Metaphysics and Truthmakers

When I speak of a fact . . . I mean the kind of thing that makes a proposition true or false. (Russell, 1972, p. 36.) ## § 1. Making True 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 \* First published in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 44 (1984), 287-321. 1 Ontologies of Sachverhalte were defended also by Reinach (in his 1911) and Ingarden (1964/65, chap. XI; cf. The discussion in Smith, 1978). Meinong preferred to use the term 'Objective'. Main description: The essays collected in this volume concern the general question of truthmaking. Most of them also bear upon the metaphysical nature of truthmakers (moments, tropes, property-instances, Aristotelian substances, states of affairs, meanings or essences?). Taking as their starting point a famous seminal paper by K. Mulligan, P. Simons and B. Smith, as well as D. Armstrong's outstanding contribution to the subject, they offer a fresh assay of the main concepts involved, in order to assess the explanatory value of truthmakers and truthmaker necessitarianism, and explore such delicate issues as contingent truth, bare possibility, tensed propositions, the ontological irreducibility of relations, the subsistence of facts and the epistemic role of negative truths. The collection as a whole provides a comprehensive and thought-provoking survey of the current debate about truthmaking theory and deserves to be read carefully by anyone interested in the relationship between language, thought and reality. With contributions from David ARMSTRONG, Stefano CAPUTO, François CLEMENTZ, Pascal ENGEL, Herbert HOCHBERG, Philipp KELLER, Jonathan LOWE, Jean-Maurice MONNOYER, Kevin MULLIGAN, Stephen MUMFORD, Frederic NEF, Peter SIMONS, Barry SMITH, Jonathan SIMON Contents Vingt ans après Truth-Makers*KEVIN MULLIGAN Two Dogmas of TruthmakingKEVIN MULLIGAN Truth in virtue of meaningPETER SIMONS Truthmaker ExplanationsBARRY SMITH Truthmakers for negative truths,and for truths of mere possibilityD.M. ARMSTRONG A World of TruthmakersPHILIPP KELLER Reply to KellerD.M. ARMSTRONG Relational TruthmakersFRANÇOIS CLEMENTZ ‘Is True’ and ‘Makes-True’:Two Predicates Without PropertiesHERBERT HOCHBERG Senex erit puerTruthmakers for tensed sentencesFRÉDÉRIC NEF Truthmaking as Essential DependenceE. J. LOWE Identity MakersPASCAL ENGEL Truth-making :What it is not and What it Could beSTEFANO CAPUTO A New Solution to the Problem of NegativeTruthSTEPHEN MUMFORD The Price of Positivity : Mumford andNegativesPETER SIMONS

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