Abstract
This paper considers the extent to which the notion of truthmaking can play a substantive role in defining physicalism. While a truthmaking-based approach to physicalism is prima facie attractive, there is some reason to doubt that truthmaking can do much work when it comes to understanding physicalism, and perhaps austere metaphysical frameworks in general. First, despite promising to dispense with higher-level properties and states, truthmaking appears to make little progress on issues concerning higher-level items and how they are related to how things are physically. Second, it seems that truthmaking-based approaches to physicalism will have a difficult time addressing the status of truthmaking itself without, in effect, appealing to the resources of alternative ways of conceptualizing physicalism.
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Notes
For approaches to physicalism that appeal to relations like supervenience, realization, and constitution, see Boyd (1980), Chalmers (1996), Howell (2009), Jackson (1998), Levine (2001), Loewer (2001), Melnyk (2003), Pereboom (2011), Putnam (1967), Shoemaker (2007), Tye (1995), and Wilson (2005). The label “nonreductive” is imperfect, due to different uses of “reduction” as well as disagreement about the consequences of understanding physicalism in terms of these relations. Regarding the first issue, I am using “nonreductive” in a broad sense to cover any approach that countenances entities or properties distinct from strictly physical entities and properties. An approach may be nonreductive in this sense while being reductive in other senses: for example, it is consistent with an approach accepting the reductive explainability of higher-level truths, if reductive explanation does not require metaphysical reduction. As an example of the second issue, while Shoemaker (2007) puts forward an account of physical realization as a way of articulating nonreductive physicalism, it is a matter of dispute whether the account succeeds in its nonreductive aspirations (see Kim 2010; Morris 2011; Ney 2010 for discussion). Similarly, it is a matter of dispute whether functionalism and a thesis of functional realization leads to metaphysical reduction (see Kim 2005; Block 2015 for discussion; Melnyk 2003 argues that functional realization leads to a kind of explanatory reduction). In some cases, relations like supervenience and realization are appealed to as something like premises in an argument for a reductionist picture. One might read Kim’s (2005) use functional realization in this way, as well as his recent defense of supervenience-based understandings of physicalism (see Kim 2011; for discussion, see Morris 2014); similarly, while Chalmers (1996) and Jackson (1998) formulate physicalism in terms of supervenience, they go on to argue that the supervenience thesis at issue requires the a priori deducibility of all truths about the world from a description of the world in the language of physics, which appears to at least support a kind of explanatory reduction (see Sect. 2.3 for related discussion).
For concerns along these lines, and the suggestion that they motivate a “one-level” approach to physicalism (and perhaps any comprehensive metaphysical outlook), see Heil (2003) and Kim (1998, 2005); for discussion focused on attempts to understand physicalism in terms of supervenience, see Horgan (1993) and Melnyk (2003). Melnyk (2003) argues that realization supports a kind of explanatory reduction; however, he does not infer from this a “flat” metaphysics (see fn. 3 for related discussion).
Sharpe (unpublished ms) does explicitly develop a truthmaking-based approach to physicalism, which he calls “truthmaking physicalism”. While Heil does not develop a truthmaking-based view of physicalism, much of what he says is suggestive of this. For example, he develops (2003, Chapters 2–7) a truthmaking-based approach to metaphysics as a response to what is essentially the nonreductive physicalist commitment to “levels of reality”. Further, he appears to hold (2012, Chapter 8) that the truthmakers for ordinary and special science discourse are ultimately to be discovered by physics.
Truthmaking theory is itself an area of dispute, and those interested in truthmaking have debated the nature of truthbearers, truthmakers, and the truthmaking relation, whether it ought to be held that all truths have truthmakers, and so on. For discussion, see the papers in Beebee and Dodd (2005) and Lowe and Rami (2009). My aim is to remain as neutral as possible on these issues. However, some of my discussions will work from one or another account of truthmaking.
See Merricks (2007).
See Schulte (2014). Admittedly, given the disputes that have occupied truthmaker theorists about the nature of truthbearers, truthmaking, and truthmakers (see fn.7), it is likely that not all will regard this as trivial.
This is essentially what Heil (2003) labels “Principle (Φ)”, which he takes to be a core component of the linguistic approach to metaphysics that he rejects.
Schulte’s “problem of higher-level entities” is similar to, though distinct from, the concerns that I will raise about truthmaking physicalism. Schulte (2014) is primarily interested in the extent to which various accounts of truthmaking have the consequence that items not needed as truthmakers are “ontological free lunches”. This is relevant to truthmaking physicalism, since the truthmaking physicalist should prefer an account of truthmaking under which items not needed as truthmakers are “ontological free lunches”. Nonetheless, Schulte is not interested specifically in the extent to which truthmaking can be used to understand physicalism. I discuss Schulte’s proposal for understanding truthmaking in Sect. 2.3.
See the references in fn. 6. While Heil might be read in this way, it is not entirely clear to me where he stands on these issues. A broadly reductionist position about things like tomatoes and properties like redness is suggested by his rejection, in From an Ontological Point of View, of any levels-based metaphysics. In more recent work, however, he seems more amenable to using truthmaking to draw a distinction between the fundamental and the derivative, with physics given the role of describing how the world is fundamentally; see, for example, Heil (2012), Chapter 8. I discuss a position like this in Sect. 2.2.
Below I discuss the related suggestion that when properly understood, truthmaking physicalism should be understood as a kind of eliminativism about higher-level items; see Sect. 2.2.
See Schulte (2014) for discussion. For views of truthmaking along these lines, see Armstrong (1997, 2004). For related views, see Bigelow (1988) and Lewis (2001). Schaffer (2008) attributes this kind of view to Cameron; however, Cameron (2008, 2010) is not especially forthcoming about the nature of truthmaking.
For example, while rejecting simple necessitation-based accounts of truthmaking, Merricks (2007) essentially adds to them an aboutness condition on the truthbearer, that it must be about its truthmaker. Likewise, various authors have proposed understanding truthmaking in terms of an “in virtue of” or “grounding” notion, which appears to be understood as entailing, though not entailed by, the thesis that truthmakers necessitate the truth of what they make true (see Rodriguez-Pereyra 2005; Schaffer 2008; for a related suggestion, see Lowe 2009).
Schaffer (2008) argues that truthmaking cannot provide an alternative to a Quinean approach to ontology on the grounds that a truthmaking-based theory will take certain quantifier-based commitments, those that assert the existence of a truthmaker, to be ontologically committal. My interest, however, is not with the extent to which truthmaking can provide a distinctive measure of ontological commitment. For even if “ontological commitment” is understood in truthmaker-theoretic terms, it can still be asked how those items that exist but are not ontological commitments are related to those that are ontological commitments.
This appears to be the view in Sharpe (unpublished ms).
The concern here is not that there cannot be a physicalist account of truthmaking. For example, if supervenience were sufficient for “physicalistic acceptability”, one could claim that truthmaking is unproblematic on the grounds that truthmaking supervenes on physical reality. Nor is the concern that it is impossible to articulate truthmaking in other terms—for example, in terms of an “in virtue of” or “grounding” notion (see fn. 18). Rather, the concern is specifically that truthmaking will not play a role in explaining the place of truthmaking itself in the physical world.
Two points are worth noting. First, it should be emphasized that the concerns here arise specifically for the truthmaking-based approach to physicalism, and (perhaps unlike the concerns raised in Sect. 2) do not appear to threaten the general use of truthmaking in austere metaphysical pictures. This is significant, in part, because certain objections to truthmaking-based theories of fundamentality, such as those developed in Sider (2011), can perhaps be met by taking truthmaking to be fundamental (see Fisher 2015). However, a strategy like this is unavailable to the truthmaking physicalist: physicalism places constraints on the fundamental metaphysics, and plausibly these constraints exclude fundamental truthmaking. Second, the present line of thought targets views that take truthmaking to be a relation between language and world, and has little force against views that take truthmaking to be an operator on sentences or representations (Melia 2005; Schneider 2006). While addressing the issues that these views raise for truthmaking physicalism would require a lengthy discussion, the following points are salient. First, those who have utilized truthmaking to understand austere metaphysical pictures have emphasized the role of truthmaking as a relation between truthbearers and the world, and not as a sentential operator. Second, they have supposed that truthmaking can play a role in delineating metaphysical issues from linguistic ones. This may prove untenable if “making true” is construed as a sentential operator. Third, while understanding “makes true” as a sentential operator may avoid the concerns developed in Sect. 3, such proposals do not straightforwardly avoid those advanced in Sect. 2.
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Morris, K. Physicalism, Truthmaking, and Levels of Reality: Prospects and Problems. Topoi 37, 473–482 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-016-9379-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-016-9379-y