Abstract
Mark Jago has presented a dilemma for truthmaker non-maximalism—the thesis that some but not all truths require truthmakers. The dilemma arises because some truths that do not require truthmakers by the non-maximalist’s lights (e.g., that Santa Claus does not exist) are necessitated by truths that do (e.g., that Barack Obama knows that Santa Claus does not exist). According to Jago, the non-maximalist can supply a truthmaker for such a truth only by conceding the primary motivation for the view: that it allows one to avoid positing strange ‘negative’ entities without adopting a non-standard account of the necessary features of ordinary things. In this paper, I sketch out and defend two plausible non-maximalist proposals that evade Jago’s dilemma.
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Notes
Or at least requires a plurality of things that collectively make it true. I suppress this qualification throughout.
Following Jago, I assume that propositions exist and are bearers of truth, although nothing of substance is effected by taking sentences in contexts of utterance to be the bearers of truth instead.
One can take this to be an compactly stateable sufficient condition for Max’s being in such a scenario, or a massive disjunction of the possible scenarios in which he has been Gettiered. It will not matter for my purposes.
I cannot fully survey which putative additions or replacements will do, but there are many attractive options. Any non-factive conception of belief possession that allows it to be reliably produced, or evidentially supported, or warranted, or undefeated, or to have arose out of an act of intellectual virtue, or..., even though the content of that belief be false, would do the trick. (As Jago notes (2012, p. 913), some proposed sufficient conditions for knowledge employ factive operators, for which the original problem re-emerges. Nonetheless my contention that at least some plausible non-maximalist proposals evade Jago’s dilemma, which is all I set out to defend here, still holds. Moreover, see fn. 9 for a possible to way extend what I say to factive operator-involving conditions.)
To be sure, a negative existential is extrinsically true—at least insofar as its truth holds at least partially in virtue of how things ‘external’ to it stand. But a thing’s positive characteristics can also be extrinsic (e.g., my owning a cat).
Barker and Jago (2012) develop a theory of negative facts that takes them to be non-mereological complexes of objects and properties in which the former “anti-instantiate” the latter, with negative properties lambda-abstracted from these. But I see no particularly compelling reason why any of the facts that (KT) leans on must be conceived of as the product of a negative existential’s anti-instantiating falsity, or its anti-instantiating either-falsity-or-indeterminacy, or its anti-instantiating anything else for that matter.
E.g., those who take ‘tropes’, ‘modes’, or ‘moments’ as truthmakers—particularized properties like the redness of Max’s desk at one time, or its greenness at another—take them to be necessary excluders (cf. Mulligan et al. 1984).
Of course, some solutions claim that there is no such proposition as \({<}\)Ern Malley does not exist\({>}\), and others claim that this proposition is false; if either one of these two solutions is correct, then there is no fact as that \({<}\) Ern Malley does not exist \({>}\) is true, but obviously Jago’s dilemma goes away as well. Representative solutions accept that this proposition exists and is true, and that have no trace of negative ontology, include Braun (1993) among many others. These solutions also appear to extend in a natural way to factive operators analysable in terms of truth under a selection of ways the world could have turned out to be, such as Sosa’s (1999) notion of safety and Williamson’s (2000) notion of a most general factive mental state. Given the modest aim of this paper (see fn. 5) I will not pursue the issue further here.
Thanks to Fabrice Correia, Michaela McSweeney, Noël Saenz, and an anonymous referee for independently pressing me to address versions of the following objection.
“When is what is called truth or falsity present, and when is it not? We must consider what we mean by these terms. It is not because we think that you are white, that you are white, but because you are white we who say this have the truth. (Metaphysics 9, 1051b, 5–8 [1984, pp. 1661]; cf. Categories 14b, 15–22 [Aristotle (1984), pp. 22]).
What if, following Rosen (2010), one takes grounding statements to ascribe a relation? Then the suitability of the strategy I have outlined turns on what one takes the relata of this relation to be. For instance, the non-maximalist could not follow Audi (2012) and take the relata of grounding to be ‘worldly’ particulars partially individuated by the objects they have as constituents, since the non-maximalist denies that there is a worldly particular with Ern Mally as a constituent. However, the strategy can be adopted by the non-maximalist if she instead follows Rosen and takes the relata of grounding to be true propositions; see McGrath (2003) for defense.
It is important to remember that on the Mellor-style conception of derivability under consideration, what is being claimed here is not that (KN) is ultimately made true in part by facts about the non-existence of truthmakers for the negations of (N) and (NG). For strictly speaking, (KN) has no truthmaker at all (cf. Mellor 2003, p. 213). Rather, the task for the “sophisticated” non-maximalist as Jago calls her (p. 910) is merely to provide the truth conditions for (KN) purely in terms of the existence or non-existence of truthmakers for certain positive propositions, and thereby perspicuously link the truth of (KN) to what’s in one’s ontology and what isn’t. (KN), I claim, provides the means to do this.
I wish to thank Paolo Bonardi, Alexander Bown, Pablo Carnino, Fabrice Correia, Ghislain Guigon, Michaela McSweeney, Robert Michels, Kevin Mulligan, Noël Saenz, Maria Scarpati, and anonymous referees for their comments and encouragement. This article was completed while funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation as a member of the research project “The Nature of Existence: Neglected Questions at the Foundations of Ontology” (ID #: 10012_150289), and I am grateful for its generous support.
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Skiles, A. Is there a dilemma for the truthmaker non-maximalist?. Synthese 191, 3649–3659 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0485-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0485-3