Mohsen Zamani

Many advocates of grounding believe that a proposition’s truthmaker grounds its truth—what I call the Alethic Grounding Principle. The principle was attacked by (Griffith, Inquiry 57(2):196-21, 2014), (Saenz Synthese, 2018), and (Audi, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 1-24, 2019). According to Griffith, truthmaking is a species of grounding: however, something might be a proposition’s truthmaker, although its ground is not that proposition’s truthmaker. Saenz suggests that the ground of a proposition’s truth includes its truthmaker, but it includes a lot more. In Audi’s view, what counts as the relation between truths and truthmakers lacks certain logical properties of the grounding relation; therefore, it does not count as grounding. I will suggest that Griffith’s and Saenz’s views imply an unnecessary inflation in ontology, as they rule out one motivation for the truthmaker theory. Furthermore, Audi’s conception of grounding is very similar to emergence. Taking some of these objections into account, I provide a revised version of the Alethic Grounding Principle, according to which the truth of a proposition is grounded in both the proposition and its truthmaker.

There are two dimensions to Fine’s truthmaker semantics. One involves a claim about the nature of propositions: propositions are not structural and nothing but sets of their possible truthmakers, and the other talks about the relation between truthmaking and Boolean operations. In this paper, I show that a claim by Fine in the latter dimension—that truthmaking is distributed over “or”—faces a counterexample. I will then go on to argue that one possible way to do away with the counterexample is to restrict truthmakers to fundamentals, namely entities that are not grounded in anything else. This would, nevertheless, pose a problem for the first dimension of truthmaker semantics: certain distinct propositions would fail to be distinct.

In this paper I deal with the relation between the disjunction thesis—that the truthmaking relation is distributed over a disjunction—and the necessary connection thesis—that the existence of some entities requires the existence of other distinct entities. I will first show that because of this very relation, the arguments for and against the disjunction thesis that overlook its metaphysical considerations will fail. Finally, I will show that the commitment produced by truthmaker maximalism to totality states of affairs, or some relevantly similar things, requires one to accept a necessary connection that disaffirms the disjunction thesis.

There are two main theories of ontological commitment: the quantifier view, and the truthmaker view. Since there are some truths that apparently commit us to certain entities, but actually do not, any ontological commitment theory must also contain an ontological reduction theory. Advocates of the quantifier view propose the paraphrasing method of reduction, while advocates of the truthmaker view propose the supervenience method. In this paper, after a brief discussion of the quantifier view, I propose a modified version of truthmaker-based ontology, and show that a plausible account of the supervenience method can be deduced from my version. I then show that the supervenience method could explain why the paraphrasing method is successful, albeit that there are some cases in which the supervenience method works but the paraphrasing method does not, or so it seems prime facie. I also argue that according to the truthmaker view we must accept composite objects as something over and above the particles which constitute them.

The truthmaker principle faces a number of problems, including that of negative truths. Lewis, among others, tries to solve the problem of negative truths by appealing to falsemakers. In this paper, firstly I argue that certain steps of Lewis's argument for the equivalence of the truthmaker and the falsemaker principles are unjustified, and then I suggest a new argument for this equivalence. Secondly, I argue that Lewis's characterization of the falsemaker principle is not appropriate and then I suggest my own characterization of it. Thirdly, I argue that appealing to falsemakers will not solve the problem.

Armstrong appeals to the existence of totalities in order to solve the problem of negative truths. The totality of first-order states of affairs is a truthmaker for all negative truths, but it involves things which are irrelevant to many such truths. To solve this problem, Armstrong claimed that negative truths have minimal truthmakers which usually consist in totalities smaller than the totality of first-order states of affairs. Merricks objects to this claim by arguing that given Armstrong’s definition of minimal truthmakers, the totality of first-order states of affairs is a minimal truthmaker for every negative truth. In this article, I respond to Merricks’s objection. I will first show that the definition of minimal truthmakers that he proposes is not plausible. However, Merricks’s objection, I will argue, also works on the standard definition of minimal truthmakers. I will then show that for independent reasons, the standard definition should be revised, and, given my revised definition, Merricks’s objection fails.