Truthmaking and Minimalism
Arthur Schipper
University College London
August 2nd, 2010
Abstract
In my paper, I shall argue that truthmaker theory is needed to capture the dependence or the grounding that holds between truth and reality. In §1, I shall explicate the kind of truthmaker theory that I will defend. I shall show that whatever account is given to capture the idea that truths are grounded in reality, this account must capture an asymmetric explanatory dependency between them. I shall show that although recent attempts to put the relation in terms of entailment or necessitation capture something necessary about truthmaking, they are insufficient and inadequate. I shall argue that truthmaking is a species of grounding, which is limited to relating entities at two levels: the truthbearers (e.g., propositions, sentences, beliefs, etc., which are truth-apt) and their truthmakers, or the real-world entities, which ground them and make them true in virtue of their existence rather than any other properties they may have.
In §2, I defend my favored version of truthmaker theory, explicated in terms of explanation, against two challenges: (1) the minimalist challenge, set forth by Horwich (1998 and 2009), who claims that the nature of truth is fully captured by a simple equivalence schema; and (2) the identity-theorist challenge, defended by Hornsby (1997, 2005), who claims that the equivalence schema captures all there is to truth because a true proposition is identical to the way the world is. Both aim to capture the dependency between truth and reality in terms of explanation, but also claim that invoking truthmaking is an unneeded and excessive addition to the more minimal accounts that they defend. Working off the assumption which all of these accounts seem to hold on to, that the grounding between truth and reality needs to be properly explained, I shall use the two challenges to present a dilemma for a minimalist account. Either one denies that there is any difference between truthbearers and the reality that they are about à la Hornsby, a consequence of which is that there is nothing that needs explaining, or one accepts the difference between truth and reality, and as a consequence needs to posit a substantive, non-causal relation between them. I shall conclude that one cannot capture the dependence of truth on reality without positing a fully substantive account such as truthmaker theory.
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