{"id":7445,"date":"2015-01-12T05:45:31","date_gmt":"2015-01-12T05:45:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2015\/01\/12\/will-the-real-truth-maker-of-al-is-fat-please-stand-up\/"},"modified":"2015-01-12T05:45:31","modified_gmt":"2015-01-12T05:45:31","slug":"will-the-real-truth-maker-of-al-is-fat-please-stand-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2015\/01\/12\/will-the-real-truth-maker-of-al-is-fat-please-stand-up\/","title":{"rendered":"Will the Real Truth-Maker of ‘Al is Fat’ Please Stand up?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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From a comment thread:<\/span><\/p>\n

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Me to Josh: "Could Al be the truth-maker of 'Al is fat'? Arguably not. What is needed is a state of affairs, Al's being fat<\/em>."<\/span><\/p>\n

Josh to me: Yes, I think Al is the truth-maker of "Al is fat," but could be persuaded otherwise. I'm not sure what objections you have in mind for that position.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Here is an excerpt from a forthcoming article of mine  to appear in a volume honoring the late David M. Armstrong, widely regarded as Australia's greatest philosopher:<\/span><\/p>\n

II. The Truth-Maker Argument for Facts<\/strong> <\/span><\/p>\n

The central and best among several arguments for facts is the Truth-Maker Argument. Take some such contingently true affirmative singular sentence as 'Al is fat.' Surely with respect to such sentences there is more to truth than the sentences that are true. There must be something external to a true sentence that grounds its being true, and this external something is not plausibly taken to be another sentence or the say-so of some person. 'Al is fat' is not just true; it is true because<\/em> there is something in extralinguistic and extramental reality that 'makes' it true, something 'in virtue of which' it is true. There is this short man, Al, and the guy weighs 250 lbs. There is nothing linguistic or mental about the man or his weight. Here is the sound core, at once both ancient and perennial, of correspondence theories of truth. Our sample sentence is not just true; it is true because of the way the world outside the mind and outside the sentence is configured. The 'because' is not a causal 'because.' The question is not the empirical-causal one as to why Al is fat. He is fat because he eats too much. The question concerns the ontological ground of the truth of the sentential representation, 'Al is fat.' Since it is obvious that the sentence cannot just be true — given that it is not true in virtue of its logical form or ex vi terminorum<\/em> — we must posit something external to the sentence that 'makes' it true. I don't see how this can be avoided even though I cheerfully admit that 'makes true' is not perfectly clear. That (some) truths refer us to the world as to that which makes them true is so obvious and commonsensical and indeed 'Australian' that one ought to hesitate to reject the idea because of the undeniable puzzles that it engenders. Motion is puzzling too but presumably not to be denied on the ground of its being puzzling. <\/span><\/p>\n

    Now what is the nature of this external truth-maker? If we need truth-makers it doesn't follow straightaway that we need facts. This is a further step in the argument. Truth-maker<\/em> is an office. Who or what is a viable candidate? It can't be Al by himself, if Al is taken to be ontologically unstructured, an Armstrongian 'blob,' as opposed to a 'layer cake,' and it can't be fatness by itself.1<\/sup><\/a> (Armstrong 1989a, 38, 58) If Al by himself were the truth-maker of 'Al is fat' then Al by himself would make true 'Al is not fat' and every sentence about Al whether true or false. If fatness by itself were the truth-maker, then fatness exemplified by some other person would be the truth-maker of 'Al is fat.' Nor can the truth-maker be the pair of the two. For it could be that Al exists and fatness exists, by being exemplified by Sal, say, but Al does not instantiate fatness. What is needed, apparently, is a proposition-like entity, the fact of Al's being fat<\/em>. We need something in the world to undergird the predicative tie. So it seems we must add the category of fact to our ontology, to our categorial inventory. Veritas sequitur esse<\/em> \u2013 the principle that truth follows being, that there are no truths about what lacks being or existence \u2013 is not enough. It is not enough that all truths are about existing items pace<\/em> Meinong. It is not enough that 'Al' and 'fat' have worldly referents; the sentence as a whole needs a worldly referent. In many cases, though perhaps not in all, truth-makers cannot be 'things' \u2013 where a thing is either an individual or a property \u2013 or collections of same, but must be entities of a different categorial sort. Truth-making facts are therefore 'an addition to being,' not 'an ontological free lunch,' to employ a couple of signature Armstrongian phrases. For the early Armstrong at least, facts do not supervene upon their constituents. This yields the following scheme. There are particulars and there are universals. The Truth-Maker Argument, however, shows or at least supports the contention that there must also be facts: particulars-instantiating-universals.2<\/sup><\/a> There are other arguments for facts, but they cannot be discussed here. And there are other candidates for the office of truth-maker such as tropes and Husserlian moments (Mulligan et al<\/em>. 2009) but these other candidates cannot be discussed here either. Deeper than any particular argument for facts, or discussion of the nature of facts, lies the question whether realism about facts even makes sense. To this question we now turn.<\/span><\/p>\n

______________ <\/span><\/p>\n

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1<\/a>If Al is a blob, then he lacks ontological structure; but that is not to say that he lacks spatial or temporal parts. It is obvious that he has spatial parts; it is not obvious that he has ontological 'parts.' Thin particulars, properties, and nexus count as ontological 'parts.' Layer cakes have both spatiotemporal and ontological structure.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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2<\/a>Are facts or states of affairs then a third category of entity in addition to particulars and universals? Armstrong fights shy of this admission: \u201cI do not think that the recognition of states of affairs involves introducing a new entity. . . . it seems misleading to say that there are particulars, universals, and <\/em>states of affairs.\u201d (Armstrong 1978, 80) Here we begin to glimpse the internal instability of Armstrong's notion of a state of affairs. On the one hand, it is something in addition to its constituents: it does not reduce to them or supervene upon them. On the other hand, it is not a third category of entity. We shall see that this instability proves disastrous for Armstrong's ontology.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\nRelated articles<\/legend>\n
\n
\"\"<\/a>Tropes as Truth-Makers? Or Do We Need Facts?<\/a><\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>The Delight of the 'Find'<\/a><\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>God as an Ontological Category Mistake<\/a><\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>John Anderson on Levels of Reality<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/fieldset>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From a comment thread: Me to Josh: "Could Al be the truth-maker of 'Al is fat'? Arguably not. What is needed is a state of affairs, Al's being fat." Josh to me: Yes, I think Al is the truth-maker of "Al is fat," but could be persuaded otherwise. I'm not sure what objections you have … Continue reading “Will the Real Truth-Maker of ‘Al is Fat’ Please Stand up?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,237,228],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-constituent-ontology","category-facts","category-truth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7445","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=7445"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7445\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}