Truthmakers – Maverick Philosopher

One-Category Trope Bundle Theory and Brentano’s Reism

This morning's mail brought a longish letter from philosophy student Ryan Peterson. He would like some comments and I will try to oblige him as time permits, but time is short. So for now I will confine my comments to the postscript of his letter:

P.S. Just as crazy as one category trope bundle theory is to me, is the later Brentano’s attempt at a different one category ontology, ‘reism’, where “For example, ‘Socrates is wise’ and ‘Socrates is Greek’ are made true, respectively, by wise-Socrates and Greek-Socrates, where wise-Socrates and Greek-Socrates are two coinciding but numerically distinct concrete particulars (which also coincide with Socrates)” (from Uriah Kriegel’s Thought and Thing: Brentano’s Reism as Truthmaker Nominalism). I like to rigorously understand all the different views put forth by intelligent philosophers on a topic but I do like to spend the most time understanding the more plausible seeming views first.

Leaving trope theory to one side for the moment, I am happy to agree with Peterson's assessment of Brentano. While not literally a product of insanity, Brentano's view I find to be incomprehensible. (And I don't mean that to be a merely autobiographical remark.)

I assume what to me seems to be well-nigh self-evident: some, but not all, truths need truth-makers. (I am not a truth-maker maximalist.) A truth is a true truth-bearer. The primary truth-bearers — the primary vehicles of the truth-values — are propositions. An assertive utterance at a particular time by a particular person of the declarative sentence 'Socrates is wise' expresses the proposition Socrates is wise. I will assume that propositions are abstract in the Quinean, not the trope-theoretic, sense of 'abstract.' (You can hear an asserted sentence and see a written sentence; you cannot hear or see a proposition.) A truth-bearer is not a truth-maker, except in some recherché cases I won't mention. (And don't confuse a truth-maker with a truth condition.)

There has to be something in the world of concreta (the spatiotemporal realm of causal reality) that makes it true that Socrates exists. To avoid the word 'makes,' we can say that the sentence and the proposition it expresses need an ontological ground of their being-true. Now you either get it or you don't. There are those who don't have a clue as to what I am talking about. Such people have no philosophical aptitude, and must simply be shown the door. A contingent truth cannot just be true, nor can it be true in virtue of someone's say-s0: a contingent truth requires something in reality external to the truth-bearer and its verbal expression that 'makes' it true, where this 'making' or grounding is neither narrowly logical nor causal. (Its not being either the one nor the other sensu stricto is what prejudices some against it. I kick them off my stoa as lacking philosophical aptitude.)

Now what in the world could function as the ontological ground of the contingent truth of 'Socrates exists'? The obvious answer is: the concrete particular Socrates. (Aristotle makes this very point somewhere in The Categories.) A particular may be defined as an unrepeatable entity by contrast with universals (if such there be) that are by definition repeatable.

There is an obvious difference between 'Socrates is wise' and 'Socrates is Greek,' on the one hand, and 'Socrates exists' on the other. It is the difference between predicative and existential sentences. Now we come to the nub of the issue. It seems blindingly evident to me that the two predicative sentences (and the propositions they express), if they need truth-makers at all, need concrete states of affairs (STOAs) as truth-makers, and that these truth-making states of affairs must be numerically distinct. I have no objection to saying that wise-Socrates makes true the first sentence and Greek-Socrates the second if 'wise-Socrates' and 'Greek-Socrates' refer to concrete states of affairs (not to be confused with Chisholmian abstract states of affairs).

But that is not what Brentano is saying. His reism cannot allow for concrete states of affairs of the form a's being F. For the predicate 'F' either picks out an abstract particular, a trope, or it picks out a universal. But on reism, all you've got are things, concrete particulars, which, moreover, cannot be assayed as concrete states of affairs along either Bergmannian or Armstrongian lines.

On reism one must therefore swallow the absurdity that "wise-Socrates and Greek-Socrates are two coinciding but numerically distinct concrete particulars (which also coincide with Socrates)." So they are one and the same and yet numerically different?? A question for Peterson: Is Kriegel defending truth-maker nominalism? I hope not. For it makes no bloody sense. For one thing it implies that the putatively two but at the same time one concrete particular(s) are property-less and are thus 'bare,' though not in Gustav Bergmann's precise sense. They are property-less if there are no properties, and there are no properties if there are no tropes nor any universals. A predicate is not a property.

'Red,' 'rot,' 'rouge,' and 'rosso' are four different predicates in four different languages. If Tom the tomato is red, as we say in English, he is not red only in English or rosso only in Italian. That way lies an absurd linguistic idealism. The predicates are true of Tom because there is something in or related to Tom that makes the predicates true of him, that grounds their applicability to him. This something in Tom is either the trope in him (assuming he is a complete bundle of tropes) or a universal that he instantiates. Nominalism makes no sense. The reality of properties is non-negotiable. But of course they needn't be universals. Trope-nominalism makes sense. 'Ostrich' nominalism does not. The same goes for van Inwagen's 'ostrich realism.'

Here is another argument. Socrates, while essentially Greek (Cf. Kripke's essentiality of origin), is only accidentally wise: had he lived long enough he might have gone 'Biden.' At every time at which he exists, our man is Greek, but only at some times is he wise. (He wasn't wise when he peeped his head out from between the legs of his mother, inter faeces et urinam nascimur.) So if he is one and the same concrete individual over time, then there has to be a distinction between him and real properties (not predicates!) that are either in him as tropes or related to him as universals.

The Ersatz Eternity of the Past: Denied by Lukasiewicz!

The Pole denies the actuality of the past and in consequence thereof the ersatz eternity or accidental necessity (necessitas per accidens) of the past.

Quasi-literary Preamble:

What has been, though it needn't have been, always will have been. What time has mothered, no future time can destroy. What you were and that you were stand forever inscribed in the roster of being whether or not anyone ever reads the record. What you have done, good or bad, and what you have left undone, good or bad, cannot be erased by the passage of time. You will die, but your having lived will never die. This is so even if you and your works and days are utterly forgotten. An actual past buried in oblivion remains an actual past. The erasure of memories and memorials is not the erasure of their quondam objects. The being of what was does not depend on their being-known; it does not rest on the spotty memories, flickering and fallible, of fragile mortals or their transient monuments or recording devices.

But how paltry the ersatz eternity of time's progeny! Time has made you and will unmake you. In compensation, she allows your having been to rise above the reach of the flux. Thanks a lot, bitch! You are one mater dolorosa whose consolation is as petty as your penance is hard.

………………………….

I posted a precursor of the above on 10 March 2010. It elicited an astute comment from Alan Rhoda. He wrote:

You here express the tense-logical idea that p –>FPp, that if something is the case, then it will thereafter always be the case that it has been the case. In Latin, facta infecta fieri non possunt. [The done cannot be undone.]

Believe it not, this has been denied by the famous Polish logician Lukasiewicz, no less. He seems to have accepted a version of presentism according to which (1) all (contingent) truths depend for their truth on what presently exists, and (2) what presently exists need not include anything that suffices to pick out a unique prior sequence of events as "the" actual past. Accordingly, truths about the past may cease to be true as the passage of time obliterates the traces of past events. Lukasiewicz apparently found this a comforting thought:

"There are hard moments of suffering and still harder ones of guilt in everyone’s life. We should be glad to be able to erase them not only from our memory but also from existence. We may believe that when all the effects of those fateful moments are exhausted, even should that happen only after our death, then their causes too will be effaced from the world of actuality and pass into the realm of possibility. Time calms our cares and brings us forgiveness." (Jan Lukasiewicz, "On Determinism" in Selected Works, ed. L. Borkowski, North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1970, p.128.)

That is to my mind an amazing passage from Lukasiewicz both because of his rejection of the tense-logical principle, p –>FPp, and because of the consolation he derives from its rejection.

I myself find it very hard to believe that there wasn't an actual unique past. I find it impossible to believe that, with the passage of enough time, past events will somehow go from being actual to being merely possible. It seems obvious to me, a plain datum, that there is an important difference between a past event such as Kierkegaard's engagement to Regine Olsen, which actually occurred, and a merely possible (past) event such as his marriage to her which did not occur, but could have occurred, where 'could have' is to be taken ontically and not epistemically. Now that datum tells against presentism — unless you bring God into the picture which is what Rhoda does. For if the present alone exists, then the wholly past does not exist, which implies that there is no difference between a merely possible past event and an actual past event.

Alan Rhoda responds:

Yes, in my paper "Presentism, Truthmakers, and God" (Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 2009). I argue that the best way for presentists to supply truthmakers for truths about the past is to appeal to divine memories.

I accept the datanic nature of your distinction between the actual and the merely possible past. I'm not clear, however, on why that distinction by itself should count against presentism. Unlike Lukasiewicz, most presentists do posit present grounds for that distinction. The live question is what sort of present facts, if any, could serve the presentist's purposes. That's where my argument for theistic presentism gets its purchase.

If only that which exists now, exists, then that which existed does not exist. If to exist = to be actual, then that which existed is not actual. Since what existed is presumably not impossible, that which existed is merely possible. It therefore looks as if one can get very quickly from the distinction I pointed out to a rejection of atheistic presentism. Atheistic presentism cannot supply the truth-makers for past-tensed truths such as 'Kierkegaard was engaged to Regine Olsen.'

Atheistic presentists need to find present facts to ground the distinction in question. Now there are some present facts that could serve to ground some past-tensed truths. Consider 'Bill Sykes the burglar entered my house yesterday.' This contingent truth needs a truth-maker, and on presentism this truth-maker must exist today. Our presentist might plausibly say that it is Sykes' footprints outside my window, and the the broken glass, both of which exist today, that tie Sykes to the crime and make-true the contingent sentence in question. But what makes it true that my grandfather Alphonso drank a glass of dago red on New Year's Day, 1940 and pronounced it excellent? Suppose the red wine drunk by Alphonso came from the Gallo vineyard. What now makes it true that that particular glass of dago red came from the Gallo vineyard as opposed to the Cribari vineyard? What exists now that could serve as a truth-maker of such truths? There are plenty of past-tensed truths that have no presently existing truth-makers. This is why Rhoda argues that it is only present facts involving divine memories that are up to the truth-making job.

Whether recourse to God and his omniscience works to save presentism we leave for later.

Politics, Lies, and Counterfactuals

Suppose I say

1) Had Jeb Bush won the 2016 Republican nomination for president, Hillary Clinton would have won the presidential election.

We know, of course, that Donald J. Trump won the 2016 election. Suppose an Anti-Trumper calls me a liar for asserting (1). Have I lied? That depends on what a lie is.

What is a lie?

A lie is not the same as a false statement. For one can make a false statement without lying: one may sincerely believe that what one is asserting is true when in fact it is false. The intention to deceive is essential to a lie. No lie without the intention to deceive. A lie, then, is an intentional misrepresentation of what one either knows to be the case or sincerely believes to be the case for the purpose of deceiving one's audience.

Now what is the case is actually the case as opposed to possibly the case. So on the definition just given, one cannot lie about the merely possible. It follows that one cannot lie about what might have been or what could have been. Therefore, I cannot be fairly accused of telling a lie if I assert (1). There simply is no fact of the matter as to whether or not, had Jeb won the nomination, Hillary would or would not have won the election.

On my analysis, then, there are two necessary conditions for a statement's being a lie. (i) The statement must express a person's intention to deceive his interlocutor(s), and (ii) there must be some actual fact about which the one who lies intends to deceive them. Note that one who lies on a given occasion need not be a liar because a liar is one who habitually lies, and one who lies needn't be in the habit of lying.

Can one lie about a counterfactual state of affairs?

It follows from my analysis that there cannot be any lies pertaining to counterfactual states of affairs. Counterfactual conditionals, however, have as their subject matter counterfactual states of affairs, which is to say, states of affairs that are really possible but not actual. So no counterfactual is a lie. Note that I said really possible, not epistemically possible. I am assuming that Reality, with majuscule 'R,' is not exhausted by the actual or existent: there are merely possible states of affairs that subsist mind-independently. (That which subsists is but does not exist.)

But what I just wrote is not self-evident: I don't want to paper over the fact that the problem of the merely possible and its ontological status is deep and nasty and will lead us into a labyrinth of aporiai and insolubilia. More about this later.

Now (1) is either true or if not true, then false, but no one knows, or could know, which it is. So no one can rightly call me a liar for asserting (1).

If I am not lying when I assert (1), what am I doing? I am offering a reasonable, but practically unverifiable, speculation. And the same goes for a person who denies (2). Consider a second example.

Donald Trump famously boasted,

2) Had it not been for all the illegal votes, I would have won the popular vote as well as the electoral college vote.

Leftists, who compile long lists of Trump's supposed lies, had among their number some who counted (2) — an accurate paraphrase of what Trump said, not an exact quotation — as a lie.

But it is obviously not a lie. The worst you could call it is an unlikely, self-serving speculation. He did not assert something he knew to be false, he asserted something he did not know to be true and could not know to be true. Again, there is no underlying fact of the matter.

Trump haters who compile lists of his 'lies,' need to give a little thought as to what a lie is; else their count will be wrong.

Before proceeding to a third example, let me record an aporetic pentad for later rumination and delectation:

1) Counterfactuals have truth-values: some are true and the rest are false.

2) The true ones are contingently true.

3) Contingent truths have truth-makers.

4) Truth-makers are obtaining, i.e., actual states of affairs.

5) Counterfactuals are about non-actual, merely possible, states of affairs.

These propositions are individually plausible but collectively inconsistent. Is the problem genuine or pseudo? If genuine, how solve it? Which proposition should we reject? I hope to come back to this problem later.

A third example. London Ed quotes and comments upon a recent assertion of mine:

“He [David Frum] neglects to observe, however, that the devastation of that country [Ukraine] would not have occurred had Trump been president.”

Ed comments:

Trump’s presidency ended January 20, 2021. The invasion of Ukraine was 24 February 2022. What might have happened (another counterfactual) under a continued Trumpian presidency that would have prevented Putin’s invasion? The build up of Russian troops began March and April 2021, although the Russian government repeatedly denied having plans to invade or attack.

What might have happened is that Putin would have been dissuaded from invading Ukraine out of fear of what Trump would do to him and his country should he have invaded.

The Gist of Brightly’s Presentism

An excerpt from a comment by David Brightly to this entry:

My mind is populated with ideas of things. I acquire these ideas (a) directly through acquaintance with external objects and (b) indirectly by description in language and image. These ideas of things guide my interaction with the outside world. Having seen a bear go into the cave or having been told 'There's a bear in the cave', I approach the cave with caution. Through my contact with the external world I come to accept that all external things come into existence, exist for a while, and then pass out of existence. The ceasing to exist of things that I am familiar with and am attached to is an everyday experience. When I have such an experience, or have a thing's passing described to me, my idea of that thing becomes modified. None of the idea itself passes away, at least not initially. Instead the idea (not the thing it's an idea of) acquires a new attribute, analogous to the label 'Account Closed' on the front of a business ledger, signifying that, to a first approximation, the content of the idea can be safely ignored for purposes of guiding my life. I might express this label by saying 'The thing is past' or 'The thing is in the past' or 'The thing has ceased to exist'. The important point here is that, despite appearances, these assertions are not predicating something of the thing itself but rather of my idea of it, namely that the idea is redundant.

Suppose that a monument M, of which I had direct sensory acquaintance, has been demolished. M no longer exists, but my memorial ideas, my memories, of M still exist. Consider the most vivid of these, idea R. R is obviously distinct from M because R is a mental representation of M. R exists now 'in' my mind; M does not exist now, and, being a physical chunk of the external world, never existed 'in' any (finite) mind either spatially or merely intentionally. When I learn that M no longer exists, R undergoes a modification; it "acquires a new attribute" as David puts it. This new attribute is not an attribute of M, which no longer exists, but solely an attribute of R. We could describe this attribute as the property of not being of or about anything real or existent. It comes to the same if we call this attribute the property of being non-veridical. This simply means that R is not true of anything. R has thus undergone a modification: it was veridical when M existed, but is now non-veridical when R no longer exists. (In my example, R is a memory, but it might be a past-directed description, say, 'the only statue at the corner of Third and Howard.'

You can see where David is going with this. He is proposing that we analyze 'M is (wholly) past, ' M is in the past,' and 'M has ceased to exist' in terms of 'R has ceased to be veridical.'

One virtue of this analysis is that R is available, and available at present, which satisfies the demands of presentism according to which only what exists (present tense) exists. But I don't think the analysis is workable even as a specification of truth conditions. The cup out of which Socrates drank the hemlock existed but no one now has any ideas about it, that very cup. And there are innumerable things that existed but no longer exist about which no one now or ever had any ideas whether singular or general. What existed cannot depend for its having existed on the present contents of any finite mind. But there is worse to come when we ask about truthmakers.

If you are wondering what the difference is between a truth condition and a truthmaker, our old friend Alan Rhoda in an old blog post does a good job of explaining the distinction:

. . .truthmakers are parcels of reality . . . .

Not so with truth conditions. Truth conditions are semantic explications of the meaning of statements. They tell us in very precise terms what has to be true for a particular statement to be true. For example, a B-theorist like Nathan Oaklander will say that the truth conditions of the sentence "The 2006 Winter Olympics are over" is given by the sentence "The 2006 Winter Olympics end earlier than the date of this utterance". Thus truth conditions are meaning entities like statements that are used to spell out or analyze the meaning of other statements.

'M existed' is true, true now, and contingently true now (it might not have been true now and would not have been true now if the Antifa thugs hadn't dynamited the monument). We have here a truthbearer that clearly needs a truthmaker. So I ask a simple question of the presentist: What makes it true that M has ceased to exist? (In general: what makes any presently true, past-tensed, contingent truth true?) The truthmaker cannot be or involve M because M, on presentism, does not exist.

Note that the truthmaker of 'M has ceased to exist' cannot be the fact that the memorial representation or idea R has ceased to be veridical. This answer avails nothing since it merely postpones the question, which becomes: what makes it true that R has ceased to be veridical? 'R is no longer veridical' is true, presently true, and contingently true. It needs a truthmaker.

If the presentist says instead that 'M has ceased to exist' had a truthmaker in the past, what makes true this tensed claim, namely, the claim that the truthbearer in question had a truthmaker in the past?

Could past-tensed contingent truths be brute truths? (A brute truth, by definition, has no need of a truthmaker.) I may come back to this topic in a separate entry. But if you grant me that the true, present-tensed, contingent 'BV is seated' (assertively uttered at t) needs a truthmaker, then how could the mere passage of time do away with the need for a truthmaker of the presently true, contingent, past-tensed 'BV was seated' (assertively uttered at t* > t)?

Finally, the presentist might reject the need for any truthmakers at all. I would respond by hitting him over the head with Aristotle's Categories, figuratively speaking of course.

Truthmaker Maximalism Questioned

0) What David Armstrong calls truthmaker maximalism is the thesis that every truth has a truthmaker. Although I find the basic truthmaker intuition well-nigh irresistible, I have difficulty with the notion that every truth has a truthmaker. Thus I question truthmaker maximalism (TM). Alan Rhoda has recently come out in favor of TM in a penetrating weblog entry. After sketching my position, I will try to pinpoint my disagreement with Rhoda.

1) Compare *Peter is tired* and *Every cygnet is a swan.* I will argue that truths like the first need truthmakers while truths like the second do not. A declarative sentence enclosed in asterisks names the primary truthbearer expressed by the sentence when assertively uttered or, more generally, assertively tokened. A truthbearer is anything appropriately characterizable as either true or false when 'true' and 'false' are used in their sentential as opposed to their ontic senses. ('True friend' and 'false teeth' feature ontic senses of 'true' and 'false'.) Candidate truthbearers include assertively tokened sentences in the indicative mood, statements, asseverations, judgments, Fregean Gedanken, Bolzanian Saetze an sich and more. By definition, a truth is a true truthbearer, whatever truthbearers are taken to be.)

2) Intuitively, *Peter is tired,* being contingently true, both due to its dependence on the existence of Peter, and on Peter's accidentally possessing the property of being tired, is in need of something external to it that 'makes' it true or determines it to be true, or serves as the ontological ground of its truth. (An ontological ground is not the same as an empirical cause.) *Peter is tired* can't just be true. This is because its truth-value depends on the way the world is. It needs a truthmaker external to it. By 'external to it,' I don't just mean that the truthmaker of a truth must be distinct from it: this condition is satisfied by a distinct proposition (or other type of truthbearer) that entails *Peter is tired.* Entailment, however, is not truthmaking: entailment connects propositions to propositions; truthmaking connects extra-propositional entities (states of affairs for Armstrong) to propositions. What I mean when I say that a contingent truth needs something external to it to 'make' it true is that the truthmaker must be both distinct from the truthbearer and not, like the truthbearer, a 'representational entity' where the latter term covers such items as assertively uttered sentences, judgments, Fregean thoughts/propositions (the senses of context-free sentences in the indicative mood), and whatever else counts as a truthbearer. In other words, a truthmaker of a contingent atomic truth such as *Peter is tired* must be outside the sphere of representations: it must be extralinguistic, extramental, and extra-propositional. Thus the truthmakers of propositions like *Peter is tired* cannot belong to the category of propositions. The ontological ground of a contingent proposition's being true cannot be an entity within the sphere of propositions.

3) The truthmaker of *Peter is tired* cannot be a proposition; but it also cannot be utterly unlike a proposition. Consider Peter himself, that very concrete individual. It is clear that he could not be the truthmaker of *Peter is tired.* Granted, if Peter were not to exist, then the proposition in question could not be true. There are no truths about what does not exist. But although Peter or Peter's existence is a necessary condition of the truth of every true proposition about him, that very individual, it is not the case that Peter or Peter's existence is a sufficient condition of the truth of contingent propositions about him if these propositions are predications such as *Peter is tired.* (I am open to the suggestion that Peter himself suffices for the truth of *Peter exists.*) That Peter by himself cannot be the truthmaker of contingent predications about him can be proven or at least argued as follows.

Argument from Necessitation. Assume for reductio that Peter by himself can serve as truthmaker of contingent predications about him. Now, by truthmaker necessitarianism, whatever truthmakers are, they broadly logically necessitate the truth of their corresponding truthbearers. So if X is the truthmaker of *Peter is tired at t,* then there is no possible world in which X exists and *Peter is tired at t* is not true. But there are plenty of worlds in which Peter exists but *Peter is tired at t* is not true. So Peter by himself cannot be the truthmaker of *Peter is tired at t.*

Argument from Selection. Consider any two true affirmative atomic contingent monadic propositions about Peter such as *Peter is tired at t* and *Peter is hungry at t.* If Peter by himself can serve as the truthmaker of one, then he can serve as the truthmaker of the other. But they obviously require numerically different truthmakers. So Peter is the truthmaker of neither of them. Although different truths can have the same truthmaker, this is not the case when both truths are atomic, even if both are about the same individual. The truthmakers of such atomic propositions as that Peter is a philosopher and that Peter is a violinist must be distinct and they must match up with, or select, their truthbearers. To do this, the truthmakers must have an internal structure isomorphic to the structure of the truthbearers. In other words, the truthmakers must be proposition-like despite their not being propositions. Extra-propositional but proposition-like! What may look like a 'bug' is a 'feature' of truthmaker theory. It follows that Peter by himself cannot be the truthmaker of atomic contingent propositions about him.

4) If Peter by himself cannot serve as truthmaker of the accidental predication *Peter is F,* then neither can F-ness by itself. The same goes for the set {Peter, F-ness}, the mereological sum (Peter + F-ness) and the ordered pair [Peter, F-ness]. For what is needed in addition to Peter and F-ness is a link in the truthmaker that corresponds to the copulative link in the proposition. After all, not every possible world in which both Peter and F-ness exists is a world in which Peter is F. There could be a world in which Peter exists and F-ness exists (by being instantiated by Paul) but in which Peter does not instantiate F-ness. I am assuming that F-ness is a universal, but not that F-ness is a transcendent universal (one that can exist uninstantiated). This is why concrete states of affairs are plausible candidates for the office of truthmaker, as in middle-period Armstrong.

5) But even if one balks at the admission of concrete states of affairs or facts, one will have to admit that Peter himself — assuming that this concrete individual is not assayed as a state of affair but as an individual — cannot be the truthmaker of contingent propositions of the form *Peter is F.* Some will say that tropes can serve as truthmakers. Fine, but they too have a proposition-like structure. If the trope Peter's-tiredness-at-t is the truthmaker of *Peter is tired at t,* then it is made true by an entity that has a proposition-like structure, a structure isomorphic to, and mirroring, the structure of the truthbearer.

6) It seems to me that I have just definitively established that the truthmakers of accidental atomic predications like 'Peter is a philosopher' cannot be concrete individuals lacking a proposition-like structure. I have also made it clear that we should not confuse the principle that there are no truths about nonexistent objects with the truthmaker principle. We can call the first principle veritas sequitur esse (truth follows being). What it says is that a truth cannot be true unless there are one or more items it is about. Thus VSE requires that if Milo kicked Philo, this is true only if both Milo and Philo exist or have some mode of being other than existence. The truthmaker principle (TMP) goes beyond this in requiring the instantiation of the dyadic relation —kicks___ by Milo and Philo, in that order.

7) Consider now the analytic proposition *Every cygnet is a swan.* As analytic, it is true solely in virtue of the meanings of 'cygnet' and 'swan.' It is true ex vi terminorum. Its truth is not contingent on the existence of any cygnets. Why does it need a truthmaker? It certainly does not need anything external to it to make it true. The concept cygnet includes the concept swan, so that, by sheer analysis of the subject concept, one can arrive at the truth in question. That's why we call it, following Kant, 'analytic.' Clearly, nothing external to an analytic proposition is required to make it true. It follows that it cannot have a truthmaker. Or rather it follows if a truthmaker of a first-order truthbearer is an entity that is external to the truthbearer and resident in the realm of reality beyond the sphere of representations broadly construed.

Does this not decisively refute truthmaker maximalism? There are plenty of analytic truths, but none of them has or can have a truthmaker. For if you say that an analytic truth needs a truthmaker, then you are saying that it needs something external to it to 'synthesize,' to bring together, subject and predicate concepts. But analytic truths are precisely not synthetic in that (Kantian) sense. But I hear an objection coming.

8) "*Every cygnet is a swan* does have a truthmaker, namely, the fact that cygnet includes swan." This is a confused response. There would not be a analytic truthbearer at all if cygnet did not include swan. The very existence of the proposition *Every cygnet is a swan* requires that the first concept include the second. So there is no need of an ontological ground of the truth of this proposition. One could of course say that in the analytic case the truthbearer is its own truthmaker. But it is better to say that in the analytic case there cannot be a truthmaker as 'truthmaker' was defined in #2 above.

9) Here is where Alan Rhoda will disagree:

Some philosophers say that truthmaking is asymmetric rather than anti-symmetric, but that is a mistake. Asymmetry disallows the possibility of self-grounding truthbearers. Anti-symmetry allows for that possibility. And this is something we should allow, because conceptually necessary propositions (e.g., all triangles have three sides) are their own truthmakers. If the proposition exists—whether it exists [as] a Platonic object, an idea in God’s mind, or something else—its very existence supplies a parcel of reality sufficient to explain and ground its own truth.

10) For me, truthmaking is an asymmetric relation whereas for Alan it is an antisymmetric relation. Thus I am maintaining that, for any x, y, if x makes-true y, then it is not the case that y makes-true x. This implies that no truthbearer is its own truthmaker or truth-ground. It implies that in no case is the truthmaker of a truth (a true truthbearer) that very truth. It implies that the truthmaker of a truth is in every case 'external' to that truth in the manner explained above.

Now a relation R is said to be antisymmetric just in case: for any x, y, if x stands in R to to y, and y stands in R to x, then x = y. The antisymmetry of 'makes-true' allows for cases in which a proposition (or other truthbearer) is its own truthmaker. Thus Every cygnet is a swan is its truthbearer that is its own truthmaker. This is Alan's position.

11) Here is a consideration in favor of my position. Truthmakers play an explanatory role. Now explanation is asymmetric: if x explains y, then it is not the case that y explains x. This holds for causal explanation, but also for metaphysical explanation or metaphysical grounding. It is the existence of Milo that metaphysically grounds the truth of Milo exists. And not the other way around. No one — I hope! — will say that that the truth of Philo's belief that Milo exists is what makes it the case that Milo exists or that Shlomo's sincere assertive utterance of 'Milo is sleeping' is what makes it the case that Milo is sleeping.

Now if truthmakers play an explanatory role, and metaphysical explanation is asymmetric, then no truthbearer is its own truthmaker. So in the case of analytic or conceptually necessary truths, we should say that they do not have and do not need truthmakers. To maintain this is to reject truthmaker maximalism.

It is worth noting that my position is consistent with saying that a truthbearer (whether a Platonic proposition, a divine thought, whatever) can serve as a truthmaker for a different truthbearer. The Platonic proposition expressed by '7 is prime,' for example, makes-true the general Platonic proposition that there are Platonic propositions.

Your move, Alan.