Abstract
This paper provides an outline of a theory of causal truthmaking according to which contingent truths are made true by causal facts and dispositional mechanisms. These facts and mechanisms serve to account for the truth of propositions by explaining in a non-epistemic fashion why they have come about as truths. Given that negative causation is allowed for, we are able to provide truthmakers for negative truths without making appeal to negative facts, lacks or absences. The paper takes its starting point in the following claims by George Molnar: (1) the world is everything that exists; (2) everything that exists is positive; (3) some negative claims about the world are true; and (4) every true claim about the world is made true by something that exists. The conclusion is reached that we can keep (1–4) in a consistent manner if causal truthmaking is permitted.
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Notes
To avoid needless complexity, I shall limit the scope of (4) to contingent truths.
Notice that in understanding explanation in this way I am not committed regarding every instance of an ontic explanation as something involving a genuine relation. In fact I think we have good reasons to doubt that every explanation relates something (cf. Mellor 1995). But this view is fully compatible with the view according to which truthmaking is a cross-categorial relation of explanation that relates worldly facts to true propositions.
A standard principle of truthmaking is that if T makes it true that p and if that p entails that q, then T makes it true that q. The principle cannot plausibly quantify over all propositions. Since all necessary truths are entailed by all truths, it follows that anything and everything makes every necessary truth true. To avoid this, Armstrong recommends restricting the principle to what he calls ‘purely contingent truths’: i.e. truths which do not contain any necessary component at any level of analysis (Armstrong 2004, pp. 10–12). Given such a restriction, the principle seems to hold, and to be useful in truthmaker theory.
The argument to follow is to be found in Mellor (2002). Unpublished manuscript.
Other cases discussed by Mellor include truths about mirror images and mental states (2002, pp. 2–7).
In more detail, according to Mellor (1995, pp. 21–30 and pp. 156–184) whatever makes (CT) state a causal truth must be such that it makes the truth of 〈C〉 raise the chance of 〈E〉’s truth, which he writes ‘ch(E)’. This chance (understood as probability) is taken to be a property of the stated cause and the relevant circumstances S in which 〈E because C〉 is true. By 〈C〉 raising the chance of 〈E〉 is meant that ch(E) must be higher than it would be in S without 〈C〉 being true. The corresponding conditionals which raise ch(E) given the truth of 〈C〉 under circumstances S are what TE/C makes true. In what follows I shall assume the correctness of Mellor’s theory of causation.
Jonathan Schaffer has argued that such a denial would be sharply at odds with common-sense, scientific and theoretical applications of the concept of causation: negative causation is ‘supported by all the central conceptual connotations of causation, including counterfactual, statistical, agential, evidential, explanatory, and moral connotations’ (Schaffer 2004: p. 203). It is also required by the most useful theoretical applications of causation, including Kripke’s causal theory of reference, Lewis’s theory of rational decision-making and Goldman’s theory of perception.
This follows from the assumption that truthmaking is closed under entailment. For then, if T~© makes (~CT) true and (~CT) entails 〈~E〉, we get that T~© makes 〈~E〉 true. Even Armstrong should agree to this, since true causal instances of (~CT) are ‘purely’ contingent truths (see footnote 3).
I assume that we are talking about Kim’s not having any biological children.
Briefly, Armstrong thinks that every fusion of states of affairs that are of the same sort F may stand in a contingent and external relation to some second-order ‘unit property’ G that he calls ‘totalling’. These so-called totality facts are the truthmakers for negative and general truths.
In order for causal truthmaking to account for (4), one must assume that every contingent negative truth about the world can be stated as an effect in a true causal instance of (~CT). In the present paper I have insufficient space at my disposal to defend this assumption. Suffices to say that it is reasonable to assume that the different ways in which the world stands are always explainable in terms of patterns of causal dependence. Sometimes these patterns will be hard to track down. So for example, a truth like 〈there are no unicorns〉 will presumably be grounded in causal facts involving initial conditions and a highly complex interplay between evolutionary mechanisms that set a boundary to the routes that evolution might take within the space of possibilities. I might be wrong on this particular point. But the question of what makes propositions like 〈there are no unicorns〉 true is not something that we need to discuss, let alone settle. I raise it only because it illustrates that we are able to provide causal grounds for truths of the form ‘there are no Fs’ and that this plausibly involves reference to causal mechanisms (dispositions...) that set a limit to the extension of entities having certain properties.
A similar observation is made by Cameron (2008b).
Notice that you are not forced to concede that the laws are fixed by S. A dispositional essentialist, for example, is most likely to take the laws of nature to supervene on the sparse properties that partly constitute the dispositional component (cf. Bird 2007, pp. 200–202). This does not, however, make S otiose, as we still need to include the relevant conditions in which 〈~E because C〉 is true.
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Stenwall, R. Causal Truthmaking. Int Ontology Metaphysics 11, 211–222 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12133-010-0069-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12133-010-0069-8