Regress? What Regress? Truth-Making Revisited

Ed continues to repeat his regress argument against truth-makers, despite my hurling invective at it.  I think I called it "breathtakingly rotten" or something equally offensive, all in good fun of course:

I have argued (e.g. here and here that the notion of a ‘truthmaker’ leads to an infinite regress. If there is such a truthmaker, an entity that makes a proposition like ‘Socrates sits’ true - let it be A - then it comes into existence when Socrates sits down, and ceases to exist when he stands up. But then there would have to be a further truthmaker for A existing. I.e. the sentence “A exists” can be true or false, and so requires a further truthmaker B, that makes it true when B exists. But then “B exists” requires yet another truthmaker, and so on ad infinitum.

Now what is the regress supposed to be?  There is an entity  A and it makes-true sentence s.  A is not a sentence, or any other type of representation.  Since we can talk about A, we can say 'A exists.'  'A exists' is contingently true, so it too needs a truth-maker.  So far, so good.

Ed assumes that the truth-maker for "A exists' must be distinct from the truth-maker for s.  Without this assumption, the regress can't get started.  Therefore, to show that his regress argument is bogus, it suffices to show that one and the same entity A can serve as the truth-maker for both s and 'A exists.'

Suppose the truth-maker of 'Tom is tired' is the fact, Tom's being tired.  Now consider the sentence 'Tom's being tired exists.'  I claim that the truth-maker of both sentences is Tom's being tired.   I conclude that there is no regress.

To appreciate this you must note that while 'Tom is tired' is a predication, 'Tom's being tired exists' is not.  It is an existential sentence like 'Tom exists.'  So while the predication requires a fact for its truth-maker, the existential sentence does not.  It does not need a fact as a truth-maker any more than 'Tom exists' does.  The truth-maker of the latter is just Tom.  The truth-maker of  'Tom's being tired' is not the fact, Tom'sbeing tired's existence, but just  Tom's being tired.

There is a second reason why the regress cannot arise.  Ed is a nominalist. He eschews propositions and believes only in sentences.  Well, there is no need for there to be the sentence 'A exists'!  If no one says that A exists, then there is no sentence 'A exists.'  And of course nonexistent sentences do not need truth-makers.   And if someone does say that A exists, there is no need that he, or anyone else, say that the truth-maker of 'A exists' exists.  So for this reason too the regress can't get started.

Ed ends his post on this strange note: "If we buy the idea of a ‘truthbearer’ (a proposition, a thought, whatever), the idea of a ‘truthmaker’ comes with it."  That's plainly false.  That there are truth-bearers is self-evident; that there are truth-makers is not.  Must I dilate further on this self-evident point?  Second, if the quoted sentence is true, and Ed's regress argument is sound, the upshot is that there are no truth-bearers, which is absurd.  In effect, Ed has provided a reductio ad absurdum of his own claim that there are no truth-makers!

What Ed says about representation and the representation of the faithfulness of a representation would require a separate post to discuss.  But I sense the conflation of epistemological questions with ontological ones.

Comments

[Edward]

? Didn't I comment on this earlier?

[Edward]

The comment was something like, truth is a relation between a thought or proposition and reality. It is an internal relation, like the relation of husband to wife. So, just as buying the idea of a husband requires buying the idea of a wife, so buying the idea of a truthbearer requires buying the idea of a truthmaker. That proves the consequence. Proof of the antecedent (namely, that truth is an internal relation) would take a little longer than that little sketch.

I am very busy at the moment and no time to say more.