Abstract
Recently, philosophers have tried to develop a version of truthmaker theory which ties the truthmaking relation (T-REL) closely to the notion of fundamentality. In fact, some of these truthmaker-fundamentalists (TF-ists), as I call them, assume that the notion of fundamentality is intelligible in part by citing, as central examples of fundamentals, truthmakers, which they understand necessarily as constituents of fundamental reality. The aim of this paper is first to bring some order and clarity to this discussion, sketching how far TF is compatible with orthodox truthmaking, and then critically to evaluate the limits of TF. It will be argued that truthmaker theory cannot directly help with articulating the nature of fundamental reality and that T-REL does not necessarily relate truths with anything more fundamental, unless what is fundamental is what the truthbearers in question are about. I shall argue that TF faces a rather thorny dilemma and some general problems. I shall present two exhaustive types of fundamentalism on which a version of TF can be based: deflationary and inflationary. It will be argued that each version of TF runs into significant troubles accounting for all truth, specifically ordinary truths and metaphysical truths about the relations between ordinary facts and fundamental facts. I shall not attempt to solve these problems, but rather, at the end, diagnose the issues with TF as lying in the difficulties with reconciling the manifest image with the scientific and metaphysical images of reality.
Highlights
IntroductionThe recent upsurge of work in analytical metaphysics comes on the back of calls to put metaphysics first and demands for ontological seriousness. At its heart, ontological seriousness is a virtue of theories and practices manifested by the refusal to read ontology off of language. Prime examples include those approaches which refuse to draw conclusions about the world from the structure of sentences and propositions (e.g. that the world contains sentence-structured entities corresponding to the sentences we use to talk about them). Two questions have taken centre-stage:
The recent upsurge of work in analytical metaphysics comes on the back of calls to put metaphysics first and demands for ontological seriousness.1 At its heart, ontological seriousness is a virtue of theories and practices manifested by the refusal to read ontology off of language.2 Prime examples include those approaches which refuse to draw conclusions about the world from the structure of sentences and propositions.3 Two questions have taken centre-stage:(q1) what makes truth?; and (q2) what is fundamental?The first aims to bring ontological seriousness to all our talk, including our everyday talk, by moving us beyond language and asking what are the aspects of reality to which truths are beholden
The deflationist could respond by rejecting the initial assumption that tables are not fundamental entities. They might say that because we have discovered that tables must exist, for they are the truthmakers for truths such as t3, we have discovered that tables must be part of fundamental reality
Summary
The recent upsurge of work in analytical metaphysics comes on the back of calls to put metaphysics first and demands for ontological seriousness. At its heart, ontological seriousness is a virtue of theories and practices manifested by the refusal to read ontology off of language. Prime examples include those approaches which refuse to draw conclusions about the world from the structure of sentences and propositions (e.g. that the world contains sentence-structured entities corresponding to the sentences we use to talk about them). Two questions have taken centre-stage:. 1424; my emphasis) recently succinctly captures both of these motivations when he writes: about (1), tf-truth “allows us to rely less on language to determine what we ought to be ontologically committed to”; and about (2), “it allows us to say that English sentences that nearly everyone accepts are true, but without the ontological baggage that the Quinean view requires” Both of these points will be presented in more detail in Sect. The main aim of the paper is clarificatory, I shall argue that answering (q1) and (q2) with ontological seriousness leads us not to use heavy-weight, fundamentalist and grounding machinery to answer (q1) for all truths Using such machinery to explain many truths, including truths about ordinary, non-fundamental reality and truths about metaphysical relations (including grounding relations themselves), does the opposite of what it sets out to do: instead of ontological seriousness, it brings ontological disengagement and arbitrariness, making truth lose sight of what exactly we are talking about. I shall assume that (q1) and (q2) are important questions to answer for metaphysics and philosophy generally and argue that the best way to answer each is to answer them separately
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