Truth-making and Reference-making: Revised and expanded

A revised and much expanded version of my series of posts on truth-making and reference-making--including criticisms of previous theories, a reply to Greg Restall's arguments for the triviality of the truth-making relation, and answers to several objections--is now available here on Scholardarity, for only ten cents!


I'm thinking of using this as my MA thesis, so I've taken it down. 

The problem of how best to explain the truth-making relation is a vexed one for truth-maker theory. As Raimi points out in his introductory survey, theories of this relation face four main difficulties:

An adequate definition of the truth-maker relation must satisfy at least four conditions. It should not fall victim to any of the following problems: (i) the problem of counterintuitive truth-makers; (ii) the problem of excluded truth-makers; (iii) the problem of missing truth-makers; and (iv) the problem of unnecessary truth-makers. A definition falls victim to the first problem if it classifies as truth-makers for a certain proposition entities that are intuitively not truth-makers for this proposition. It falls victim to the second problem if it fails to classify as a truth-maker for a certain proposition an entity that intuitively is a truth-maker for this proposition.  It falls victim to the third problem if it fails to account for any truth-maker for a certain proposition that intuitively has a truth-maker. Finally, it falls victim to the fourth problem if it classifies a truth-maker for a proposition that intuitively has no truth-maker. (Truth and Truth-Making, pp 13-4)

            In this paper I propose an account which I hope will not succumb to any of these problems. Section 2 sketches a couple of the major accounts that have been given of the truth-making relation, and explains what their problems are. In Section 3 I explain the basic ideas behind my own proposal, where I introduce the idea of reference-making, and use it to account for the idea of truth-making for subject-predicate sentences, taking a truth-maker to be a reference-maker for a sentence.  In Section 4, I give a quasi-formal account of how it can be applied to truth-functional compounds, quantified sentences, and modal sentences. Section 5 gives a reply to Greg Restall’s arguments that logical considerations lead quickly to the trivialization of the truth-making relation: that everything is a truth-maker for every true truth-bearer. I show that this does not hold for my approach, and in the process show how it avoids problem (i). Next, in Section 6 I discuss some of its philosophical implications. Then, in Section 7, I show how my account, contrary to first appearance, can be tweaked to avoid truth value gaps. Section 8 answers objections to my views. Finally, I conclude the paper in Section 9.