This article considers three recent attempts by David Armstrong, Ross Cameron, and Jonathan Schaffer to provide truthmakers for negative existential truths. It is argued that none of the proposed truthmakers are up to the task of making any negative existential truth true and, it will turn out, for the same reason.

Identifying plausible truthmakers for negative truths has been a serious and perennial problem for truthmaker theory. I argue here that negative truths are indeed made true but not in the way that positive truths are. I rely on a distinction between “existence-independence” and “variation-independence” drawn by Hoffman and Horvath to characterize the unique form of dependence negative truths exhibit on reality. The notion of variation-independence is then used to motivate a principle of truthmaking for contingent negative truths.

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This paper argues that a consideration of the problem of providing truthmakers for negative truths undermines truthmaker theory. Truthmaker theorists are presented with an uncomfortable dilemma. Either they must take up the challenge of providing truthmakers for negative truths, or else they must explain why negative truths are exceptions to the principle that every truth must have a truthmaker. The first horn is unattractive since the prospects of providing truthmakers for negative truths do not look good neither absences, nor totality (...) states of affairs, nor Graham Priest and J.C. Beall’s ‘polarities’ (Beall, 2000; Priest, 2000) are up to the job. The second horn, meanwhile, is problematic because restricting the truthmaker principle to atomic truths, or weakening it to the thesis that truth supervenes on being, undercuts truthmaker theory’s original motivation. The paper ends by arguing that truthmaker theory is, in any case, an under-motivated doctrine because the groundedness of truth can be explained without appeal to the truthmaker principle. This leaves us free to give the ommonsensical and deflationary explanation of negative truths that common-sense suggests. (shrink)

These essays center around two questions: Does truth have an underlying nature? And if so, what sort of nature does it have?

Truth and Ontology concludes that some truths do not depend on being in any substantive way at all.

Truths are determined not by what we believe, but by the way the world is. Or so realists about truth believe. Philosophers call such theories correspondence theories of truth. Truthmaking theory, which now has many adherents among contemporary philosophers, is the most recent development of a realist theory of truth, and in this book D. M. Armstrong offers the first full-length study of this theory. He examines its applications to different sorts of truth, including contingent truths, modal truths, truths about (...) the past and the future, and mathematical truths. In a clear, even-handed and non-technical discussion he makes a compelling case for truthmaking and its importance in philosophy. His book marks a significant contribution to the debate and will be of interest to a wide range of readers working in analytical philosophy. (shrink)

Consider a certain red rose. The proposition that the rose is red is true because the rose is red. One might say as well that the proposition that the rose is red is made true by the rose’s being red. This, it has been thought, does not commit one to a truthmaker of the proposition that the rose is red. For there is no entity that makes the proposition true. What makes it true is how the rose is, and how (...) the rose is is not an entity over and above the rose. It is against this view that I shall argue in this paper. I shall argue that a significant class of true propositions, including inessential predications like the proposition that the rose is red, are made true by entities. "No truthmaking without truthmakers" is my slogan. Although I have my view about what kinds of entities are truthmakers, I shall not argue for or presuppose that view here. All I shall argue for here is that if a proposition is made true by something, it is made true by some thing, but my argument will leave it open what kind of thing that thing is: it could be a fact or state of affairs, a trope, or any other sort of entity. (shrink)

A significant reorientation is currently under way in analytic metaphysics, away from an almost exclusive focus on questions of existence and towards a greater concentration on questions concerning the dependence of one type of phenomenon on another. Surprisingly, despite the central role dependence has played in philosophy since its inception, interest in a systematic study of this concept has only recently surged among contemporary metaphysicians. In this paper, I focus on a promising account of ontological dependence in terms of a (...) non-modal and sufficiently constrained conception of essence developed by Kit Fine. I argue that even this essentialist account is, as it stands, not fine-grained enough to recognize different varieties of dependence which ought to be distinguished even within the realm of ontology. In some cases, an entity may be ontologically dependent on its essential constituents out of which it is constructed; but in other cases, an entity may be ontologically dependent on another for a different reason. A framework which glosses over these differences does not offer a proper diagnosis of why one entity ontologically depends on another. (shrink)

During the realist revival in the early years of this century, philosophers of various persuasions were concerned to investigate the ontology of truth. That is, whether or not they viewed truth as a correspondence, they were interested in the extent to which one needed to assume the existence of entities serving some role in accounting for the truth of sentences. Certain of these entities, such as the Sätze an sich of Bolzano, the Gedanken of Frege, or the propositions of Russell (...) and Moore, were conceived as the bearers of the properties of truth and falsehood. Some thinkers however, such as Russell, Wittgenstein in the Tractatus, and Husserl in the Logische Untersuchungen, argued that instead of, or in addition to, truth-bearers, one must assume the existence of certain entities in virtue of which sentences and/or propositions are true. Various names were used for these entities, notably 'fact', 'Sachverhalt', and 'state of affairs'. (1) In order not to prejudge the suitability of these words we shall initially employ a more neutral terminology, calling any entities which are candidates for this role truth-makers. (shrink)

This chapter replies to arguments, advanced by Gonzalo Rodriguez–Pereyra, for thinking that the intuitions that have inspired theories of truthmaking cannot be accommodated without commitment to truth-making entities. It contains a suggestion about why, even if there are no entities that make propositions true, we should nonetheless be apt to think of truth as grounded. The advocates of truthmakers engage sometimes in a specifically ontological enquiry of a wide-ranging sort, sometimes in the project of understanding truth. Inasmuch as Rodriguez–Pereyra's manner (...) of defending a truthmaker principle makes connections with both of these projects, the objections to his account made in the chapter rebound on them both. (shrink)

In this paper I examine two principles of orthodox truthmaker theory: truthmaker maximalism - the doctrine that every (contingent) truth has a truthmaker, and truthmaker necessitarianism - the doctrine that the existence of a truthmaker necessitates the truth of any proposition which it in fact makes true. I argue that maximalism should be rejected and that once it is we only have reason to hold a restricted form of necessitarianism.