Abstract
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 Asay’s presented dilemma for the explanation-first perspective by specifying the nature of the distinctive form of explanation that explanation-first truthmaker theorists should envisage. Second, partly based on my proposal in the preceding discussion, I provide an account of the cases that Asay thinks pose troubling questions concerning whether a certain entity really serves as the explanans of a truthmaking explanation. Third, I establish a way in which the explanation-first perspective can be beneficial to what the ontology-first perspective focuses on, namely, exploring the ontological requirements for truths. The overall discussion warns against the underestimation of the prospects for the explanation-first perspective.
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Notes
To say that explanation-first truthmaker theorists are fundamentally interested in the question, “Why \(\varphi\)?” is not to say that they do not ask the question, “Why is \(\langle \varphi \rangle\) true?” which is the one that Asay invokes when he describes what explanation-first truthmaker theorists seek to answer. Otherwise, my proposal would be vulnerable to the charge of overlooking the definitional aspect of Asay’s conception of explanation-first truthmaking. My point here is that, in asking the latter, they also ask another question, namely, the former—which is intertwined with, but often implicit in the latter. Thus, my proposal is immune to the charge in question. (Additionally, it is worth noting that Asay does not seem to make a sharp distinction between the two questions, “Why is \(\langle \varphi \rangle\) true?” and “Why \(\varphi\)?” judging from his invocation of a D-N explanation as an alternative way of explaining truth that “do[es] the job simpler or better” than truthmaking explanations (pp. 36–37). If so, this constitutes another reason for the immunity of my proposal from the charge in question.) Furthermore, even if my conception of explanation-first truthmaking is missing some definitional aspect of Asay’s, it does not undermine the former’s significance. What then becomes evident is that what Asay calls “explanation-first truthmaking” is not the only serious alternative to ontology-first truthmaking; my claim then is that what I am proposing as an explanation-focused alternative deserves particular attention and is of deep theoretical interest. I thank an anonymous referee for raising the concern discussed here.
I presume that most truthmaker theorists accept the instances of the schema in question (when \(\langle \varphi \rangle\) is true), although Cameron (2008, p. 123) is an exception.
Asay’s following observation is also worthy of attention: “My point has been to argue that truth and truthmaking are separate investigations; from that perspective, it’s not a necessary task of the theory of truth to give a theory of truthmakers (and vice versa)” (p. 132, emphasis in original). My contention here is that explanation-first truthmaker theorists can (or indeed should) equally invoke this very separation to clarify their enterprise.
To specify explanation-first truthmaker theorists’ distinctive explanations in this way does not commit one to the thought that they make no explanatory claim in terms of truthmakers that involves as the explanandum the truth of a truth-bearer. They can embrace the claim that the truth of \(\langle \varphi \rangle\) is explained in terms of some entity x by, for example, forming a chain of explanations (and assuming the transitivity of explanation of the relevant kind): they can accept that \(\langle \varphi \rangle\) is true because \(\varphi\) while maintaining that the fact that \(\varphi\), in turn, is explained in terms of x. The point is that what is distinctive of the explanation-first truthmaking project is the latter explanatory claim in this chain of explanations. See also note 7 below.
Asay also offers the more modest claim that “[explanation-first truthmaker theorists] pursue their truthmaker theory in a way that lends itself to also giving a theory of truth” (p. 41, n. 26). Explanation-first truthmaker theorists can even refute this claim, since when they ask for an explanation for the question, “Why \(\varphi\)?” they need not rely on any substantive conception of the relationship between the subject matter of a truth and the truth of the truth-bearer. In other words, when it comes to the compatibility and theoretical affinity with deflationary theories of truth, the explanation-first perspective is on par with the ontology-first perspective. Therefore, both perspectives can accept Asay’s following remark: “[The] expression [i.e., ‘the truth of truth-bearers’] can just serve as an abbreviation for the infinitely many truths: the truth of truth-bearers is just snow being white, grass being green, Obama existing, and the like” (p. 134).
The specification of the explanantia of truthmaking explanations embraced here is in line with the proposal by, for example, Correia (2005, section 3.2). One might object that the explanantia should be truthmakers themselves, not their existence: truthmaking explanations would then be formulated simply as “...in virtue of x,” where x is a truthmaker for some truth-bearer. Although interesting, this issue falls beyond the scope of this piece. (See Sider (2011, section 8.5) for a related discussion.) Nothing in the following discussion essentially hangs on how we should settle the issue. I thank an anonymous referee for raising the concern discussed here.
It is worth noting that how explanation-first truthmaker theorists formulate the idea of the dependence of truth on reality and how they specify their distinctive form of explanation are intertwined but separate issues. They can formulate the dependence idea using the simple schema, “\(\langle \varphi \rangle\) is true because \(\varphi\),” and then specify their distinctive form of explanation as “\(\varphi\) because x exists,” where x is a truthmaker for \(\langle \varphi \rangle\). For a similar view, see Schulte (2011).
Cameron (2018) thinks that every instance of truthmaking explanation involves as the explanans a truth of the form, \(\langle x \text { exists}\rangle\), that is brute in the sense that it is not grounded in any proposition. The conception of truthmaking explanations that I am proposing here is compatible with this idea, though not committed to it. Asay criticizes (in a paper preceding A Theory of Truthmaking) Cameron’s idea as follows: “[A]t the bottom of Cameron’s hierarchy are true propositions. It is true propositions that are brute, and that provide metaphysical foundations for all other truths. So construed, Cameron’s approach is out of sync with standard thinking about truthmaking. [...] For ordinary truthmaker theorists, taking the truth of propositions as brute is precisely what they are trying to avoid” (2017, p. 18). The appropriate response would be to maintain that propositional grounding focuses on the subject matters of the propositions that bear the grounding relation to one another, not the truth of these propositions. Indeed, grounding theorists may regiment their grounding talk solely using the sentential operator, “because,” thereby dispensing with propositions as the relata of the grounding relation. Grounding explanations are then expressed simply by the claims of the form, “\(\varphi\) because \(\psi\).” The point is that it is one thing to take some true propositions as brute, and it is another to take the truth of these propositions as brute.
Kit Fine describes the propositions that are multiply grounded in this way as “disjunctively grounded” (2012, p. 47).
The idea here is that being a panda is what Theodore Sider calls a maximal property: “A property, F, is maximal iff, roughly, large parts of an F are not themselves Fs” (2001, p.357).
Cf. Armstrong (1997, p. 12).
I thank an anonymous referee and the editor for their helpful comments and suggestions here.
To use the metaphor of the “book of the world,” what such nonmaximalists claim is that in order to write all of the book of the world, we need some negative(s), such as “there exists nothing more than these entities.”
The thought here seems somewhat congenial to Asay, at least insofar as the example of hard road nominalism is concerned, as he states that “[truthmaker theorists who adopt maximalism or strong supervenience] avoid taking the very facts of predication as fundamental” (p. 197) and also that “by taking how things are as equally fundamental with what things there are, [nominalists] take more basic categories as metaphysical primitives” (p. 199).
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the editor-in-chief of this journal, Nikolaj Pedersen, and two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and helpful comments.
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Kitamura, N. In defense of explanation-first truthmaking. AJPH 1, 23 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44204-022-00026-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s44204-022-00026-2