Truthmaking

[see Bill Vallicella's 'Truth' category]

While I can't shake off the conviction that if p is true there is something in the world that makes it true, I can't help but feel that the kinds of truthmakers we have been discussing do not advance our understanding of the 'truthmaker relation'. For in going from p to its purported truthmaker t all we seem to be doing is 'gerundising' the verb phrase within p. Examples:
Tom is fat ==> Tom's fatness
Tom is seated ==> Tom's being seated
Tom exists ==> Tom
The noun phrases on the right are readily seen as terms that refer to objects in the world. But we know that not all referring terms succeed in referring. Tom's fatness or seatedness may not exist. Indeed Tom may not exist. It's the existence of Tom's fatness, etc, that implies that Tom is fat, etc. This suggests that 'Tom's fatness' remains a conceptual entity---we have not, as we had supposed, got outside the realm of representations. Do we really expect to achieve this by a trivial syntactic transformation? And is there not the risk that a somewhat convoluted phrase like 'Tom's being seated' gets its meaning by being understood as that which makes 'Tom is seated' true?

No comments:

Post a Comment