Abstract
After arguing that truth-making is properly construed as a partnership between truth bearers and truth-makers, I focus on two prominent arguments against the category of fact as one of the key relata in the truth-making relation. After rejecting those arguments, I go on to examine a more difficult issue, one that might force us to appreciate more fully the robust role that thought has in “creating” truth.
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Notes
Of course, their relational properties trivially depend on what else exists. If a given fact or property has the relational property of being represented, then one of its (relational) properties depends on the existence of a conscious being.
It may be that one can ultimately get rid of the “thing” in characterizing a fact. I leave open the possibility that ultimately we can reduce all thing talk to property exemplification talk.
As I’m using the expression “representation-independent” even representations are representation-independent—they existence is independent of their being represented (in this case by meta-representations).
Respectable philosophers do rhetorically flirt with the above argument. In explaining his "internal" realism Putnam (1987) argues that "What we cannot say—because it makes no sense—is what the facts are independent of all conceptual choices," p. 33. And again "—the view from which absolutely all languages are equally part of the totality being scrutinized—is forever inaccessible" (1990, p. 17). Of course, we can't say what the facts are without employing concepts. But then we can't say what exists without using language. Does that really mean that the existence of things is parasitic upon the existence of language?
Though they are, trivially, the truth-makers for propositions describing relations between beliefs.
The argument’s most well-known proponent is, perhaps, Donald Davidson (1984). A similar argument was used by Quine to establish that certain modal contexts must be construed as referentially opaque and, consequently, philosophically suspect. Davidson himself trotted out a nearly identical (and equally flawed) version of the argument in an earlier piece designed to establish that we cannot construe facts as the relata of causal connection (1967).
There is some terminological confusion on the question of whether definite descriptions refer. One can certainly use the expression “refer” technically so that only an expression that picks something out directly (unmediated by description) genuinely or purely refers. Definite descriptions can clearly succeed in picking some thing or person out and many use the term “denotes” to describe that relation. In any event, it should be obvious that for the slingshot to work, we need to allow the substitutivity of definite descriptions that have the same denotation. For ease of exposition I’ll continue to talk as if definite descriptions refer.
As we will see in the last section, one need not think that true thoughts with different contents always have different truth-makers. The point is, however, that the correspondence theorist will often take different thoughts to have different truth-makers.
For another penetrating criticism of Davidson's slingshot, see also Searle (1995), Chap. 9, appendix. Searle discusses a slightly different version of the argument but successfully points out the fatal flaws of the argument. It was Searle who suggested to me that the use of the expression "slingshot" to describe the argument had something to do with David and Goliath.
Goodman (1978) raises this point in his discussion of the way in which he thinks we "carve" such entities as galaxies out of stars. He expects the realist about truth-makers to complain that the carving out of the galaxies is only possible because there exist the stars "waiting" to be sorted by conscious beings. What the alethic realist fails to understand, however, is that the stars are "constructed" just as surely as are the galaxies. How many particles we lump together to “make” a star reflects a decision just as much as our decision to call some collection of stars a galaxy. And the input of conscious decision-making will always reappear at whatever more fundamental level we search for the "unconceptualized" building blocks of the world we create. Putnam (1990, p. 28) poetically puts the claim this way: “What I am saying, then, is that elements of what we call "language" or "mind" penetrate so deeply into what we call "reality" that the very project of representing ourselves as being "mappers" of something "language-independent" is fatally compromised from the very start.”
As many of my examples will indicate, the properties to which I have I greatest philosophical commitment are, perhaps ironically, those to the very existence of which some philosophers object. But that’s a sad commentary on the naturalism to which many have been seduced. There is no doubt that there are qualia. That should be one’s starting point. One can engage in serious discussion concerning the question of whether or not one can reconcile their existence with the claim that all things and properties are, in some sense, physical.
One might even be able to mount a subtle phenomenological argument for the existence of generic universals. See Fales (1996).
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Fumerton, R. Partnership in Truth-Making. Topoi 29, 91–98 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-009-9078-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-009-9078-z