Kevin Mulligan, Peter M. Simons and Barry Smith,
Truth-Makers
Preprint version of paper published in Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research, 44 (1984), 287–321.
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translation
A realist theory of truth for a
class of sentence holds that there are entities in virtue of which these
sentences are true or false. We call such entities ‘truthmakers’, and contend
that those for a wide range of sentences about the real world are moments
(dependent particulars). Since moments are unfamiliar we provide a definition
and a brief philosophical history, anchoring them in our ontology by showing
that they are objects of perception. The core of our theory is the account of
truthmaking for atomic sentences, in which we expose a pervasive ‘dogma of
logical form’, which says that Atomic sentences cannot have more than one
truthmaker; the authors uphold. The mutual independence of
logical and ontological complexity. The theory is compared with that of
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, and the authors outline formal principles of
truthmaking taking account of both kinds of complexity and suggesting how to
overcome Wittgenstein’s problem of negation.
Barry
Smith, Truthmaker
Realism
Preprint version of paper published in Australasian Journal of Philosophy , 77
(3), 1999, 274–291.
The paper takes as its starting point a thesis to the effect
that, at least for true judgments of many varieties, there are parts of reality
which make such judgments true. It is then argued that two distinct components
are involved in this truthmaker relation. On the one hand is the relation of
necessitation, which holds between an object x and a judgment p when the
existence of x entails the truth of p. On the other hand is the dual notion of
projection, which holds between a judgment p and an object x when the truth of
p entails the existence of x. A truthmaker for a judgment p is then a
necessitator for p which satisfies the further constraint that it is part of
p’s projection. We offer a formal theory of the truthmaker relation thus
defined, exploiting ontological tools of basic mereology and the theory of
dependence. We then apply the theory to a range of problems connected with
generic expressions, ellipsis, vagueness, and indexical and perceptual
judgments.
Barry Smith, Truthmaker Realism:
Response to Gregory
Preprint version of paper published in Australasian Journal of Philosophy , 80
(2), 2002, 231–234.
Barry Smith and Jonathon
Simon, Truthmaker
Explanations
Forthcoming in J.-M. Monnoyer
(ed.), Proceedings of the conference: Truthmakers: Twenty Years After, Aix-en-Provence,
December 2004.