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Truthmaking for Meinongians

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Abstract

This paper aims to introduce Meinongian Abstractionism (MA), i.e. a view on the metaphysics of truthmaking and modality. This approach is based on the notion of objectives—one of the key elements of Alexius Meinong’s Theory of Objects. In the light of it, worlds are interpreted in terms of sets of subsistent and non-subsistent objectives. This—along with Meinong’s characterization of objectives—provides a ground for possible as well as impossible worlds. One of the consequences of Meinongain Abstractionism is a reformulation of the relation of truthmaking in modal terms. Importantly, this reformulation avoids the problem of too-coarse grained analysis of truthmakers. This makes MA a metaphysically–oriented supporter of the so-called ‘hyperintensional revolution.’

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Notes

  1. Thanks to Franz Berto, Philip Bricker, Arkadiusz Chrudzimski, Tadeusz Ciecierski, Alessandro Giordani, Katarzyna Kijania-Placek, Daniel Nolan, Jacek Paśniczek, Mariusz Popieluch, Pierre Saint-Germier, Diego Tajer, and the anonymous reviewers for this journal for their helpful comments concerning the earlier versions of the paper. This material is based on the work supported by the National Science Centre (NCN), Poland (Grant No. 2016/20/S/HS1/00125).

  2. See e.g., (Fox 1987; Mulligan et al. 1984; Bigelow 1988; Armstrong 1997, 2004; MacBride 2019).

  3. Indeed, most theorists of truthmaking hold that Tm is a many-to-many relation. Neverthless, for the subject of this paper the mentioned assumption about Tm being one-to-many relation is sufficent.

  4. See (Read 2000; Restall 2009; Rodriguez-Pereyra 2006; Jago 2009; López de Sa 2009; Tałasiewicz et al. 2013; Fine 2018).

  5. The view that different types of entities exist (or have being) in a different way is often labeled ‘ontological pluralism,’ and is a subject of ongoing debate (see e.g., Quine 1948; van Inwagen 1998; McDaniel 2009). Although the view is considered to be a controversial one, I do not intend to discuss it here, and I merely assume it for the sake of argument.

  6. In virtue of similarities between the notions of objective and state of affairs (Grossman 1983; Smith 1989), the introduced change might be taken to be superfluous. The change has two motivations. The first one is that the notion of a state of affairs carries a great theoretical burden. Many have claimed that every state of affairs exists or that there are no molecular (negative, complex) states of affairs. This obviously is not a dogma, nevertheless in order to avoid side discussions I would rather like to give up the phrase ‘state of affairs’ in favor of ‘objective.’ The second motivation is that the view that is proposed in this paper is committed to Meinong’s well-known principle of characterization. While Meinong originally applied it to the characterization of simple objecta, it will be reformulated to also apply to worlds. If one, however, does not consider the mentioned reasons to be substantial enough for this change, one may stick with notions of states of affairs and obtaining (or existence). It should be noticed, however, that there are reasons for which similarities between these two notions are not so obvious (Findlay 1963, pp. 59–101).

  7. In this context, sentence (iv) contains a sentential connective of affirmation (‘\(\llcorner \)’), which is an opposition to negation and reads ‘it is the case that’ (Meinong 1910, pp. 39, 168).

  8. For other logical connectives see Sect. 4.2.

  9. See also (Findlay 1963, p. 76).

  10. For the debate over the plausibility of the original notion of objective, see among others (Russell 1905; Reinach 1911; Findlay 1963; Smith 1982, 1989; Sierszulska 2005).

  11. See (Castañeda 1974; Rapaport 1978; Parsons 1980; Routley 1980; Zalta 1983; Jacquette 1996; Paśniczek 1999; Priest 2005; Berto 2013).

  12. In this section, I focus on simple, atomic objectives. Objectives which are referents of complex sentences are subjects of Sect. 4.2.

  13. Given that Biv. is meant to express bivalence, this characterization may seem to be stronger than it should be. An alternative to this is to hold that for every objective of a given ontological status, if it is an element of w, then it is not the case that the same objective of the opposite ontological status is an element of w as well. This would be sufficient for such sentences, that their \(\delta \) function’s image is a set of two elements. Yet, as we will see in Sect. 4.2., there are sentences (e.g., disjunctions) for which this does not hold. Thus, to guarantee the bivalence of every sentence, we need a stronger assumption.

  14. As a matter of fact, there is also nihilism, which has it that no truth requires a truthmaker. That, however, is merely skepticism about the plausibility of the notion of truthmaking in the first place. For that reason, I do not take it into consideration (MacBride 2019).

  15. Notice that the truth of \(\lnot \varphi \) does not reduce to the falseness of \(\varphi \) or \(\llcorner \varphi \).

  16. See Sect. 4.3.

  17. While Armstrong’s view takes propositions to play the role of tb, his observation holds also in those cases where sentences are truth-bearers.

  18. Contrary to what the name may suggest, the empty world is not a world with no elements. After all, worlds are non-empty sets of objectives (Nolan 1997; Vander 1997).

  19. See (Castañeda 1974; Rapaport 1978; Parsons 1980; Routley 1980; Zalta 1983; Jacquette 1996; Paśniczek 1999; Priest 2005; Berto 2013).

  20. Notice that if \(\varphi \) is false, this is so due to a falsitymaker (i.e., an entity that is an element of each w, where \(\varphi \) is false) and not merely due to a lack of an adequate truthmaker. Accordingly, the falseness of a given sentence does not reduce to the absence of its truthmaker.

  21. Notice that this does not depend on what logic \({{L}_1}\) is. While many advocates of TE assume the notion of entailment known from classical logic, it seems that a similar problem arises in cases of non-classical logics as well.

  22. See also (Wolniewicz 1979, p. 167)

  23. At the same time, condition \(\hbox {ii}_{{MA}}\) allows preserving the commutativity of conjunctions and disjunctions, which some consider being a desirable limitation of fine-grainedness (Bjerring and Schwarz 2017).

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  1. Institute of Philosophy, University of Warsaw, Krakowskie Przedmieście 3, 00-927, Warszawa, Poland

    Maciej Sendłak

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Sendłak, M. Truthmaking for Meinongians. Synthese 200, 55 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03541-0

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