{"id":10187,"date":"2011-11-13T14:17:43","date_gmt":"2011-11-13T14:17:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2011\/11\/13\/you-deny-truth-makers-what-then-is-your-theory\/"},"modified":"2011-11-13T14:17:43","modified_gmt":"2011-11-13T14:17:43","slug":"you-deny-truth-makers-what-then-is-your-theory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2011\/11\/13\/you-deny-truth-makers-what-then-is-your-theory\/","title":{"rendered":"You Deny Truth-Makers? What Then is Your Theory?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Let us confine ourselves to true affirmative contingent nonrelational predications.  If you deny that there is any extralinguistic fact or state of affairs that makes it true that Tom is smoking, then what is your positive theory? Here are some possible views, 'possible' in the sense that they are possibly such as to be held by someone whether fool or sage or someone in between.<\/span><\/p>\n

1.  A contingently true sentence like 'Tom is smoking' is just true; there is nothing external to the sentence, nothing at all, that plays any role in making it true.  There is no more to a true sentence than the sentence.  Thus no part of the sentence has a worldly correlate, not even the subject term.  On this view there is no extralinguistic reality — or at least no extralinguistic reality that bears upon the truth or falsity of our sentences — and thus no ontological ground of any kind for the truth of true contingent representations, whether declarative sentences, propositions, judgments, beliefs, whatever the truth-bearers are taken to be.<\/span><\/p>\n

2. A rather less crazy view is that our sample sentence does have something corresponding to it in reality, and that that item is Tom, but nothing else.  On this view 'Tom is smoking' has a truth-maker, but the truth-maker is just Tom.  On this view the truth-maker role is a legitimate one, and something plays it, but there are no facts, and so no fact is a truth-maker.  Note carefully that the question whether there are facts is not the same as the question whether there are truth-makers.  It could be that the truth-making riole is played by non-facts, and it itr could be that there are facts but they have no role to play in truth-making.<\/span><\/p>\n

3. On a variant of (2) it is admitted that besides Tom there is also an entity corresponding to the predicate, and the truth-maker of 'Tom is smoking' is the set or the mereological sum, or the ordered pair consting of Tom and the entity corresponding to the predicate.<\/span><\/p>\n

4. A more radical view is that the truth-maker role is not a  legitimate role, hence does not need filling by the members of any category of entity.  On this view there are no truth-makers becsuae the very notion of a truth-maker is incoherent.  One who takes this line could even admit that there are facts, but he would deny that they play a truth-making role.<\/span><\/p>\n

5. On a still more radical view, there is an extralinguistic reality, but we cannot say what categories of entity it contains.  On this view one abandons the notion that language mirrors reality, that there is any correspondence or matching between parts of speech and categories of entity.  Thus one would abandon the notion that truth is correspondence, that the 'Al is fat' is true just in case the referent of 'Al' exemplifies the property denoted by 'fat.'  One would be abandoning the notion that language is any guide at all to ontology.<\/span><\/p>\n

First Question<\/em>:  Are there other options?  What are they? <\/span><\/p>\n

Second Question<\/em>:  Which option do you embrace if you deny that 'Tom is smoking' has a fact as its truth-maker?  <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Let us confine ourselves to true affirmative contingent nonrelational predications.  If you deny that there is any extralinguistic fact or state of affairs that makes it true that Tom is smoking, then what is your positive theory? Here are some possible views, 'possible' in the sense that they are possibly such as to be held by … Continue reading “You Deny Truth-Makers? What Then is Your Theory?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[228],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-truth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10187"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10187\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}