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Truths and Processes: A Critical Approach to Truthmaker Theory

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Abstract

The starting point of this paper is the idea that linguistic representation is the result of a global process: a process of interaction of a community of cognitive-linguistic agents, with one another and with the environment. I maintain that the study of truth, meaning and related notions should be addressed without losing perspective of this process, and I oppose the ‘static’ or ‘analytic’ approach, which is fundamentally based on our own knowledge of the conventional meaning of words and sentences, and the ability of using them that we have as competent speakers. I argue that the analytic perspective is responsible for five recurring difficulties in truthmaker theory: (1) the lack of attention to the difference of explanatory role between the distinct notions proposed as primary truthbearer; (2) the adscription of purely extra-linguistic truthmakers to ‘synthetic truths’, ignoring the contribution of the linguistic factor; (3) the adscription of purely linguistic truthmakers to ‘logical’ and ‘analytic truths’, ignoring the contribution of the worldly factor; (4) the difficulties in the search for minimal truthmakers; (5) the problems in the treatment of ‘negative facts’ and of other ‘logically complex facts’. I do not provide an account of how to solve these difficulties, but I do show how the ‘process model’ helps to clear up confusion regarding them.

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Notes

  1. It is true that her sentences would continue to have their conventional meaning, according to the general conventions of English. However, by the time the disagreement is so strong that I no longer admit she seriously believes what she is saying, I will tend to stop interpreting her words by reference to those general conventions. Moreover, in the limiting case, supposing that all English speakers when listening to each other perceived such extreme disagreements, the English language as a whole would be at risk of disappearing.

  2. “If the meaning of the sign … is an image built up in our minds … then why should the written sign plus this … image be alive if the written sign alone was dead?” (The Blue and Brown Books 1989: 5; written circa 1933). See also e.g. Proudfoot (2009).

  3. “‘following a rule’ is a practice” (Philosophical Investigations 1958: I: §202; written circa 1945); “The common behaviour of mankind is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language” (ibid.: §206); “‘We are quite sure of it’ … [means] that we belong to a community which is bound together by science and education” (On Certainty 1974a: §298; written circa 1951). See also e.g. Malcolm (1986: Ch. 9), Hacker (1997).

  4. “The psychological processes which are found by experience to accompany sentences are of no interest to us” (Philosophical Grammar 1974b: I: §6; written circa 1933).

  5. The river metaphor can be further developed along the following lines, although I will not make use of these details in the present paper. The riverbed is the sign (the sentence). The water flow is meaning, which travels through the sign when it is in use. When the sign falls into disuse, meaning stops flowing through it, leaving it as a dry riverbed. The sea is reality, into which meaning discharges when the sentence is true. When the sentence is false, meaning does not get to reality, but disperses before discharging in it. The clouds, finally, are the cognitive-speakers. Evaporation is the cognitive experience by means of which we pick up from the sea the meanings that have been laid down there, or we abstract new meanings. Henceforth water condensed into steam is reelaborated, individually and collectively, defining new contents and beliefs that we will pour into the river again, or that will precipitate creating new riverbeds, in continuous creative change.

  6. Strawson (1998: 403).

  7. The term ‘translinguistic’ appears in an approximately similar sense in Kirkham (1992: §2.3: 56), in turn inspired in Sellars (1963: §2: 641). Similar labels used in this context have been ‘non-linguistic’ (Quine 1970: Ch. 1: 14) and ‘extra-linguistic’ (Haack 1978: Ch. 6: §4: 82).

  8. Quoted in MacBride (2005: §5: 136), from where the phrase ‘Strawson’s famous triviality charge’ has been taken. Also quoted in Dodd (2002: §2: 181), Morris (2005: §3: 51), Smith and Simon (2007: §4: 84), David (2009b: §5), Pendlebury (2010: §1: 137, footnote 1), Candlish and Damnjanovic (2011: §3.2), etc.

  9. “The limit of language manifests itself in the impossibility of describing the fact that corresponds to (is the translation of) a sentence without simply repeating the sentence” (Wittgenstein, Culture and Value 1998: 13; written circa 1931); “When a statement is true, there is, of course, a state of affairs which makes it true … but equally of course, we can only describe that state of affairs in words (either the same or, with luck, others)” (Austin 1950: §3a: 117). Analyses of propositions in terms of possible worlds, or in terms of ‘sentences of the language of thought’, are also typically dependant in an essential way on the ordinary sentences by means of which the proposition in question is characterised (e.g.: ‘the set of possible worlds in which it is raining here and now’, ‘the sentence of the language of thought which corresponds to my judgement that it is raining here and now’, etc.).

  10. Compare: “A proposition ... is a sentence in the indicative ... A proposition is just a symbol” (Russell 1918: §1: 504), with: “A man believes that Socrates is dead. What he believes is a proposition” (ibid.: 507).

  11. Compare: “In a proposition a thought finds an expression that can be perceived by the senses” (Wittgenstein 1921: §3.1), “A proposition contains the form, but not the content of its sense” (ibid.: §3.13), with: “A proposition can be true or false in virtue of being a picture of reality” (ibid.: §4.06).

  12. The terms ‘proposition’ and ‘sentence’ are used indistinctly (see especially 166–168).

  13. “truth-makers, that in the world in virtue of which sentences or propositions are true” (Mulligan et al. 1984: §1: 289); and section 6 (particularly 315–316), where the terms ‘sentence’ and ‘proposition’ are used indistinctly.

  14. “Sentences and facts have the same kind of structure (propositional structure) ... propositional structure is fundamentally the structure of propositions; that is, of sentences” (Morris 2005: §3: 51).

  15. The terms ‘sentence’, ‘statement’ and ‘proposition’ appear to be used indistinctly, save by the employment of differentiated quotation signs in giving examples. A distinction is also attempted, from a hard-core analytic perspective, between an ‘internal’ question of truth, to be answered in view of “how our language works”, and an ‘external’ question of truth, to be answered in view of what are “the things that there really are” (Cameron 2008a: §5: 13).

  16. The terms ‘proposition’ and ‘sentence’ are used indistinctly.

  17. Kirkham (1992: §2.4), Glanzberg (2009: §6.1), Horwich (2009: §2), Schulte (2011: §1: 414–415).

  18. Fox (1987: §1: 189), Read (2000: §1: 67, footnote 1), Rodriguez-Pereyra (2002: §1.3: 29, footnote 6), (Schnieder 2006a: §1: 72, endnote 1), López de Sa (2009: 417, footnote 1), Lowe (2009: 201), Vision (2010: §2: 110).

  19. “Most truth-maker theorists hold that propositions are the primary truth-bearers” (Rami 2009: §6: 10). See indeed Künne (2003: Ch. 5: 249), Rodriguez-Pereyra (2005: §1), Liggins (2005: §1.1: 105), Hornsby (2005: 33, footnote 2), Dodd (2007: §1: 383), Mulligan (2007: §1: 51), Mumford (2007): §1: 313), Simons (2007): 67), Smith and Simon (2007: §II: 92–93), David (2009a: §1: 138), Parsons (2009: §1: 217), Schaffer (2010: §1: A3), Briggs (2012: §1), etc.

  20. Lewis (2001: §2: 604), Armstrong (2004: §2.6: 12), Englebretsen (2010: §1), Fumerton (2010: 91–92), etc.

  21. A similar observation can be made about this eclectic approach of Moore: “There are, therefore these three senses of the words true and false: The sense in which propositions are true or false; the sense in which acts of belief are true or false; and the sense in which anything that expresses a proposition is true or false … each can be defined by reference to the others” (1953: Ch. 3: 65; text from Lectures given in 1910–1911).

  22. Kirkham (1992: §2.4–2.5).

  23. Austin (1950: §2: 113–114), Davidson (1969: 754–755), Haack and Haack (1970).

  24. “In inveighing against propositions in ensuing pages, I shall of course be inveighing against them always in the sense of sentence meanings” Quine (1970: Ch. 1: 2); “What are best regarded as true and false are not propositions but sentence tokens, or sentences if they are eternal” (ibid.: 14).

  25. I thank José López Martí for drawing my attention to this work.

  26. “In the main part of the paper we shall consider the claims of one class of entity, which we call moments, to fill … [the] role [of truth-makers]” (Mulligan et al. 1984: §1: 289); “examples [of moments] are … sound waves, cyclones, etc., and more generally all events, actions, processes, states, and conditions essentially involving material things” (ibid.: §2: 292).

  27. See footnote 13 above.

  28. He immediately specifies: “This is not true of all propositions ... In general analytic propositions are not grounded in reality” (Rodriguez-Pereyra 2005: §4, footnote 7). We will discuss analytic propositions in the next section.

  29. Similarly in Austin (1950: §3a: 117), Searle (1998: §1), Restall (2000: §1: 211), Read (2000: §1: 67), Lewis (2001: §2: 605), Parsons (2009: §1: 218), Efird and Stoneham (2009: 210), Englebretsen (2010: §4), Textor (2012: 1), etc.

  30. Thus e.g. in Schaffer (2010: §1).

  31. I thank Alejandro Villa Torrano for his insistence on this point.

  32. Armstrong (2004: §2.3).

  33. See MacBride (2013: §§1.2–1.6; §§3.6–3.8), Schnieder (2006b).

  34. MacBride (2013: §1) points out that “Some philosophers argue th [e] notion [in virtue of] is an unavoidable primitive”, quoting in this respect just Rodriguez-Pereyra (2006: 960–961). However, what Rodriguez-Pereyra says is: “No doubt the notion of ‘in virtue of’ is not totally transparent and there is a point in trying to elucidate it” (Rodriguez-Pereyra 2006: §2: 960, my emphasis).

  35. Compare: “the ... truth-value ... is usually the outcome of three factors: (1) the connection between the sentence itself and its linguistic meaning ... (2) the circumstances of utterance, and (3) whether things are as they are thereby said to be” (Simons 1992: §2: 159–160), with: “a truthmaker is in general something such that the proposition that it exists entails the truth in question” (Simons 2000: §5).

  36. Compare: “As Simons (1992: 159) says ... truth is the joint outcome of two largely independent factors: that about the language which determines what a sentence means and that about whatever it is in the world which determines that the sentence, meaning as it does, is true or false” (Rodriguez-Pereyra 2002: §2.1: 31), with: “A truthmaker is an entity that makes true a proposition” (Rodriguez-Pereyra 2005: §2: 17). In a footnote to the latter quote Rodriguez-Pereyra asks us to notice that in his 2002 book he “took sentences, rather than propositions, to be truthbearers” (2005: §1, footnote 1). However, he makes no additional observation regarding the difference brought about by this change, in view of the existing gap between the nature and the explanatory role of these two notions, and the difficulty of giving a non-trivial explanation of the connection between them.

  37. On the one hand MacBride highlights: “The truth of a statement is the upshot of two distinguishable factors, what the statement says about reality on the one hand, whether reality accords with what the statement says on the other” (MacBride 2013: §3.5), as well as: “To provide a full account, truth-makers cannot be anything else except entities that guarantee without further ado or qualification that the statements they make true are true; if further assistance is needed then whatever entities we’ve appealed to so far can’t be truth-makers” (ibid.: §3.6). However, he still refuses to admit that the need to explain that interaction down to the level of sentences is an unavoidable requirement of any serious explanation of the concept of truth: “unless it has already been established that a theory of truth for a language that fails to explain how its sentences are made true fails to articulate in some critical respect how reality conspires with meaning to deliver their mutual upshot, viz. truth. But this hasn’t been established –at least not yet” (ibid.: §3.5).

  38. Similarly in Armstrong (2004: §8.9: 109), Smith and Simon (2007: §II.7: 94), Lowe (2009: 209), Schulte (2011: §5: 428), etc.

  39. I thank José López Martí for drawing my attention to this point.

  40. “Truth presupposes meaningfulness” (Lewy 1976: Ch. 2: 15).

  41. Also, to be precise, a truth with existential presuppositions is not made true by the mere existence of the entities referred: we have to appeal again to the overall perspective of the cognitive-linguistic process.

  42. Other contributions worth noting here are Quine’s critique of the analytic–synthetic distinction (Quine 1951: §§1–4), his view that neither logic nor mathematics is immune to revision in the light of experience (ibid.: §6), and works derived from these views such as Putnam (1971), Davidson (1974), etc.

  43. “we use the term ‘proposition’ ... without being seriously committed to abstract propositions” (Peter Simons 1992: §2: 160); “Truth attaches in the first place to propositions ... But no Naturalist can be happy with a realm of propositions” (Armstrong 1997: §8.53); “truths are (centrally) true propositions ... But what are propositions? ... They are the content of the belief ... what makes the belief the particular belief that it is; or else the meaning of the statement, what makes the statement the particular statement that it is ... To go further than this here would take us, inappropriately, deep into the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language” (Armstrong 2004: §2.6: 12–14); “We can, and should, bracket here the difficult question what meanings are, though I would hope for a naturalistic account of meanings” (ibid.: §8.9: 109); “questions of meaning and sense may be avoided while attending to the project of ontological analysis” (Smith and Simon 2007: §II.7: 95). The obscurity of the notion of proposition in truthmaker literature reaches the point that it turns out to be dubious whether p and p & p should be counted as two distinct propositions or as a single one (cf. Rodriguez-Pereyra 2009: §4: 436–437).

  44. “If T is a minimal truthmaker for p, then you cannot subtract anything from T and the remainder still be a truthmaker for p” (Armstrong 2004: §2.10: 19–20). Similar formulations can be found in Mulligan et al. (1984: §3: 297), Fox (1987: §1: 190), Restall (1996: §1: 332), Simons (2000: §5: 67), David (2005: §1: 143), Mumford (2005: 263), Horwich (2009: §2: 187); Parsons (2009: §1: 219), Rami (2009: §8: 24), Rodriguez-Pereyra (2009: §3: 435), MacBride (2013: §1), etc.

  45. “Language disguises thought. So much so, that from the outward form of the clothing it is impossible to infer the form of the thought beneath it … The tacit conventions on which the understanding of everyday language depends are enormously complicated” (1921: §4.002).

  46. “what was … an atomic sentence might after translation into a more refined language appear as nothing of the sort” (Ramsey 1927: 167); “a statement which was absolutely specific with respect to one language might not be so with respect to another” (Ayer 1963: Ch. 6: 176).

  47. “I asked Wittgenstein whether, when he wrote the Tractatus, he had ever decided upon anything as an example of a “simple object”. His reply was that at the time his thought had been that he was a logician; and that it was not his business, as a logician, to try to decide whether this thing or that was a simpler matter or a complex thing, that being a purely empirical matter! It was clear that he regarded his former opinion as absurd” (Malcolm 1984: 70).

  48. Thus (my italics): “Consider the truth that a human being exists ... every human being that has ever existed, exists now or will exist in the future ... seems to be, or to be very close to being, a minimal truthmaker” (Armstrong 2004: §2.11); “Consider the truth < Venus is a different entity from Mars > ... For this truth, Venus + Mars would appear to be a minimal truthmaker” (ibid.: §4.6: 50); “Consider the mereological whole of these four men ... This whole would seem to be one of the ... minimal truthmakers for the truth that there are at least four men” (ibid.: §9.2: 113). By contrast, all examples of minimal truthmakers which are given as definitive correspond to proposition schemata or philosophical propositions: “if there are states of affairs, such entities as a ’s being F ... the truth < a is F > has that state of affairs as unique minimal truthmaker” (ibid.: §2.13: 22); “each simple property is a minimal truthmaker for the truth < there exist simple properties>” (ibid.: §2.11); “for every truthmaker T, the truth < T exists > has T as its unique minimal truthmaker” (ibid.: §2.13).

  49. “Motion exists ... But this is compatible ... with the nature of motion being a philosophical and/or scientific mystery ... From the standpoint of truthmaker theory we can say: the exact nature of the truthmaker for < motion exists > may still be to seek, and this exact nature may be quite a surprise” (Armstrong 2004: §3.2: 28); “these problems will largely be solved within the natural sciences. It will be physics and cosmology that tell us the true nature of time” (ibid.: Ch. 11: 150). Similar formulations can be found in other authors: “the investigation of what makes a particular sentence true is thus fundamentally an empirical, not a philosophical one” (Mulligan et al. 1984: §3: 299–300); “we are willing to content ourselves with the question of relative simplicity, for example of the simplicity that is determined by the elementary sentences of the various material sciences” (ibid.: §5: 311); “Often it will require empirical research to settle what makes a statement true” (MacBride 2013: §1.1); see also Fox (1987: §5: 199), Simons (2000: §VII), Schulte (2011: §4: 425–426), etc.

  50. Each of the two states (motion and rest) is the exact opposite of the other, both are relative to the reference frame, and by the law of inertia none of the two is more ‘natural’ or physically prior to the other.

  51. “One has a certain repugnance to negative facts … When I was lecturing on this subject at Harvard [in 1914] I argued that there were negative facts, and it nearly produced a riot” (Russell 1919a: §3: 42); “There is implanted in the human breast an almost unquenchable desire to find some way of avoiding the admission that negative facts are as ultimate as those that are positive” (Russell 1919b: §1: 4).

  52. Wittgenstein (1921: §5.5151), Austin (1950: §3a: 117), Strawson (1950: §5: 154), Ayer (1963: Ch. 6: 174–175), Mulligan et al. (1984: §6: 314–315), Fox (1987: §9: 204), Lewis (1992: 216), Molnar (2000: §4), Peter Simons (2005: 255), Cheyne and Pigden (2006: §2), Kukso (2006: §8: 36), Dodd (2007: §2: 386), Rami (2009: §7: 15), Tallant (2010: §5.1: 397), MacBride (2013: §2.1.4.1), etc. Armstrong (2004) rejects all negative facts except general facts, which he considers to be a special subclass of the negatives (Armstrong 2004: §5.2: 54, 59; 2007: §1: 99); Mumford (2007) rejects not only negative facts but also negative truths.

  53. Mulligan et al. (1984: §6: 314), Molnar (2000: §10), Parsons (2006: §1), Dodd (2007: §8: 400), Rami (2009: §9: 27–28).

  54. Horwich (2009: §6: 195–196; §8: 198).

  55. “I am still inclined to think that there are [negative facts] … I do not say positively that there are, but there may be” (Russell 1919a: §3: 42). “It must not be supposed that the negative fact contains … more constituents than a positive fact … The difference between the two forms is ultimate and irreducible. We will call this characteristic of a form its quality. Thus facts, and forms of facts, have two opposite qualities, positive and negative” (Russell 1919b: §1: 4).

  56. “What makes the negative facts negative ... is their polarity ... the polarities of facts seem to be no more nor less mysterious than the polarities of physics –the likes of spin, charm, flavour, and so on. Such polarities are postulated in science to explain the data” (Beall 2000: §2: 266). See also Priest (2000: §7: 317–318) and Dodd (2007: §3).

  57. Jago (2011), Barker and Jago (2012).

  58. “So long as we confine ourselves to atomic facts, i.e., to such as contain only one verb and neither generality nor its denial, the distinction between positive and negative facts is easily made. In more complicated cases there are still two kinds of facts, though it is less clear which is positive and which negative” (Russell 1919b: §1: 3). He also notices that there is no ‘formal test’ or ‘general definition’ for being a negative fact, so we have to “go into the meanings of words” (1919a: §3: 46–47).

  59. “The intuitive distinction between positive and negative truths seems correct, but it is not easy to find any general principles of demarcation” (Molnar 2000: §1).

  60. “Statements of the form “a is F” aren’t invariably positive … nor are statements of the form “a isn’t F” … always negative. But it doesn’t follow from the fact that a syntactic test cannot be given that there is nothing to the contrast between positive and negative” (MacBride 2013: §2.1.4.1).

  61. “we cannot distinguish negative propositions from positive ones simply on a logico-linguistic basis … What is needed is the metaphysical sensibility to tell the difference between things and absences” (Mumford 2007: §6: 327).

  62. “the most problematic class of truths still remains on the agenda, namely true negative propositions. So one may try to restrict (TM) [the truthmaker principle] to the class of positive contingently true propositions. The problem with this strategy is that it seems to be impossible to distinguish positive from negative propositions, in general … as far as natural language is concerned, drawing a distinction between atomic and non-atomic propositions seems to be as problematic as drawing a distinction between positive and negative propositions” (Rami 2009: §9: 27–28).

  63. “To be a truthmaker theorist is to commit oneself to a principle stating that the members of a certain class of true propositions have truthmakers” (Dodd 2007: §1: 383).

  64. “propositions are mind and language-independent and, hence, eternal and necessary existents” (Dodd 2007: §5, footnote 15).

  65. “Since there cannot be a truthmaker theory that solves the problem of negative truths whilst remaining well motivated, we should give up on truthmaking altogether” (Dodd 2007: §8).

  66. “Restricting Truth-maker to atomic truths might have the desired results in a … model in which atomic truths are identified with true atomic sentences in a formal language. But it is not clear how to specify this restriction informatively with respect to real-world truths, because it is not obvious which, if any, of them are atomic in their own right, i.e., independently of the ways in which they could be expressed. I suspect that this problem is intractable” (Pendlebury 2010: §3: 140).

  67. “I will maintain my opposition to negative and general facts, but give an improved account of how to do without them” (Pendlebury 2010: §1: 138; §3: 144).

  68. This ‘fallacy’ is akin to what Heil has called ‘linguisticism’, in turn defined as the “tendency to conflate features of descriptions and features of what is described” (Heil 2006: Abstract). Heil credits C. B. Martin for the label ‘linguisticism’ (ibid.: 233, footnote 2).

  69. “the negative is just part of ordinary ontological commitment” (Barker and Jago 2012: §1: 117–118); “What differs between negative and positive facts is the kind of non-mereological composition involved” (ibid.: §3: 121).

  70. The idea of using the invented word ‘cata’ to illustrate my position at this point was suggested to me by José López Martí.

  71. “Cheyne and Pigden’s … ‘Representational Fallacy’ … is supposed to be the activity of ‘reading off’ the structure of reality from the structure of language. As a good metaphysical realist, I’ve no quarrel with the view that this kind of reading off is, in general, invalid. Alarmingly, however, they clearly have a much broader notion of what reading off the structure of reality from the structure of language consists in than I do” (Parsons 2006: §3: C).

  72. “to identify the properties which are of the essentially positive types … one needs a theory that shows what natural kinds there are … This theory cannot be formulated on purely a priori grounds but would rely on current best science” (Molnar 2000: §1: 73).

  73. “on the whole I do incline to believe that there are negative facts and that there are not disjunctive facts” (Russell 1919a: §3: 46).

  74. “Because disjunctive and negative states of affairs will be rejected, molecular states of affairs are all of them mere conjunctions of atomic states of affairs” (Armstrong 1997: §3.1: 19).

  75. “as in the case of disjunctive facts and disjunctions, existential facts –if there are any– should not be postulated as the truthmakers of existential generalisations … How about conjunctions? The situation here is different … one may suppose that to account for the truthmakers of conjunctions … one needs to postulate conjunctive facts” (Rodriguez-Pereyra 2002: §2.2: 37–38).

  76. “All that is required for [disjunctive facts] is a truthmaker for at least one disjunct, and then there seems no need to postulate disjunctive facts in addition. … It is not difficult to argue that existential facts are not really required. … I will argue in addition that provided we allow ourselves general facts then no further negative facts are needed among our truthmakers” (Armstrong 2004: §5.2: 54).

  77. “Negative facts … cannot be regarded as a serious solution. If we postulate them … we are only cheating” (Rami 2009: §7: 15); while: “Intuitively, the fact that snow is white and grass is green … seems a plausible truth-maker for the proposition that snow is white and grass is green” (ibid.: §8: 25).

  78. “we show how to accommodate conjunctive, existential, negative existential and universal facts in the theory” (Barker and Jago 2012: §5: 124); “we do not accept disjunctive facts of any kind” (ibid.: 126).

  79. “disjunctive facts can be obtained with the tools already available to us” (Jago 2011: §6: 44).

  80. “Although ‘Cyril has viral hepatitis’ may be logically equivalent to (i.e., have the same truth-conditions as) ‘Cyril has A-hepatitis or Cyril has B-hepatitis’, this is not something that can be established by any lexical, grammatical, or logical analysis of the meaning of the sentence, but at most by empirical research. This research does not uncover a hidden ambiguity in the term ‘hepatitis’ … Those who used the term ‘hepatitis’ before the discovery of its varieties did not fail to understand the term; they were simply (partly) ignorant about hepatitis” (Mulligan et al. 1984: §3: 299); “might we not consider selected disjunctions of universals, and selected negations of universals? Might it not be legitimate to account these as universals if the development of the natural sciences appeared to demand this? … No firm thesis is advanced here … In the spirit of a posteriori realism, options about disjunctive and negative properties should be kept a little open” (Armstrong 1997: §3.41: 27–28); “Just as the apparently natural colours turned out to be disjunctive, perhaps one day the spins and charges and masses of modern science will themselves turn out to be disjunctive too” (Melia 2005: §3: 76).

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Picazo, G. Truths and Processes: A Critical Approach to Truthmaker Theory. Philosophia 42, 713–739 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-014-9533-y

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