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We don’t need no explanation

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Abstract

Explanation has played myriad roles in truthmaker theory. The notion of explanation is sometimes thought to give content to the very idea of truthmaking, and is sometimes used as a weapon to undermine the entire point of truthmaker theory. I argue that the notion of explanation is dialectically useless in truthmaker theory: while it’s true that truthmaking offers a form of explanation, this claim is theoretically unilluminating, and leaves truthmaker theorists vulnerable to various kinds of attack. I advocate an alternative approach to truthmaker theory that downplays the role of explanation, and show how it releases the enterprise from a variety of problematic commitments that have troubled truthmaker theorists. The “ontology-first” approach to truthmaking that I advocate not only restores the initial impulse behind truthmaking, but also has a number of theoretical advantages. Most prominently, it dodges the infamous problem of negative existentials, and lessens truthmaker theory’s dependence on contentious intuitive judgments about both explanation and truthmaking.

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Notes

  1. There are exceptions. See, for instance, Briggs (2012) and Angere (2015).

  2. Well, not really. See Chang (2004).

  3. Grounding theorists are another story. See, e.g., Rosen (2010).

  4. Semantic ascent and descent are usually associated with material biconditionals such as ‘<p> is true if and only if p’. My current claim is that the “because” formulations assert a direction of priority between the components of the biconditionals. But to assert that priority is not to offer a truthmaker.

  5. One might suggest drawing a sharp distinction between explaining, say, why Macca sang lead on “Help!”, and why <Macca sang lead on “Help!”> is true, but doing so draws an unwarranted chasm between two nearly identical states of affairs. Furthermore, to suggest that truthmaker theory is concerned with only one of these kinds of truths (namely, the semantically ascended ones) is to misinterpret the ambitions of truthmaker theory. Truthmaker theorists concern themselves with the ontological grounds for all truths, not just semantically ascended ones.

  6. This style of argument can be found in, e.g., Dodd (2002, 2007), Hornsby (2005), and Perrine (2015).

  7. This quotation is instructive, as it shows how the mere presence of explanatory language (‘because’, ‘in virtue of’, ‘responsible’) is not by itself a guarantee that explanation is being relied on in the substantive way that I am arguing against. That one employs explanatory idioms—as I do myself—is not constitutive of taking the “explanatory-first” approach to truthmaking that I identify and criticize in this paper.

  8. See, for instance, Asay (2016).

  9. This is not to say, however, that ontology-first truthmaking is identical to Quine’s metaphysical methodology: to ask Quine’s question is not to answer it the way he does. For one thing, it’s anachronistic to talk about Quine’s views about “truthmaking”. For another, it is no presupposition of truthmaker theory that ontological investigation applies only to theories that have been regimented into first-order logic. Nor does it assume that ontological commitments can be simply “read off” the truths once so regimented: truths need not wear their ontological implications on their sleeves. The relationship between “theories of ontological commitment” that one finds in, say, Quine (1960) and Azzouni (2004), and theories of truthmaking is complicated. See Cameron (2008), Schaffer (2008b), and Rettler (2016) for discussion, as I cannot explore the matter in full here. One point of difference is clear. Take some true accidental predication, such as <a is F>. Quine takes this to force an ontological commitment only to the particular a, and to there being Fs. Many truthmaker theorists (such as Armstrong) think there needs to be a state of affairs—what we might name ‘a’s being F’—to make it true. Whether we call a’s being F an ontological commitment of <a is F> depends on how we choose to use the phrase ‘ontological commitment’. What’s clear is that <a is F> doesn’t quantify over a’s being F, and so truthmaking questions cannot be assumed to be settled merely by settling on the values of one’s variables.

  10. One might note here that in offering some object x as a truthmaker for some proposition, one is offering another truth, namely, the proposition that x exists. This observation is fine, so long as we keep in mind that it’s philosophically contentious just which truths are the ontologically committing ones. Quine (1960) has a famous view on that matter, but it’s not the only one. See Azzouni (2004) for discussion.

  11. It’s not clear to me that Smith and Simon’s use of ‘ontological explanation’ forces them into the explanation-first camp, since they explicate what they mean by ‘explanation’ in a way similar to my articulation of ontology-first truthmaking. So as far as I can tell, it’s open to them to agree with all of my remarks on explanation. That said, there are other aspects of their view with which I would contend. For instance, they argue that when T is a truthmaker for <p>, T’s existence is not only sufficient, but also necessary for <p> to be true. Thus, they deny that Socrates makes true <There are humans>, which I believe is an unwelcome consequence. (Of course, if their view on this case is a product of some prior set of explanatory judgments, then they may well belong to the explanation-first camp.).

  12. My thanks go to Mark Colyvan for stressing this aspect of my view.

  13. I discuss this connection more in Asay (2016: 52–53). See also David (2009) for more on the relationship between truthmaking and correspondence.

  14. Perhaps more carefully put, my view is that the ideas behind both approaches have been with truthmaker theory from the beginning, but that explanation-first truthmaking has been rising in prominence and visibility. By explicitly distinguishing the two, I hope to restore what I take to be truthmaking’s original ontological focus—a focus which was always primary, though not perhaps exclusive.

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Acknowledgements

This paper was presented at the Explananza workshop and conference at the University of Western Australia in December 2015. My thanks go to all the participants there, particularly David Braddon-Mitchell, Mark Colyvan, Lina Jansson, Kristie Miller, Michael Rubin, Jonathan Tallant, and Al Wilson, and especially to Sam Baron for bringing everyone together. Sam and Jonathan also provided very helpful feedback on later drafts. Thanks also go to the referees for the journal. The work described in this paper was substantially supported by a grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (HKU 23400014).

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    Jamin Asay

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Asay, J. We don’t need no explanation. Philos Stud 175, 903–921 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-0898-1

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