Truthmakers and Truth Conditions

The following is an excerpt from an old entry that makes a distinction we need to keep in mind in present discussions.

………………..

Dan offers

(*) The sentence 'Al is fat' is true because Al is fat

to show that a truthmaker need not be an entity.

It seems to me, though, that Dan is confusing a truthmaker with a truth condition.  A truthmaker is concrete chunk of extralinguistic and extramental reality whereas a truth condition is just another sentence, proposition, or cognate item. 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.
 

Dan's (*) merely sets forth a truth condition. It doesn't get us off the level of propositions and down to the level of truthmakers.

Another important point has to do with the asymmetry of truthmaking: if T makes true p, it does not follow that p makes true T.  It's an asymmetry of explanation. If one thing explains another, it does not follow that the other explains the one. The truthmaker theorist takes seriously the project of metaphysical explanation. Truthmakers explain why true truthbearers are true, but not vice versa.  Dan's (*), however, entails the following non-explanatory biconditional:

(**) The sentence 'Al is fat' is true iff Al is fat.

But (**) has nothing to do with truthmaking; it is but an instance of Quine's disquotational schema according to which the truth predicate is but a device of disquotation. We remain on the level of sentences (propositions, etc.)

In sum, I see no merit in Dan's suggestion that there are truthmakers but they needn't be entities. That shows a failure to grasp the notion of a truthmaker. What Dan should say is that there is no need for truthmakers. He might also try arguing that the truthmaking relation is bogus or unintelligible since it is neither a logical relation nor a causal one.

Back on Facebook

I gave up Facebook for Lent, but now I'm back. 

I offer daily punch-back against leftist loons on a wide variety of topics. Culture critique in the bowels of the Zuckerbergian beast.  No lefties need apply. I am looking for a few good men and women to join me in the fight for sense and sanity and the defense of the Republic. 

Most linkage and political commentary is now over at Facebook.  The idea behind the FB offload is to keep this site free of the polemics necessary in political warfare. As I see it, polemics has no place in philosophy, including political philosophy. The latter is theoretical; politics is practical. Politics is a form of warfare in which polemic and invective have their place.  The philosophical opponent is a friend to whom one is tied by a philiatic bond.  Theirs is a cooperation under the aegis of a truth that belongs to neither and is above both: amicus Plato sed amica magis veritas. The political opponent is an enemy whose opposition is 'existential.'  Must it be so? No, but it is so at the present time. A politics based on mutual respect conducted under an umbrella of common principles and values is unlikely but not impossible.

The Left has to be battled in multiple ways from multiple platforms. So occasionally polemical material will appear here.

I received 'friend' requests from a couple of hotties the other day who proudly strut their stuff and sport their 'racks' on pages including links to their 'nude pics.'  Sorry girls, you are not MavPhil material.  

A Reader has a Request. Suggestions Solicited

I hope you are doing well. I am a regular reader of your blog for quite a few years and I thank you for doing this.
 
When you have time, could you recommend books/articles written by thinking people who became believers (were not born into religious setting) and describe the processes that led them to change their worldview?
 
I've read a couple like God and the Philosophers edited by Thomas Morris and Belief: Readings on the reason for faith edited by Francis Collins, but — simplifying for sake of brevity — these books do not contain the personal accounts I am looking for. Collins' book come closest to what I am looking for, but still falls a bit short as it is too literary and short on personal & sincere accounts.
 
Thank you in advance,
 
Dmitri
 
I am well and I hope the same is true for you and yours. I have read the T. V. Morris volume and I am surprised that you don't find it helpful. It contains several outstanding essays, in particular the one by Peter van Inwagen. Other than that, I can't think of any others in this genre off the top of my head.
 
Perhaps my readers have some suggestions.

Presentism and the Determinacy of the Past

On presentism, the present alone exists, and not in the trivial sense that the present alone exists at present, but in the substantive sense that the present alone exists simpliciter.  But if so, then the past is nothing, a realm of sheer nonbeing. But surely the past is not nothing: it happened, and is in some sense 'there' to be investigated by historians and archeologists and paleontologists. 

If our presentist cannot accommodate the reality of the past, then his position is hopeless. He might say this:  the past is real, but its reality is wholly contained in the present.  The causal traces of past events in the present constitutes the entire reality of the past.  Will this work? No. There simply aren't enough causal traces!

On the principle of bivalence, every proposition is either true, or if not true, then false. Given that bivalence holds for what presently exists, it is difficult to see how it could fail to hold for what did exist. Why should the present, which is wholly determinate, become less than wholly determinate when it becomes past? However things stand with the future, one reasonably views the past as a realm of reality and thus as wholly determinate.

Our knowledge of the past is spotty, but not the past itself. It was, and I would add: it actually was. When a thing passes away it does not pass from actuality to mere possibility; it remains actual, though no longer temporally present. Or so it would seem if we are realists about the past. The historian studies past actualities, not past possibilities.

Compare Kierkegaard's engagement to Regine Olsen to his marriage to her. There is a loose sense in which both events belong to the past. It is clear that he was engaged to Olsen. We also know that he did not marry her. But he might have. This possible event belongs to the past in the sense that, had it been actual, it would have belonged to the actual past. The crucial difference is that the first event actually occurred while the second was a mere possibility. This is a difference that an adequate philosophy of time must be able to accommodate.

To make a slogan out of it: the past is fact, not fiction; actuality not possibility.

One point to keep in mind is that if the past is wholly determinate, as determinate as the present, this is the case whether or not determinism is true. The determinate is not to be confused with the determined. (Bourne 2006, 50 f.)

Consider the proposition that my grandfather Alfonso drank a glass of dago red on New Year's Day, 1940. Bivalence ensures that the proposition is either true or false but not both. If the proposition is true and the event occurred, it doesn't matter whether the event was caused by prior events under the aegis of the laws of nature, or not. To say that the past is determinate is not to say that past events are determined; it is to say that, e.g., the past individual Alfonso V. cannot be such that he neither drank nor did not drink red wine on the date in question. It had to be one or the other if bivalence holds for the past.

Of course, no one now remembers whether or not this event occurred, and there is no written record or other evidence of the event's having occurred. If the event occurred, nothing in the present points back to it as to its cause. Some past events, states, individuals, and property-instantiations leave causal traces in the present, but not all do. My grandfather's gravestone and the dessicated bones lying beneath it are causal traces in the present of a long-dead and wholly past individual. But there is nothing in the present that bears upon the truth of the proposition that Big Al drank a glass of vino rosso on New Year's Day, 1940, assuming it is true. If true, it is true now but lacks a present truth-maker.

So it looks as if our presentist is in a serious bind. The following cannot all be true:

1) Presentism is true: whatever exists at all, exists at present.

2) The past is real.

3) The past is determinate.

4) There are countless events that really happened that no one remembers and for which there is not a shred of evidence in the present.

It seems to me that the obvious solution to this aporetic tetrad is to deny (1).

Comments enabled, but no comment will be allowed to appear that does not address the above argument.

Word of the Day: Recusant

Merriam-Webster:

1: an English Roman Catholic of the time from about 1570 to 1791 who refused to attend services of the Church of England and thereby committed a statutory offense.
2: one who refuses to accept or obey established authority.
Example:
So, like atheists in a theocracy, or recusants in Elizabethan England, we go underground. We are a secret society — brave rebels against the epidemiocracy.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Decoupling Rock and Roll from Sex and Drugs

Five examples:

Norman Greenbaum, Spirit in the Sky

Johnny Cash, Personal Jesus. This is one powerful song.

Clapton and Winwood, Presence of the Lord. Why is Clapton such a great guitarist? Not because of his technical virtuosity, his 'chops,' but because he has something to say.

George Harrison, My Sweet Lord

George Harrison, All Things Must Pass. Harrison was the Beatle with depth.  Lennon was the radical, McCartney the romantic, and Ringo the regular guy.

Good YouTuber comment: "Immortal song, even if all things must pass . . . " 

Presentism and Regret

I have done things I regret having done.  Regret is a past-directed emotion by its very nature. One cannot regret present or future actions or omissions.  So if I regret action A, A is wholly past.  What's more, I cannot regret a non-existent action.  But on presentism, all items in time are such that they exist at present.  Therefore, presentism is false.  

1) There exist states of regret.

2) Every such state has as its accusative an event that exists.

3) Every such state has as its accusative an event that is wholly past.

Therefore

4) There exist wholly past events.

5) If presentism is true, then there exist no wholly past events.

Therefore

6) Presentism is false.

Doesn't this argument blow presentism clean out of the water?  It is plainly valid in point of logical form. Which premise will you deny?

"You're begging the question! You are using 'exist(s)' tenselessly.  But on presentism, the only legitimate uses of 'exist(s)' are present-tensed."

Reply:  Please note that you too must use 'exist(s)' tenselessly to formulate your presentist thesis on pain of your thesis collapsing into the miserable tautology, 'Whatever in time exists (present-tense) exists (present-tense).'  That's fake news. To advance a substantive claim you must say, 'Whatever in time exists simpliciter exists at present' where 'simpliciter' is cashed out by 'tenselessly.'

Comments enabled, but no comment will be allowed to appear that does not address the above argument.

Presentism and the Cross

Alexander Pruss argues:

1) It is important for Christian life that one unite one’s daily sacrifices with Christ’s sufferings on the cross.

2) Uniting one’s sufferings with something non-existent is not important for Christian life.

3) So, Christ’s sufferings on the cross are a part of reality.

4) So, presentism is false.

The Prussian argument is an enthymeme the tacit premise of which is

0) On presentism, only temporally present events exist or are real.

Add the above to your Holy Saturday meditations.

Cognitive Dissonance on Good Friday

It was Good Friday. I was 11 or 12 years old, possibly 13. I was with the boy next door, also raised Catholic.  He wanted to play. It was around two in the afternoon. Christ had been on the cross for two hours according to the account we had been taught. I recall to this day the cognitive dissonance induced by the collision of the worldliness of my playmate and the Catholicism inculcated in me by my pious Italian mother and  the priests and nuns in the days before Vatican II.

An acquaintance of mine, a former altar boy with a similar upbringing, told me he never believed a word of it. I would guess that most of those who attended the Catholic schools for 8-12 years mainly just went long to get along and then dropped it all when the world issued its call.  The etymology of 'inculcate' suggests that it is not the right word. The teaching wasn't stamped into me, but planted in me, in soil fertile and receptive unlike the stony and weed-choked psychic soil of most of my classmates.  In compensation, they were spared the cognitive dissonance.

Related: Good Friday: At the Mercy of a Little Piece of Iron

He Breathed His Last

If you have ever struggled with the one-person-two-natures doctrine, then you may be inclined to agree with Dale Tuggy:

Today is when we remember that terrible and wonderful day when our Savior willingly died for us, breathing his last.

This whole time, God was not breathing at all. As a divine spirit, God lacks lungs, throat, mouth, and diaphragm. He lived on to witness the heroic death of his beloved Son, his Christ – and later (spoiler alert!) to raise Jesus back to life.

Recent and ancient catholic traditions have created a lot of confusion about just who gave up his life on the cross. The gospel is not that God died for you; God is essentially immortal. Rather, the gospel is that God’s human Son died for you. It was one of us who atoned for the rest of us.

Do you imagine that somehow Jesus having “two natures” can explain how he can die even while being the essentially immortal God? I invite you to think again – such speculations just don’t work out. Think carefully through these things; don’t just blindly repeat unclear and non-biblical language, e.g. Jesus “died in his human nature” but “lived in his divine nature.”

Let’s celebrate this wonderful event without muddying the waters; the New Testament is very explicit that God is immortal, and also that his human Son died for us.

That a man should be raised from the dead by the power of God is a miracle, but it involves no conceptual incoherence or logical contradiction that I can see. It is of course incompatible with metaphysical naturalism and its epistemology, scientism, but it is no affront to the discursive intellect.  Chalcedonian orthodoxy is. To this extent I agree with my friend Tuggy.  The fancy footwork that is used to show that Chaldedonian orthodoxy is logically in the clear convinces neither of us.

But how seriously should we take affronts to the discursive intellect in theological matters?   One might attempt a mysterian move in support of the two-natures doctrine.  Tuggy will of course balk. At the end of Intellectual Integrity and the Appeal to Mystery, I offer a partial response.

A Field Day for Authoritarians

Another example:

In Colorado, a man was playing with his six-year-old daughter in a park with no one else within a vast distance, when he was arrested by a group of police officers–wrongly, based on signs at the park–who themselves failed to follow guidelines as to use of masks, gloves, and social distancing.

It makes no sense. But an entity with sufficient power has no need to make sense.

Why Do Leftists Call Good People Racists?

Dennis Prager:

First, truth is not a left-wing value. As I have said and written ever since studying communism and the left in graduate school at the Columbia University Russian Institute, truth is a [classically] liberal value and a conservative value, but it is not a left-wing value. However, destroying opponents by destroying their reputations is a left-wing value — whether it's charging Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh with multiple rapes, preoccupying the country with the fake charge that Donald Trump's presidential campaign colluded with Russia to manipulate the 2016 election, or the charges such as those made against me.

Second, smearing opponents is not only a left-wing value; it is the left's modus operandi. And the reason for that is: The left does not win through argument. It wins through smear. If you differ with the left, you are, by definition, sexist, racist, bigoted, intolerant, homophobic, Islamophobic, xenophobic, fascist and/or a hater. The proof? You cannot name a single opponent of the left who has not been so labeled.

True, but we need to go deeper. Why don't leftists value truth, and why do they smear their opponents? The most obvious answer is that leftists are just not good people. Prager has said in the past that leftism turns good people bad. I see it the other way around: some if not most of the people who embrace leftism in the first place do so because they are morally defective specimens of humanity blind to their defects because of their absurd conceit that people are basically good.  It's paradoxical: believing humanity to be good at bottom and held back  by contingent socio-economic arrangements, leftists see their way clear to the commission of the most horrendous crimes. Communists, using the power of the state, murdered some 100 million in the 20th century alone.

They broke a lot of eggs, but where's the omelet?

Helmuth James Graf von Moltke

Von MoltkeI  sometimes express skepticism about the value of the study of history. If history has lessons, they don't seem applicable to the present in any useful way. But there is no denying that history is a rich source of exemplary lives. These exemplary lives show what is humanly possible and furnish existential ideals. Helmuth James von Moltke was a key figure in the German resistance to Hitler. The Nazis executed him in 1945. Here is his story.  Here is an obituary of his wife, Freya.