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.

Truthmakers against Correspondence

“…But maximalism is not a sine qua non of truthmaker theory, and so truthmaker theory by itself offers no theory of truth. 6 Though the matter is controversial, many truthmaker theorists reject maximalism (e.g., Bigelow 1988, Lewis 2001b, and Saenz 2014. The paradigm examples of truthmaker gaps-truths without truthmakers-are negative existentials.…”

True by Default

“…Non-maximalists have criticized these proposed truthmakers. (For critiques, see Barker and Jago 2012; Dodd 2007; Griffith 2013; Merricks 2007; Molnar 2000; Parsons 2005, 2006; and Saenz 2014.) But they have also cast doubt on what motivation there is for a truthmaker principle that generalizes over all truths.…”

“…My appeal to default truth-values is not novel. Simons (2000, 2005, 2008) and Saenz (2014) both hold that some truths are true by default. However, I offer a new way to understand default truth-values and give them a central role in a theory I call truth-value-maker theory (TVM).…”

Deflating Deflationary Truthmaking

“…E.g Blackburn 1984, Rodriguez-Pereyra 2005, Cameron 2008a, Saenz 2014, Simpson 2014, Griffith 2015, and Jago 2018 …”