Ed continues to repeat his regress argument against truth-makers, despite my hurling invective at it. I think I called it "breathtakingly rotten" or something equally offensive, all in good fun of course:
I have argued (e.g. here and here that the notion of a ‘truthmaker’ leads to an infinite regress. If there is such a truthmaker, an entity that makes a proposition like ‘Socrates sits’ true – let it be A – then it comes into existence when Socrates sits down, and ceases to exist when he stands up. But then there would have to be a further truthmaker for A existing. I.e. the sentence “A exists” can be true or false, and so requires a further truthmaker B, that makes it true when B exists. But then “B exists” requires yet another truthmaker, and so on ad infinitum.
Now what is the regress supposed to be? There is an entity A and it makes-true sentence s. A is not a sentence, or any other type of representation. Since we can talk about A, we can say 'A exists.' 'A exists' is contingently true, so it too needs a truth-maker. So far, so good.
Ed assumes that the truth-maker for "A exists' must be distinct from the truth-maker for s. Without this assumption, the regress can't get started. Therefore, to show that his regress argument is bogus, it suffices to show that one and the same entity A can serve as the truth-maker for both s and 'A exists.'
Suppose the truth-maker of 'Tom is tired' is the fact, Tom's being tired. Now consider the sentence 'Tom's being tired exists.' I claim that the truth-maker of both sentences is Tom's being tired. I conclude that there is no regress.
To appreciate this you must note that while 'Tom is tired' is a predication, 'Tom's being tired exists' is not. It is an existential sentence like 'Tom exists.' So while the predication requires a fact for its truth-maker, the existential sentence does not. It does not need a fact as a truth-maker any more than 'Tom exists' does. The truth-maker of the latter is just Tom. The truth-maker of 'Tom's being tired' is not the fact, Tom'sbeing tired's existence, but just Tom's being tired.
There is a second reason why the regress cannot arise. Ed is a nominalist. He eschews propositions and believes only in sentences. Well, there is no need for there to be the sentence 'A exists'! If no one says that A exists, then there is no sentence 'A exists.' And of course nonexistent sentences do not need truth-makers. And if someone does say that A exists, there is no need that he, or anyone else, say that the truth-maker of 'A exists' exists. So for this reason too the regress can't get started.
Ed ends his post on this strange note: "If we buy the idea of a ‘truthbearer’ (a proposition, a thought, whatever), the idea of a ‘truthmaker’ comes with it." That's plainly false. That there are truth-bearers is self-evident; that there are truth-makers is not. Must I dilate further on this self-evident point? Second, if the quoted sentence is true, and Ed's regress argument is sound, the upshot is that there are no truth-bearers, which is absurd. In effect, Ed has provided a reductio ad absurdum of his own claim that there are no truth-makers!
What Ed says about representation and the representation of the faithfulness of a representation would require a separate post to discuss. But I sense the conflation of epistemological questions with ontological ones.
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