Truth maker

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A truth maker for a proposition is the concrete entity by virtue of which this proposition is true (or would be true). Philosophers have speculated that every true proposition needs a truth maker. The classic teaching of Parmenides is: what does not exist cannot be thought. This was read as the teaching that every true proposition needs a truth maker, because otherwise it is not about or about anything. A wrongdoer for a proposition is that existing by virtue of which a proposition is wrong.

However, the teaching that every true proposition needs a truth maker creates difficulties. For example: what is the truth maker for ethical , modal or mathematical propositions? In non- cognitivist metaethics , the truthfulness of normative sentences is disputed, so that truth makers cannot be related to sentences of deontic logic or norm logic .

What about negations of existence statements ("there are no unicorns") and universally quantifying statements? It has been suggested: the totality of all things makes them true, or ( Richard M. Gale ): an actual state of affairs, so that x1 is not a unicorn, x2 is not one, etc. and everything is either x1 or x2, etc.

David Lewis proposed a more moderate truth-maker theory. Only for positive propositions must there be truth makers. What makes negative statements true is that they lack a false maker , that is, they lack a truth maker for their negation. "There are no unicorns" is made true by the lack of a truth-maker for "There are unicorns". This could be understood as a reconstruction of the Aristotelian dictum: To speak true is to say of what is, to say that it is, and of what is not, that it is not.

Different truth maker theories assume different types of truth makers. Some assume that sentences are made true by facts, of which they act and are typically described by nominalizations of the sentence: "Socrates sits" is made true by "sitting of Socrates".

Others teach: the truth maker of this sentence is simply Socrates - about whose existence the sentence is about.

The existence of truth makers may seem like a speculative glass bead game. But this question has now become important for many debates. The Australian philosopher John Leslie Mackie, for example, has argued: The truth-makers of moral sentences must be so unusual that they cannot possibly exist, and these sentences must therefore be false.

See also

literature

  • Armstrong, DM: Truth and truthmakers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2004. ISBN 0-521-54723-7
  • Beebee, H., & Dodd, J. ( Eds .): Truthmakers: The contemporary debate. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2005. ISBN 0-19-928356-7
  • David Lewis: Truth-Making and difference-making , in: Nous 35 (2001), 602-615
  • David Lewis: Things qua truthmakers , in: Lillehammer / Rodriguez-Pereyra, Real Metaphysics, Routledge 2003, 25 - 42
  • Peter Forrest, Drew Khlentzos (eds.): Truth Maker and Its Variants . Special Issue of Logique et Analyze , Vol. 43 No. 169-170 (2000)
  • Kevin Mulligan , Barry Smith , Peter Simons: Truth-makers in: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 44 (1984), 287 - 321 ( German translation (PDF; 2.2 MB) in LB Puntel (ed.), Der Truthsbegriff) Neue Explikationsversuche, Darmstadt 1987, also here ; PDF; 363 kB) A classic essay on the theory of truth makers

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