Today I read your critique of Feser on presentism. I am curious about something you said: A truth-bearer cannot serve as a truth-maker.If that's right, how would you handle obvious truths that are about propositions. Take the following: "The proposition that Humphreys Peak is the tallest in Arizona is true and believed by many."That sentence would seem to express a proposition which has another proposition (the one about Humphreys Peak) as its truth-maker; it is about that proposition; that proposition, and nothing else, makes it true. But of course all propositions are truth-bearers. So it would seem that we have a case of some thing which bears truth and makes truth. How would you understand that sentence in a way that is consistent with the claim that a truth-bearer cannot serve a truth-maker?As always, I enjoy your philosophical contributions.
In the typical case of truth-making, it is correct to say that if x makes-true y, then x is not a proposition, only y is. But if propositions exist, then doesn't the existence of any proposition make-true various propositions? The proposition expressed by 'The Earth has only one moon' exists. By its very existence it makes-true the proposition that there are propositions. So it seems that a proposition can serve as a truth-maker and that not every truth-maker is a non-proposition. One response is that it is not the Earth proposition qua true that makes-true the proposition that there are propositions, but the Earth proposition qua existent. But this response does not seem quite adequate. Perhaps the following works.
The intuition behind the truth-maker principle (TM) is that truth-makers are 'in the world' where the world is the totality of concrete extra-linguistic and extra-mental particulars (unrepeatables) including e.g. Socrates, and the concrete fact of Socrates' being wise. Representations are not part of the world in this sense. Representations are either mental or abstract. Mental representations are mind-dependent in the sense that they cannot exist except in or for minds as their contents or accusatives. Abstract representations are not dependent for their existence on finite minds, but they are accessible or graspable or understandable by such minds. Abstract propositions are representations in this sense. Thus the (abstract, Fregean) proposition expressed by 'Snow is white' represents snow as having a certain color. Abstract propositions are therefore not 'in the world' in the sense just defined. But truth-makers are. Therefore, abstract propositions are not truth-makers. And so truth-bearers and truth-makers form disjoint classes. But if course a lot depends on what we pack into the notion of a truth-maker.
The basic idea behind TM is that for every truth, or at least for every contingent truth, there must be at least one (though there could be more than one) item distinct from the truth that 'makes' it true, an item that is not itself a truth and is not some finite person's say-so. As Michael Dummett puts it in his 1959 article “Truth,” “. . . a statement is true only if there is something in the world in virtue of which it is true.” (Dummett 1980, 14) He tells us that this is “one important feature of the concept of truth.” (ibid.) TM implies a commitment to realism, as correspondence theories of truth do, but without sharing the specific commitments of the latter, where “Realism consists in the belief that for any statement there must be something in virtue of which either it or its negation is true . . . .” (ibid.) This something must be 'in the world,' which for present purposes means that it must be extra-mental, extra-linguistic, and extra-propositional, if propositions are abstract objects.
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