Troubles with Truth-making: Necessitation and Projection

Abstract

The main question of this paper is how to understand the notion of a truth-maker. In section 1, I show that the identification of truth-making with necessitation cannot capture the pretheoretic understanding of notions such as ‘x makes something true’. In section 2, I examine Barry Smith’s reaction to this problem: he defines truth-making as the combination of necessitation and projection. I focus on the formal part of Smith’s account, which is shown to yield undesired results. However, in section 3, I present an alternative account of projection, which fares better and can fruitfully be employed to circumvent the problems raised in section 1. Unfortunately, the account still has to face some troublemakers, as I show in the final section. I conclude, therefore, with a pessimistic view on the project of defining truth-making via necessitation and projection.