Abstract
In this paper, I both propose and discuss a novel account of truthmaking. I begin by showing what truthmaking is not: it is not grounding and it is not correspondence. I then show what truthmaking is by offering an account that appeals both to grounding and what I call ‘deep correspondence’. After I present the account and show that it is an account that unifies, I put it to work by showing how it can overcome an objection to truthmaking, how we can get truthmaking from correspondence, what it says about truthmaker necessitation, and how it can explain a connection between truthmaker maximalism and pluralism about truth.
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Notes
There are five books (Armstrong 2004; Beebee and Dodd 2005; Merricks 2007; Monnoyer 2007; Lowe and Rami 2009) and dozens of articles devoted to truthmaking. There are also books that commit large sections to discussing truthmaking (Sider 2011, §8; Heil 2012, §8; Tallant 2018) and even one which sees all metaphysical questions through the lens of truthmaking (Tallant 2011).
This betrays my position on a contentious topic in truthmaker theory. I am a truthmaking theorist who accepts truthmakers, things in the world that make truths true. But there are truthmaking theorists who reject truthmakers. For them, there is truthmaking without truthmakers (Hornsby 2005; Melia 2005; Schnieder 2006).
See Lowe and Rami (2009, pp. 13–25) for a nice survey of attempts to define truthmaking.
As I said, all this is orthodoxy. But there are dissenters. There are some who question that grounding is two-placed (Jenkins 2011; Schaffer 2012), irreflexive (Lowe 1998, p. 145; Jenkins 2011; Correia 2014; Rodriguez-Pereyra 2015), asymmetric (Thompson 2016; Rodriguez-Pereyra 2015), transitive (Schaffer 2012; Rodriguez-Pereyra 2015), and that it holds only between facts (Cameron 2008a; Schaffer 2009; deRosset 2013; Saenz 2015).
See also Bergmann (1961) who says “Now if S is true, there must be something that makes it true. Or, as one says, the truth of S must be grounded ontologically.” (229) Consider also Liggins (2016, p. 99) who finds it attractive that the fact that Rex is barking grounds the truth that Rex is barking, but not vice-versa. Though he does not mention truthmakers, what Liggins has grounding that Rex is barking is true is what we would all call a truthmaker of the proposition that Rex is barking.
Further evidence of this comes from Armstrong (2004, p. 5) and Rodriguez-Pereyra (2009, p 228) both of whom explicitly define truthmaking in terms of in-virtue-of (which, for our purposes, is grounding). See also Correia (2011, p. 1), who finds it plausible that truthmaking should be understood solely in terms of grounding and is clear in saying that this is not a mere manner of speaking.
Two things: First, ‘<p>’ stands for ‘the proposition that p’. Second, I have it that truthmaking holds one-one. Strictly speaking, I think that this is false. It is true that the Obamas exist. But what makes this true is not a single fact but the following plurality of facts: that Barack, Michelle, Malia, and Sasha Obama each exist. Still, for stylistic reasons, I will treat truthmaking as holding one-one.
Recall, I am assuming that grounding is irreflexive. But even if grounding is not irreflexive, we should not want to say that every truthmaker grounds itself!
See Griffith (2014) for a different reason to reject that truthmakers are truthgrounders which is based on differences we find among examples of grounding.
Of course, these claims can be questioned. Still, what is important is not that they are true but that they reveal what I think we need when it comes to some facts grounding another.
But what if it has no constituents? Then it is plausible to think that nothing grounds that it exists. And if nothing grounds that it exists, then it does not exist because Pooh exists, which is precisely what I am aiming to establish.
There are contemporary accounts of the grounds of the existence of propositions that fit the spirit of these. King (2007; 2009) gives one according to which the constituents, Pooh and stuffed-with-fluff-ness, of <Pooh is stuffed with fluff >, are bound by a complex relation involving a language L, context c, lexical items a and b of L such that a and b occur at various nodes in the right king of way of a sentential relation R that, in L, involves ascribing the semantic value of b to the semantic value of a where Pooh is the semantic value of a in c and stuffed-with-fluff-ness is the semantic value of b in c. So a Kingian inspired ground of the fact that <Pooh is stuffed with fluff> exists is that Pooh and stuffed-with-fluff-ness, related in the complex manner just specified, exist.
Strictly speaking, we would need to add, as a fourth condition, that which grounds that <Pooh is stuffed with fluff> exists, namely that POOH and STUFFED WITH FLUFF, related in the right kind of way, exist. But making this explicit here is not necessary. The same holds, making the necessary changes, for the next account.
There are other theories of propositions that we could appeal to. Some hold the view that <Pooh is stuffed with fluff> is a structure whose parts are the properties Pooh-ness and stuffed-with-fluff-ness (Rasmussen 2013). The account given for this would then be similar to the ones just given except that appeal will be made to both instantiation and identity and not picking out or reference. Or take Russell’s (1910, 1912) theory, where <Pooh is stuffed with fluff> is a structure whose parts are Pooh and stuffed-with fluff-ness. The account given for Russell’s theory would then be similar to the ones just given except that appeal will be made to identity and not picking out or reference.
Of course, I am not claiming that the fact that Pooh is stuffed with fluff is not relevant, in any way, to the fact that <Pooh is stuffed with fluff> is true. Surely it is (after all, it may be part of the essence of <Pooh is stuffed with fluff> that it is true if and only if Pooh is stuffed with fluff). I am only claiming that it is not relevant in the manner specified in the text.
This explains why it will not do to say that what grounds the fact that <Pooh is stuffed with fluff> is true is the following: that Pooh is stuffed with fluff, that <Pooh is stuffed with fluff> exists, and truth (thanks to a referee for suggesting this potential ground). In this purported ground, we do not get the kind of relevance we want because we do not get a fact or facts one or more of whose constituents are such that their existing or being instanced explains that a constituent of the fact being grounded exists or is instanced.
Notice that I have not said that it is not part of the whole story to truthmaking. The target here is only that grounding is the whole story. Indeed, I will soon push for an account of truthmaking that makes grounding very much part of the story.
As I see it then, David Lewis in this paper’s first epigraph was right, but for the wrong reason. In agreement with Lewis, the truth of the proposition that there are no unicorns is not explained, and so is not grounded in, there being no unicorns. But as I understand him, Lewis’ reason for this is that the explanation is uninformative on account of its being trivial. My reason for this is that the explanation is false on account of its not being informative enough.
Notice that neither deflationary theories nor primitivism about truth furnish us with potential truthmakers. Since deflationary theories are concerned with the truth term (or at least with an extremely deflationary account of the property being true, where this property just is, in English at least, the predicate ‘true’) and not with truth itself (Devitt 2001), and since primitivism says that truth is a primitive and therefore undefined property, then neither provide us with even a potential truthmaker of a proposition’s being true (for more on why deflationism cannot provide us with truthmakers, see Liggins 2016). As a referee points out, this is not to say that these accounts of truth are inconsistent with truthmaker theory. It is to say that such theories do not, on their own, point us to what the truthmakers are for true propositions.
In assuming orthodoxy on what kinds of things truthmakers are, I am assuming two things: First, it is, typically at least, worldly things, and not linguistic or representational things, which make propositions true and second, these worldly things are by and large mind-independent things.
Cameron (2018) offers a different account of truthmaking that is much closer to TTG.
See also Rasmussen (2013, p. 167) who says “The most common view is that truth depends upon the way things are by corresponding to things”. This gets awfully close, insofar as the dependence relation here is the truthmaking relation, to thinking that truthmaking just is correspondence.
For those interested, here is Rasmussen’s analysis: a proposition p corresponds to an arrangement x if and only if (i) for each exemplifiable part of p, there is a part of x that exemplifies it, (ii) the proposition that x exists entails p, and (iii) every part of x is part of a composition that overlaps exactly those things that exemplify part of p.
This is why there is nothing inconsistent with understanding, as David does, correspondence as both a symmetric and reflexive relation. If correspondence were a dependence relation, then, of course, David’s worry would be completely undermined.
It is on account of this that some have criticized the correspondence theory as being trivial (Sellars 1962, p. 29; Davidson 1969, p. 748). As Austin (1950, p. 115), himself a proponent of the correspondence theory, says
When is a statement true? The temptation is to answer … “When it corresponds to the facts”. And as a piece of standard English this can hardly be wrong. Indeed, I must confess I do not really think it is wrong at all: the theory of truth is a series of truisms.
As mentioned in footnote 16, we would need to add here that which grounds that <Pooh is stuffed with fluff> exists, namely that ‘Pooh’ and ‘stuffed with fluff’, related in the right kind of way, exist. But omitting this here makes no difference. What I say in the text will proceed just fine without it.
As a referee pointed out, it is open to interpret the right-hand side of this account as giving us, not a new account of truthmaking (truthmaking just is grounding), but a new account of truthmakers. So interpreted, the real truthmaker of <p> is not x but the fact that <p> deeply corresponds to x. But, at least according to truthmaker orthodoxy, this gets the facts about truthmakers wrong. Truthmakers are, typically, worldly. They do not, except in certain cases, involve propositions or proposition-to-world relations. Still, if one wants to insist that according to the present account, truthmakers are proposition’s deeply corresponding to facts, then I can call our account an account of truthmaking*, where a truthmaker* is what everyone has been calling a truthmaker. Nothing will have been lost in doing this.
A referee has suggested the following response: an analysis of truthmaking in terms, and only in terms, of a primitive notion of grounding is better, on grounds of parsimony, than an analysis in terms of grounding and deep correspondence since deep correspondence is in need of further analysis. But if deep correspondence requires an analysis, it is open to analyze it in terms of notions that we already accept. In this case, appealing to deep correspondence would not yield something less parsimonious (if we want such an appeal to yield a less parsimonious analysis, then what is required is not that it has an analysis, but that it doesn’t). Moreover, appealing to parsimony here will only do the work of making an analysis of truthmaking in terms of a primitive notion of grounding better than an analysis in terms of grounding and deep correspondence if all else is equal. But that all else is not equal is precisely the point I am making in the text.
Briggs (2012, p. 13) says something similar when she says “Truthmaker theorists need a way of clarifying the nature of truthmakers, or the nature of the truthmaking relation, so that you don’t come out as a truthmaker for the proposition that there are no unicorns.”
For other correspondence theorists who see the correspondence theory as being committed to a truthmaker principle, see, inter alia, Moore (1953, p. 254), Austin (1950, p. 117), Bigelow (1988, p. 122), Armstrong (1997, p. 14), Fumerton (2006), Cameron (2008b, p. 108), MacBride (2013, pp. 868–87) and Rasmussen (2013, pp. 174–5).
According to David, saying otherwise risks circularity. If it were part of our concept of correspondence that correspondents make true the propositions they correspond to, then since the correspondence theory is typically understood as giving us an analysis of truth, and since it seems plausible to think that the truthmaking relation, in some sense, appeals to truth, then one would ultimately be fleshing out truth in terms of truth itself, which is circular. Hence for David, the risk in understanding correspondence in terms of truthmaking.
Pluralism should not to be confused with thinking that there is more than one meaning of ‘true’. Pluralism, as I am understanding it, is a metaphysical thesis, not a semantic one. For some who accept pluralism, see Wright (1992), Sher (1998), Lynch (2009) and Pedersen (2010). For some who reject it, see Tappolet (1997, 2000), Wright (2012), and Dodd (2013). For a book devoted to current issues on pluralism, see Pedersen and Wright (2013).
For distinct but similar arguments in favor of thinking that if maximalism is false, pluralism is true, see Griffith (2015, p. 1170) who favors what he calls a ‘pluralist theory of truthmaking’. This theory has it that truthmaking is a variegated phenomenon wherein positive truths, negative truths, counterfactual truths, etc. are made true in different ways. So instead of thinking that there is one relation of truthmaking and different kinds of truth, Griffith thinks that there is one kind of truth and different kinds of truthmaking. Griffith’s paper is thus part of a movement that has it that metaphysical explanatory relations such as truthmaking, ontological dependence, and grounding are plural in nature (Bennett 2011, 2017; Koslicki 2012; Wilson 2014).
This is consistent with saying that truth supervenes on being since as McLaughlin and Bennett (2014) make clear, supervenience is not dependence. Along with Baron et al. (2014), I also think that according to truthmaking, if some truths lack truthmakers, then that such truths are true is a brute, ungrounded, fact.
Notice that I am not saying that it motivates the kinds of pluralism popular in the literature on pluralism (Griffith 2015, p. 1171 also makes this point). The kinds of pluralism currently found in the literature focus on the differences between moral, mathematical, comic, legal, mental, etc. truths. The kind of pluralism discussed here focuses on the differences between truths that depend on the existence of something and those that do not. I do not take this to be an objection to the pluralism described here. After all, why think that the kinds of pluralism popular in the literature have a monopoly on the kinds of pluralism there are?
As Merricks (2007, pp. 64, 166) says, they are not about what exists because they are not, in some real sense, about anything. Merricks distinguishes between a sense of aboutness on which, for example, <there are no unicorns> is about the property of being a unicorn, and a sense of aboutness on which <there are no unicorns> is not about unicorns since there are none (pp. 32–3). Since the latter has to do with what there is, it is the sense that, according to Merricks, is relevant to truthmaking. And given this sense, negative existential, past-tensed, counterfactual, and modal truths are not about anything. For a critical discussion of Merricks on aboutness, see Schaffer (2008, pp. 302–307).
Mulligan (2007, p. 52) says something similar when he says “if truthmaker maximalism is false, … then truthmakers will not figure in a general account of truth, as opposed to accounts of some types of truths”.
Assuming both TDC and the denial of maximalism, what theory of truth should we accept for truthmakerless truths? Perhaps primitivism will do. If the truth of <p> is not dependent, even in part, on what there is, then maybe (though I am not sure about this) we should say that <p> instantiates the primitive, undefined, property being true.
Here is another way pluralism and truthmaking relate. Consider a version of pluralism according to which there are different ways of deeply corresponding (Acton 1935, p. 191; Sher 1998, 2004, 2005, 2013). Given TDC, what follows is a kind of pluralism about truthmaking: x makes <p> true just in case <p>’s being true is grounded in its deeply corresponding to x in way1, or way2, or way3, and so on. So pluralism about deep correspondence results in pluralism about truthmaking. Again, TDC has import in showing us the various ways that truth and truthmaking can relate.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Jamin Asay, Tim Pawl, Brad Rettler, Jonathan Schaffer, Alex Skiles, and the 2012–13 participants at the University of Notre Dame’s Center for Philosophy of Religion, where I presented an ancestor of this paper. A very special thanks to Paul Horwich for a conversation we had on truth and truthmaking and for some particularly encouraging advice he gave me on matters related to the profession and publishing one’s work. And finally, as I forever will, I would like to thank my wife, Amy Greenip, for her love and always present support and encouragement in my work.
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Saenz, N.B. An account of truthmaking. Synthese 197, 3413–3435 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-1894-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-1894-5