Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Contributors
- 1 Introduction: truth and truth-making
- Part I Setting the stage
- Part II The current debate
- 8 Truth-making and correspondence
- 9 Facts and relations: the matter of ontology and of truth-making
- 10 Being and truth
- 11 An essentialist approach to truth-making
- 12 Are there irreducibly relational facts?
- 13 Why truth-makers
- 14 Postscript to “Why truth-makers”
- Bibliography
- Index
13 - Why truth-makers
from Part II - The current debate
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Contributors
- 1 Introduction: truth and truth-making
- Part I Setting the stage
- Part II The current debate
- 8 Truth-making and correspondence
- 9 Facts and relations: the matter of ontology and of truth-making
- 10 Being and truth
- 11 An essentialist approach to truth-making
- 12 Are there irreducibly relational facts?
- 13 Why truth-makers
- 14 Postscript to “Why truth-makers”
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Introduction
Consider a certain red rose. The proposition that the rose is red is true because the rose is red. One might say as well that the proposition that the rose is red is made true by the rose's being red. This, it has been thought, does not commit one to a truth-maker of the proposition that the rose is red. For there is no entity that makes the proposition true. What makes it true is how the rose is, and how the rose is is not an entity over and above the rose.
Although expressed in other terms, this view has been held by various authors, like David Lewis (1992, 2001) and Julian Dodd (2002). It is against this view that I shall argue in this paper. I shall argue that a significant class of true propositions, including inessential predications like the proposition that the rose is red, are made true by entities.
No truth-making without truth-makers is my slogan. Although I have my view about what kinds of entities are truth-makers, I shall not argue for or presuppose that view here. All I shall argue for here is that if a proposition is made true by something, it is made true by some thing, but my argument will leave it open what kind of thing that thing is: it could be a fact or state of affairs, a trope, or any other sort of entity.
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- Information
- Truth and Truth-Making , pp. 227 - 241Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2008
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