The World and Truth About What Is Not

Abstract

Truthmaker says that things, broadly construed, are the ontological grounds of truth and therefore, that things make truths true. Recently, there have been a number of arguments purporting to show that if one embraces Truthmaker, then one ought to embrace Truthmaker Maximalism — the view that all nonanalytic propositions have truthmakers. But then if one embraces Truthmaker, one ought to think that negative existentials have truthmakers. I argue that this is false. I begin by arguing that recent attempts by Ross Cameron and Jonathan Schaffer to provide negative existentials with truthmakers by appealing to the world fail. I then argue that the conditional — if one embraces Truthmaker, the one ought to embrace Truthmaker Maximalism — is false by considering small worlds where very little, if anything at all, exists. The conclusion is that thinking that negative existentials do not have truthmakers, and therefore rejecting Truthmaker Maximalism, need not worry Truthmaker embracers. Truth requires an explanation, or ontological ground, of sorts.1 One way of articulating this requirement is to say that things, broadly construed, are the ontological ground of truths and therefore, that things make truths true. Call the claim that things make truths true Truthmaker. Call the claim that all non-analytic truths are made true by things Max, which I’ll formulate as follows: Max. Necessarily, for all non-analytic propositions p, if is true, then there is some thing(s) E and is true in virtue of E2 Recently, there have been a number of arguments purporting to show that if one embraces Truthmaker, then one ought to embrace Max (Mumford 2007: 49; Merricks 2007: 39-67; Dodd 2007; Cameron 2008a: 411-412). Some philosophers who 1For example, Aristotle (1984: 22) says “if there is a man, the statement whereby we say that there is a man is true ... And whereas the true statement is in no way the cause of the actual thing’s existence, the actual thing does seem in some way the cause of the statement’s being true.” W. V. O. Quine (1970: 10-11) echoes this thought when he says “No sentence is true but reality makes it so”. 2I follow custom in allowing that ’ ’ stand for ’the proposition that p’.