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Predication and truthmaking: an improvement on the essentialist approach to truthmaking

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Abstract

This paper addresses some problems related to the relation of truthmaking, especially those concerning its necessity, adopting an essentialist point of view and focusing on the nature of truthbearers. According to the orthodox view in truthmaker theory, the relation of truthmaking is necessary in some sense. Thus, an important question involves how the relation of truthmaking is made necessary. I adopt a version of Jonathan Lowe’s essentialist approach to this question. However, contra Lowe, I take token acts of predication as the primary truthbearers. This is Peter Hanks’ view in the philosophy of language. I shall argue that some problems with the essentialist approach can be solved by taking the nature of token acts of predication to be the source of necessity in truthmaking. At the end of this paper, I shall also briefly outline two general consequences related to truthmaking that I suppose this move about truthbearers should have.

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Notes

  1. In this paper, I use the words ‘being’, ‘entity’, ‘object’, and ‘thing’ in the same general sense.

  2. As I take predications rather than propositions to be (the primary) truthbearers, ‘<p>’ in (TM) stands for a predication in this paper. I do not think that this modification is crucial for (TM).

  3. Notably, if a relation is internal, it will also be necessary, although not the other way around.

  4. Lowe seems to be an instrumentalist as to possible worlds and so avoids the existential commitment to them. I believe that this may be the reason he employs the word ‘circumstances’ instead of ‘possible worlds’, which is more common. Although I use the latter below, I would also like to avoid the existential commitment to possible worlds, and so I use the word ‘possible world’ as a convenient way to talk about possibility.

  5. Lowe himself denies the particularity of numbers and expresses doubts about whether sets are ontologically significant (2006, 81–82).

  6. Hanks admits relational predications besides attributive ones. Ingvar Johansson (2013) argues for ‘scattered exemplification’, and presents a theory of predications with ‘many-place copulas’. I shall follow these authors here.

  7. Some may wonder what the truthmakers for these possible tokens are. I would say that they are possible modes of the universal in question, if we follow Lowe’s lead about truthmakers.

  8. I believe that this can also be the reason to adopt possible token predications rather than abstract propositions to avoid the problem that the class of truths outnumbers the class of tokens, as stated at the end of Section 3.

  9. Hanks does enumerate another example — ‘justified or unjustified’ — that does not have the same partiality of evaluation. However, if we judge in parallel with the other cases, the property that should be opposed to ‘justified’ is ‘falsified’. This will render justified or unjustified partial.

  10. Here I mean by ‘totality’ the principle that any proposition (or predication) has a truth-value, which is Truth or Falsity. Partiality is the negation of totality.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on this paper.

Funding

This work was supported by Japanese Government’s JSPS KAKENHI grant no. 20K00028.

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  1. Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Saitama University, Saitama, Japan

    Daisuke Kachi

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Correspondence to Daisuke Kachi.

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Kachi, D. Predication and truthmaking: an improvement on the essentialist approach to truthmaking. AJPH 2, 61 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44204-023-00119-6

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