Facts as Truthmakers

Abstract

Facts, I am pleased to observe, are back in fashion. For some time now they have had staunch friends in the American Midwest,1 and these days they are embraced as far afield as Sydney2 and San Francisco.3 But what are facts, and what facts are there? My answer to the first part of this question, which I shall not pursue further, is the same as Russell's and the early Wittgenstein's4: Facts are what constitute the objective world, and what make true sentences and thoughts true and false sentences and thoughts false. (This is largely what is meant, I think, when it is said that you cannot argue with them.) But what is the nature of the relation between facts and truths whereby the former make the latter true?5 This is the central question of my paper. I naturally do not claim to give a full and adequate answer to it, but only to present some considerations which tend to favour one type of answer over another. The main burden of the paper is to show that it is in principle neither necessary nor desirable to admit negative, molecular, and general facts in order to allow for an adequate account of making true. The naive view of the making true relation is, firstly, that it must be 1-1?or at any rate would be were it not for unthought and unrecorded facts, and for equivalent and equivocal thoughts and sentences?and, secondly, that this 1-1 correspondence arises from more basic cor respondences between the components of the fact and matching com ponents of the thought or sentence. Thus the naive fact ontologist is com mitted to a thoroughgoing isomorphism between the structure of the world and the structure of our thought and talk about it. But for those of us who do not regard facts as artefacts of thought and language, this is surely, on reflection, incredible. I find it far more plausible to assume that a relatively simple thought or sentence may be made true by a relatively complex set of facts, and vice versa. The set of facts that makes it true that Smith is a bachelor is clearly far more complex than the thought that he is. On the other hand, an enormously complex disjunction may be made true by a very simple fact. The 1-1 theory cannot account for such intuitions. Nor can it account for the circumstance that everyday thoughts and sentences are fre quently vague. For to do so it would have to assume that there are vague facts. But it is surely our thought and talk that is vague, not the world itself.6