Abstract
This paper aims to support the claim that analytic metaphysics should be more cautious regarding the constraints that truthmaking considerations impose on metaphysical theories. To this end, I reply to Briggs and Forbes (Philos Stud 174(4):927–943, 2017), who argue that certain truthmaking commitments are incurred by a Humean metaphysics and by the Growing-Block theory. First, I argue that Humean Supervenience does not need to endorse a standard version of truthmaker maximalism. This undermines Briggs and Forbes’s conclusion that Humean Supervenience and the Growing-Block theory are incompatible. Second, I argue that the Growing-Block theory does not commit us to any weaker version of truthmaker maximalism, which also undermines Briggs and Forbes’s conclusion. Finally, I point out other reasons to think that any version of truthmaker maximalism is disputable, undermining a fortiori Briggs and Forbes’s conclusion and supporting the moral that metaphysical theories—or at least Humean Supervenience, the Growing-Block theory, and presentism—are little constrained by truthmaking commitments.
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Notes
Their other premise is: “If some propositions about the future are made true by something (or things) not in the future, then there are irreducible necessary connections between distinct existents” (Briggs and Forbes 2017, 928). Indeed, this may sound like the least obvious of the three premises. Still, this paper focuses on criticizing Briggs and Forbes’s defense of the other two, as they are sometimes assumed in other debates in contemporary metaphysics.
In more detail, and quoting (Briggs and Forbes 2017, 935), the revised version of Truthmaker Maximalism is: “If something is true, then it would not be possible for it to be false unless either certain things which [don’t exist and WILL not exist] were such that they [either exist or WILL exist], or else certain things which [exist or WILL exist] were such that they [do not exist and WILL not exist].” Cf. Westphal (2006, 4).
In the modus ponens \(\lbrace p \rightarrow q ; p \models q \rbrace\), p is Truthmaker Maximalism, and q is the incompatibility between Humean Supervenience and Growing-Block theory. Then, the modus tollens concludes that \(\lnot p\). (Cf. this suggestion with the criticisms cited in Sect. 3.2 esp. Footnote 3.2).
Nor is there any problem for the Growing-Block theory in appealing to the non-existent future. This theory, unlike Humean Supervenience, is neutral about ontological commitments to non-existent entities. The neutrality of presentism regarding the ontological commitments to abstracta is defended by Filomeno (2016), which mutatis mutandis holds for the Growig-block theory.
As constituents of, say, larger states of affairs.
In general, not only from the Humean viewpoint, the revised version seems more reasonable than the standard version. It can be said that the truth-value of a proposition about a certain period of time is grounded by what (part of) the world is like at that period of time. Furthermore, a proposition’s truth-value is independent from the times at which its utterance is made (leaving of course aside indexical propositions). So, while (part of) the world at a certain period of time grounds propositions about that period, there is no requirement that the world at that period continues to exist at any other time (cf. Westphal 2006).
If one wants to keep all classical tautological inferences valid, one can choose the supervaluationist semantics, at the cost of denying that a disjunction can be true only if one of its disjuncts is; see Briggs and Forbes (2012, 14) for an excellent summary of the trade-offs. Besides, advocates of Łukasiewicz logic reject the rules Reductio ad Absurdum and Contraposition: these fail because classical contradictions, such as \(Fp \vee \lnot Fp\), may a lack truth-value, and therefore have untrue negations. Conditional proofs fail for similar reasons; see Briggs and Forbes (2012, 24). In comparison with supervaluationism, Łukasiewicz assigns truth values to far fewer sentences, as every classical tautology has untrue instances, including the law of excluded middle (Briggs and Forbes 2012, 21); although I don’t see this as a substantial virtue or flaw. To conclude, the balance of trade-offs is longer and requires philosophical assessment, see ibidem, Iacona (2020), Øhrstrøm and Hasle (2020). Now, we do not need to decide anything here; we just need to outline the plausibility of the alternatives.
This includes 3-valued Łukasiewicz semantics, Supervaluationism, Peirce’s models, and MacFarlane’s relativism.
This first consideration against Truths about the Future does not hold if the world turns out to be deterministic, of course. For not only solar eclipses, but everything would be determined, and therefore settled. But of course, no one wants to need to assume determinism. The next reason applies regardless of whether the world is deterministic or not.
There might be a way to justify the objection that propositions about some future macroscopic events have truth-values. The philosophy of physics literature on emergence has stressed the universality of certain events, irrespective of their details at the fundamental level. For instance, the occurrence of thermodynamic behavior may be independent of both initial conditions (the positions and velocities of gas particles in a closed container, say) and fundamental dynamics (the Newtonian laws guiding such particles) (Frigg 2009, cf. Batterman 2018; Filomeno forthcoming). Then, a future event such as the increase of entropy in the universe seems to be a macroscopic event that will definitely occur, even if the fundamental laws are indeterministic. However, this speculation is disputable (e.g. it is unclear that the universality is really applying to any branch).
In fact, Humeanism is compatible with any ontological theory of time, since the same solution to the grounding problem applies, mutatis mutandis, to presentism; and it is compatible with eternalism.
Alongside this fragile foundation of some linguistic-driven criteria in metaphysics lies the well-known unreliability of our intuitions and the manifest image. This has been highlighted for centuries, and the more the scientific image develops, the further it departs from the manifest image, so the more the latter appears as an unreliable, fragile basis for discovering the fundamental structure of the world. In fact, inspired by the astonishing discoveries of modern physics, Richard Feynman (leaving aside his funny but poor comparison of philosophy of science with ornithology) raised an illustrative point which should be kept in mind by those of us investigating “armchair” metaphysics: Nature’s imagination has turned out to be, as we have a posteriori discovered, much greater than man’s.
At this point, rather than discontinue our research, we may still endorse the attitude proposed to deal with other big philosophical issues. For instance, regarding the meaning of life, you may conclude that what you deemed as the objective meaning of life merely is a subjective fiction, and there is no objective answer to aspire to. Yet faced with this, you might learn to accept living with such a profound limitation while still keep pursuing what you deem meaningful—even if it is not an objectively grounded purpose, and especially after realizing that there is nothing better to do. Analogously, regarding our perennial desire to inquire into metaphysical issues, we can accept our profound limitations while still keep pursuing our inquiry, as there is nothing better we can do. Cf. Van Fraassen's pragmatic 'acceptance' in scientific inquiry. In other words, we are like sailors acknowledging that the compass is potentially misleading. We can stay at the dock and remain agnostic, or set sail accepting the uncertainty and that the compass can lead us down the wrong route.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Axel Barceló, David Bordonaba, Graeme Forbes, Thomas Hodgson, John Horden, Andrea Raimondi, Juan Redmond, Alessandro Torza, and Jonathan Tallant for their helpful comments. For their helpful comments, this work was supported by the Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, through a fellowship from the postdoctoral program DGAPA-UNAM, and by the grant ‘Formal Epistemology—the Future Synthesis’, in the framework of the program Praemium Academicum at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences.
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Filomeno, A. On Metaphysics’ Independence from Truthmaking. Or, Why Humean Supervenience is Compatible with the Growing Block Universe. Erkenn 88, 1467–1480 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-021-00411-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-021-00411-y