; it’s a view about what exists, absolutely and unrestrictedly. The view is the subject of extensive discussion in the literature on time and change, with much of it focused on the problems that presentism allegedly faces. Thus, most of the literature that frames the development of presentism has grown up either in formulating objections to the view (e.g., Sider 2001: 11–52), or in response (...)
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  38. Conceptual reductions, truthmaker reductive explanations, and ontological reductions.Savvas Ioannou - 2022 - Synthese 200 (4):1-26.
    According to conceptual reductive accounts, if properties of one domain can be conceptually reduced to properties of another domain, then the former properties are ontologically reduced to the latter properties. I will argue that conceptual reductive accounts face problems: either they do not recognise that many higher-level properties are correlated with multiple physical properties, or they do not clarify how we can discover new truthmakers of sentences about a higher-level property. Still, there is another way to motivate ontological reduction, the (...)
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  39. Multi-Descriptional Physicalism, Level(s) of Being, and the Mind-Body Problem.Savvas Ioannou - 2022 - Dissertation, University of St. Andrews
    The main idea of this thesis is multi-descriptional physicalism. According to it, only physical entities are elements of our ontology, and there are different ways to describe them. Higher-level vocabularies (e.g., mental, neurological, biological) truly describe reality. Sentences about higher-level entities are made true by physical entities. Every chapter will develop multi-descriptional physicalism or defend it from objections. In chapter 1, I will propose a new conceptual reductive account that conceptually reduces higher-level entities to physical entities. This conceptual reductive account (...)
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  40. In defense of explanation-first truthmaking.Naoaki Kitamura - 2022 - Asian Journal of Philosophy 1 (1):1-9.
    One of the most characteristic cornerstones of Asay’s book, A Theory of Truthmaking, is the defense of what he calls the ontology-first perspective on what the truthmaker project is all about. He distinguishes it from and defends it over what he calls the explanation-first perspective, and he bases his overall theorizing about truthmaking on it. This critical notice aims to counter Asay’s challenges for the explanation-first perspective and reveal its theoretical advantages over its rival. First, I show how to escape (...)
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  41. Generality.Nils Kürbis - 2022 - In Nils Kürbis, Jonathan Nassim & Bahram Assadian (eds.), Knowledge, Number and Reality. Encounters with the Work of Keith Hossack. London: Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 161-176.
    Hossack's 'The Metaphysics of Knowledge' develops a theory of facts, entities in which universals are combined with universals or particulars, as the foundation of his metaphysics. While Hossack argues at length that there must be negative facts, facts in which the universal 'negation' is combined with universals or particulars, his conclusion that there are also general facts, facts in which the universal 'generality' is combined with universals, is reached rather more swiftly. In this paper I present Hossack with three arguments (...)
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  42. How the Block Grows.Roberto Loss - 2022 - American Philosophical Quarterly 59 (4):377-389.
    I argue that the growing-block theory of time and truthmaker maximalism jointly entail that some truthmakers undergo mereological change as time passes. Central to my argument is a grounding-based account of what I call the “purely incremental” nature of the growing-block theory of time. As I will show, the argument presented in this paper suggests that growing-block theorists endorsing truthmaker maximalism have reasons to take composition to be restricted and the “block” of reality to literally grow as time goes by.
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  43. Replies to De Rizzo & Schnieder, Tegtmeier and Vallicella.Bo R. Meinertsen - 2022 - Philosophia 51 (1):437-447.
    In this piece I respond to commentaries by Julio De Rizzo & Benjamin Schnieder, Erwin Tegtmeier and William Vallicella on my book Metaphysics of States of Affairs (Springer, 2018).
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  44. Truthmaker Noumenalism.Damian Melamedoff-Vosters - 2022 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 100 (1):40-55.
    ABSTRACT One of the core issues where interpreters of Kant disagree concerns his alleged Noumenalism—the claim that the objects of our experience, which are in space and time, are underpinned by entities that are not spatio-temporal and that non-spatio-temporally cause our representations of empirical objects. Although there is much textual evidence in favour of Noumenalism, non-Noumenalists have also gathered a significant number of philosophical and exegetical challenges to such a reading of Kant. I present a novel way of understanding the (...)
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  45. Fitch’s paradox and truthmaking: Why Jago’s argument remains ineffective.Fredrik Nyseth - 2022 - Analysis 82 (3):451-454.
    Recently, there have been several attempts to use the kind of reasoning found in Fitch’s knowability paradox to argue for rather sweeping metaphysical claims: Jago (2020) uses such reasoning to argue that every truth has a truthmaker, and Loss (2021) does so to argue that every fact is grounded. This strategy has been criticized by Trueman (2021), who points out that the same kind of reasoning could be used to establish entirely opposite conclusions. In response, Jago (2021) has offered a (...)
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  46. A Defense Of Explanation-First Truthmaking: Some Thoughts On Jamin Asay’s A Theory Of Truthmaking.Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra - 2022 - Asian Journal of Philosophy 1 (1):1-6.
    Jamin Asay’s A Theory of Truthmaking is one of the most important books on truthmaking, full of important ideas from beginning to end. One of the most interesting parts of the book is Asay's attack on the explanation-first truthmaking. Explanation-first truthmaking is the explanatory project of explaining why truths are true. This is in contrast with ontology-first truthmaking, the project defended by Asay, and which is the project of answering the fundamental ontological question “What is there?”. Asay thinks explanation-first truthmaking (...)
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  47. Inquiry & Ordinary Truthmakers.Arthur Schipper - 2022 - Metaphysica 23 (2):247-273.
    This paper argues that accepting an ordinary approach to truthmakers and rejecting something I call “the metaphysical knowledge assumption” allows us to account for inquiry in terms of truthmaking. §1 introduces inquiry and the potential place of truthmakers in inquiry. §2 presents the relevant ordinary notion of truthmakers. §3 presents and motivates MKA. This assumption, I argue, makes a truthmaker-focused account of inquiry whose objects are not the fundamental nature of things impossible and thus should be rejected. The ordinary picture, (...)
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  48. Truthmaking for Meinongians.Maciej Sendłak - 2022 - Synthese 200 (1):1-20.
    This paper aims to introduce Meinongian Abstractionism (MA), i.e. a view on the metaphysics of truthmaking and modality. This approach is based on the notion of objectives—one of the key elements of Alexius Meinong’s Theory of Objects. In the light of it, worlds are interpreted in terms of sets of subsistent and non-subsistent objectives. This—along with Meinong’s characterization of objectives—provides a ground for possible as well as impossible worlds. One of the consequences of Meinongain Abstractionism is a reformulation of the (...)
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  49. Possibility Precedes Actuality.Tuomas E. Tahko - 2022 - Erkenntnis:1-21.
    This paper is inspired by and develops on E. J. Lowe’s work, who writes in his book The Possibility of Metaphysics that ‘metaphysical possibility is an inescapable determinant of actuality’ (1998: 9). Metaphysics deals with possibilities – metaphysical possibilities – but is not able to determine what is actual without the help of empirical research. Accordingly, a delimitation of the space of possibilities is required. The resulting – controversial – picture is that we generally need to know whether something is (...)
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  50. Aḥwāl, Divine Simplicity, and Truthmakers.Behnam Zolghadr - 2022 - European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 18 (2):(SI6)5-25.
    This paper is a comparative study between Brower’s solution to the problem of divine simplicity and that of Abū Hāšim al-Ǧubbāī (d. 933). First, I argue that the theory of aḥwāl is a semantic theory rather than a metaphysical one. Then, I present a reconstruction of Abū Hāšim al-Ǧubbāī’s theory of aḥwāl, based on Brower’s truthmaker theory of predication. Then, I show how Abū Hāšim would reply to some of the objections that Saenz raised against Brower’s truthmaker theory of divine (...)
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