Truthmaker Realism: Response to Gregory

Abstract

I. Truthmakers, Necessitation and RelevanceIf we want to give an account of the relation between those truths which have truthmakers and those portions of reality which make them true, a good place to start is with the notion of necessitation, which can be defined thus:x necessitates p if and only if: x exists and (that x exists entails that p).It is then tempting to embrace a simple definition of truthmaking along the following lines [4]:(A)x makes p true if and only if:This definition is, unfortunately, subject to two sorts of difficulties, which we can refer to as Restall's refrigerator and John's funeral.The first consists in the fact that the view of truthmakers as necessitators implies that every contingently existing entity is a truthmaker for every necessary truth: Restall's refrigerator, in particular, is a truthmaker for '1+1 = 2' [5].The second consists in the fact that, if a portion of reality is a necessitator for some contingent truth p, then by the transitivity of entailment it is a necessitator also for all those contingent truths which are entailed by p. John's funeral, in particular, is a truthmaker for 'John is dead'.To subvert these difficulties we need to find a way to block the transitivity of entailments, effectively by strengthening the definiens in (A) by imposing some factor of relevance beween x and p.In my paper "Truthmaker Realism" I attempt to show how this needed blocking factor can be formulated exclusively in terms

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