The concept of truthmaking is attracting much attention in contemporary metaphysics. This work asks how the truthmaker principle should be formulated, whether it is well motivated, whether it genuinely has the explanatory roles claimed for it, and whether more modest principles might serve just as well.
Mark Jago offers a new metaphysical account of truth. He argues that to be true is to be made true by the existence of a suitable worldly entity. Truth arises as a relation between a proposition - the content of our sayings, thoughts, beliefs, and so on - and an entity (or entities) in the world.
That there are no white ravens is true because there are no white ravens. And so there is a sense in which that truth 'depends on the world'. But this sort of dependence is trivial. After all, it does not imply that there is anything that is that truth's 'truthmaker'. Nor does it imply that something exists to which that truth corresponds. Nor does it imply that there are properties whose exemplification grounds that truth. Trenton Merricks explores whether and how truth depends substantively on the world or on things or on being. And he takes a careful look at philosophical debates concerning, among other things, modality, time, and dispositions. He looks at these debates because any account of truth's substantive dependence on being has implications for them. And these debates likewise have implications for how and whether truth depends on being. Along the way, Merricks makes a number of new points about each of these debates that are of independent interest, of interest apart from the question of truth's dependence on being. Truth and Ontology concludes that some truths do not depend on being in any substantive way at all. One result of this conclusion is that it is a mistake to oppose a philosophical theory merely because it violates truth's alleged substantive dependence on being. Another result is that the correspondence theory of truth is false and, more generally, that truth itself is not a relation of any sort between truth-bearers and that which 'makes them true'.
What is truth? What role does truth play in the connections between language and the world? What is the relationship between truth and being? The Metaphysics of Truth tackles these fundamental philosophical questions and develops a distinctive metaphysical worldview. Moreover, it does so in a climate where the traditionally central issue of the nature of truth has diminished in significance due to the rise of deflationary and primitivist views, which deny that there are interesting and informative things to say about truth. Douglas Edwards responds to these views, and demonstrates the importance of the metaphysics of truth with regard to both the study of truth itself, and metaphysical debates more generally. He also develops a detailed pluralist metaphysical approach, which starts with the diversity of different subject areas, and holds that there are different relationships between language and the world in different areas, or 'domains'. He develops a pluralist approach which explains what domains are; how different domains are individuated; which metaphysical frameworks apply in different domains; and how truth plays a key role in the picture. The picture is extended to incorporate ontological pluralism - the idea that there are different ways of being - which increases the explanatory power of the view. Edwards gives particular attention to important domains which have not yet received a great deal of attention in debates about truth, namely the institutional and social domains, and thus connects work on the metaphysics of truth and being to key issues in social construction.
The theory of truthmaking has long aroused skepticism from philosophers who believe it to be tangled up in contentious ontological commitments and unnecessary theoretical baggage. In this book, Jamin Asay shows why that suspicion is unfounded. Challenging the current orthodoxy that truthmaking's fundamental purpose is to be a tool for explaining why truths are true, Asay revives the conception of truthmaking as fundamentally an exercise in ontology: a means for coordinating one's beliefs about what is true and one's ontological commitments. He goes on to show how truthmaking connects to analyticity, truth, and realism, and how it contributes to debates over nominalism, presentism, mathematical objects, and fictional characters. His book is the most comprehensive exploration to date into what truthmaking is and how it contributes to metaphysical debates across philosophy, and will interest a wide range of readers in metaphysics and beyond.
How do we explain the truth of true propositions? Truthmaker theory is the branch of metaphysics that explores the relationships between what is true and what exists. It plays an important role in contemporary debates about the nature of metaphysics and metaphysical enquiry. In this book Jonathan Tallant argues, controversially, that we should reject truthmaker theory. In its place he argues for an 'explanationist' approach. Drawing on a deflationary theory of truth he shows that it allows us to explain the truth of true propositions and respond to recent arguments that purport to show otherwise. He augments this with a distinction between internally and externally quantified claims: externally quantified claims are claims that quantify over elements of our ontology that play an indispensable explanatory role; internally quantified claims do not. He deploys this union of deflationism and a distinction between kinds of quantification to pursue metaphysical inquiry, sketching the implications for a number of first-order debates, including those in the philosophy of time, modality and mathematics, and also shows how this explanationist model can be used to solve the key problems that afflicted truthmaker theory. Truth and the World is an important contribution to debates about truth and truthmaker theory as well as metametaphysics, the metaphysics of time and the metaphysics of mathematics, and is essential reading for students and scholars engaged in the study of these topics.
This book tries to present in brief compass a metaphysical system, matured (as is hoped) over many years. By metaphysics is understood an account of the fundamental categories of being, such notions as property, relation, causality. These notions are more abstract than the results of scientific inquiry, and are controversial among scientists as well as among philosophers. The book sprang from lectures given to graduate students, and has deliberately been kept at an informal level. It includes some explanations not required in a book for professional philosophers. The argument is developed in sixteen short chapters. It is argued that the world is a world of states of affairs, involving universals and particulars. The notion of finding suitable truthmakers for truths grows in importance as the book proceeds.