Year: 2006
Type: article
Abstract: In recent work on truth and truthmaking, D. M. Armstrong has defended a version of ‘truthmaker necessitarianism’, the doctrine that truths necessitate truthmakers. Truthmaker necessitarianism, he contends, requires the postulation of ‘totality facts’, which serve as ingredients of truthmakers for general truths and negative truths, and propositions, which function as the fundamental truth bearers. I argue that neither totality facts nor propositions need figure in an account of truthmaking, and suggest that both are artifacts stemming, albeit in different ways, from an ontologically shady ‘linguisticizing’ tendency to conflate features of descriptions and features of what is described.
Author: John Heil
Institutions: Washington University in St. Louis, Monash University
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2067947469