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Abstract
In this paper, I make a contribution to a naturalistically-minded theory of truthmakers by proposing a solution to the nasty problem of truthmakers for negative truths. After formulating the difficulty, I consider and reject a number of solutions to the problem, including Armstrong's states of affairs of totality, incompatibility accounts, and JC Beall's polarity view. I then defend the position that absences of truthmakers are real and are responsible for making negative truths true (and positive falsehoods false). According to the positive account of absences I offer, absences of contingent states of affairs are causally relevant mind-independent features of the physical world, located within space and time, and capable of being discovered by scientific inquiry. Recognition of the reality of absences strengthens truthmaker theory as a naturalistic metaphysics, as truth and falsity of each and every contingent proposition finds an ontological grounding in some region of the physical universe.
Notes
1A truthmaker is something that endows a proposition with truth. Perhaps the entity responsible for endowing a proposition with falsity should be called ‘falsitymaker’, but I follow the literature and adopt ‘falsemaker’ [Molnar Citation2000; Lewis Citation2001.
2Rejection of the law of non-contradiction raises a separate and fascinating question about what implications dialetheic treatment of semantic paradoxes may have on truthmaker theory. But even if dialetheism is true and some (but not all) propositions are both true and false, incompatibility analysis of truthmakers for negative truths must account for incompatibility that obtains between truthmakers and falsemakers of contingent propositions that do conform to the law of non-contradiction.
3I would like to thank David Armstrong, Bill Lycan, David Sanford, and Tad Schmaltz for continuing advice and support. Thanks are due also to audiences at Duke University and Davidson College, as well as AJP referees for their suggestions and comments, which helped me to improve the paper.