Maverick Philosopher

Brazen Lies and Big Lies

1) Brazen lies.  Here is an AI-generated definition: "A brazen lie is a bold and shameless falsehood, often told without any attempt to hide or conceal it." 

The AI-generated definition is on the right track, but it is not quite right: it blurs the line between a falsehood (a false statement) and a lie. A lie is not the same as a false statement. For one can make a false statement without lying: one may sincerely believe that what one is asserting is true when in fact it is false. The intention to deceive is essential to a lie: there is no  lie without the intention to deceive. A lie, then, is an intentional misrepresentation of what one either knows to be the case or sincerely believes to be the case for the purpose of deceiving one's audience.

So that is what a lie is. But not all lies are brazen lies. A brazen lie is a lie told boldly and shamelessly.   

2) Big lies.  I would define a big lie as a brazen lie so outrageous that an ordinary person would think the liar had to be telling the truth because no one would have the chutzpah to say something so outrageous unless  it were true. Example: Alejandro Mayorkas's claim that the border is secure. 

Biden Broke his Promise, but Did He Lie? Promising, Lying, Predicting

I have no respect for Joe Biden, but a very high degree of respect for Jonathan Turley, who writes:

President Biden's decision to use his presidential powers on Sunday to pardon his own son will be a decision that lives in infamy in presidential politics. It is not just that the president used his constitutional powers to benefit his family. It is because the action culminates years of lying to the public about his knowledge and intentions in the influence-peddling scandal surrounding his family. Even among past controversies about the use of this pardon power, Biden has cemented his legacy for many, not as the commander in chief, but as the liar in chief. 

The question is not whether Biden is a liar; he is. The question I am asking is whether he lied when he promised not to pardon his son.  He did in fact make that promise on several occasions, and he did in fact break it.  Those are known facts. But did Biden lie when he made that promise? What Turley says implies that he did lie.  I beg to differ.

I should make it clear that I am not defending Biden. The man is morally corrupt to the core and a national disaster. I am merely using him to focus a question that interests me, namely, if a subject S promises to do X at time t1, and refuses to do X at some later time t2, did S tell a lie at t1 by his act of promising at t1? (I assume that the circumstances at t2 do not prevent S from delivering on his promise.  I also assume that no weightier consideration such as a death threat justifies a change of mind on the part of S with respect to X during the period from t1 to t2.)  

Can one lie about a future event? If not, then how could Biden's promising not to pardon his son be a lie? The pardoning was later than the promisings. It was therefore future relative to those promisings and had yet to occur. At the time of the promisings, there was either no fact for Biden to lie about, or no fact he could have known about. Either way, Biden did not lie when he made his promises, promises that he later broke.

On one natural way to think about the future, it ain't real until it happens.  If we think about the future in this way, there was no fact for Biden to lie about when he made his promises, in which case he did not tell a lie when he made his promises.

On another way to think about the future, all future events are tenselessly real.   If we think about the future in this way, then there is (tenselessly) a fact for Biden to lie about at the times of his promisings, but there is no way anyone not possessing paranormal precognitive powers could know what this fact is. 

I am assuming that to lie is to issue a verbal or written statement intended to deceive one's audience about a state of affairs that the issuer of the statement either knows or believes to be the case.  If so, then one cannot lie about what may or may not become the case, or about what is tenselessly the case but not accessible to our present knowledge.

Turley's response, based on the quotation above, would presumably be that Biden lied about his intention to pardon Hunter.  Now if one forms a firm intention at time t to do X (or not do X) in the future, then at t there is the fact of  the forming of that intention. That is something one can know about and lie about.  

It is reasonable to conjecture that Biden at the time of his public promisings had no intention of delivering on his promise not to pardon his son, or, equivalently, had the intention to not deliver on the promise. But then the problem becomes: how could anyone know what Biden or anyone intends?  Preternatural powers aside, one cannot peer into the mind of another and 'see' what is going on there.  

And so we ought to distinguish between promise-breaking and lying.  It is verifiable that Biden broke his promise: we simply compare the publicly accessible records of what he said with the publicly accessible record of his pardoning.  What we cannot know is the nature of the inner mental intention behind the outwardly expressed promises.  Hence we do not and cannot know whether Biden lied about his intention.  

Let's not forget that the man is non compos mentis, not of sound mind. He is suffering from dementia. It is entirely possible that the superannuated grifter forgot or suppressed an original intention to not pardon his worthless son.  If so, he broke a promise but did not lie.

And so, pace the estimable Turley, the massive case for Biden's being a liar cannot be and need not be augmented by citation of his pardoning of the apple that fell not far from the tree.

In sum, one can break a promise without lying. This argument-form is invalid:

1) S promised to do (or refrain from doing) X.

2) S broke his promise.  

Therefore

3) S told a lie.

Promising is relevantly like predicting. Both are future-oriented. Many predicted in 2016 that Trump would lose the 2016 election. They were wrong in their prediction. Were they lying when that made their predictions? Of course not.  Either the proposition Trump wins in 2016 had no truth-value prior to the election, or it had a truth-value, but one not known to the predictors. Either way, there as no lie.  That's blindingly evident.

Promising is trickier, and so it is harder to think clearly about it.  S's publicly accessible speech-act of promising  to do or refrain from doing X is animated by S's mental and thus publicly inaccessible intention to do or refrain from doing X. The difference is that while one can predict one's own behavior -- taking a third-person POV with respect to oneself -- one is the agent of one's own actions and omissions.

Red World, Blue World, and the Orange Man

David Brooks, Confessions of a Republican Exile:

In Red World, people tend to take a biblical view of the human person: We are gloriously endowed and made in the image of God—and we are deeply broken, sinful, and egotistical. [. . .] You belong to God; to your family; and to the town, nation, and civilization you call home. Your ultimate authority in life is outside the self—in God, or in the wisdom contained within our shared social and moral order.

In Blue World, by contrast, people are more likely to believe that far from being broken sinners, each of us has something beautiful and pure at our core. As the philosopher Charles Taylor put it in The Ethics of Authenticity, “Our moral salvation comes from recovering authentic moral contact with ourselves.” In this culture you want to self-actualize, listen to your own truth, be true to who you are. The ultimate authority is inside you.

Brooks sees good in both worlds, and does a fair job of characterizing the differences between them, but nowadays he finds himself "rooting for the Democrats about 70 percent of the time." But why the tilt toward the Blue?

You guessed it: the Orange Man.  Brooks speaks of "Donald Trump’s desecration of the Republican Party."  Desecration? But surely no political party in a non-theocratic system such as ours is sacred. You can't desecrate what is not sacred. But let that pass. There is far worse to come.

We are told that Blue World "has a greater commitment to the truth." Really? "This may sound weird," Brooks admits, but it is worse than weird; it is incoherent. One cannot both support the Blue commitment to "your own truth" and invoke the truth. If there is the truth, it cannot vary from person to person. What can so vary is only one's personal attitude to the truth, whether by way of acceptance, rejection, doubt, etc.  The truth is invariant across personal attitudes.  Truth cannot be owned. There is no such thing as my truth or your truth, any more than there is my reality and your reality.  Claudine Gay take note. This is an elementary point. Philosophy 101. Brooks needs to think harder. But then what can you expect from a journalist who writes for The Atlantic?

But not only is Brooks embracing incoherence, he is also maintaining something manifestly false.  If there is anything that best characterizes the current Blue World  in action it is the thorough-going mendacity of the members of the Biden-Harris administration from Biden on down. Do I need to give examples? It is enough to name names: Biden, Harris, Granholm, Mayorkas, and the list goes on.  In Mayorkas, the Director of Homeland Security, the mendacity takes an Orwellian turn into the subversion of language: "The border is secure, as we define 'secure."  His very title is an Orwellianism: he is actively promoting, as is the whole Biden-Harris administration, homeland insecurity.

The truth is that truth is not a leftist value. Leftists will sometimes speak the truth, of course, but only if it serves their agenda. Otherwise they lie.  What animates them is not the Will to Truth, but the Will to Power.  

Brooks again:

But today the Republican relationship to truth and knowledge has gone to hell. MAGA is a fever swamp of lies, conspiracy theories, and scorn for expertise. The Blue World, in contrast, is a place more amenable to disagreement, debate, and the energetic pursuit of truth. 

I hate to be so disagreeable, but that is just preposterous.

Could Brooks define 'lie'?  Does he understand the distinction between a lie and an exaggeration? Has he given any thought to the difference between a lie and a counterfactual conditional? After winning in 2016, Trump famously boasted, 

Had it not been for all the illegal votes, I would have won the popular vote as well as the electoral college vote.

Leftists, who compile long lists of Trump's supposed lies, had among their number some who counted the above -- an accurate paraphrase of what Trump said, not an exact quotation -- as a lie.

But it is obviously not a lie. The worst you could call it is an unlikely, self-serving speculation.  He did not assert something he knew to be false, he asserted something he did not know to be true and could not know to be true. For there was no underlying fact of the matter about which he could have even tried to deceive his audience.  Counterfactual conditionals are about merely possible states of affairs.  That is why they are called counterfactual.

Has Brooks ever thought hard about what a conspiracy theory is? 

The Blues are "more amenable to disagreement, debate, and the energetic pursuit of truth"?  How's that for a brazen lie what with their de-platforming and cancellation of their opponents  not to mention the recent assaults on the First Amendment by John Kerry and Hillary Clinton.

Assuming that God exists, could the atheist's denial of God be reasonable?

I say Yes to the title question; Greg Bahnsen, glossing Cornelius Van Til, says No. 

Yet it should be clear even to the atheist that if the Christian God exists, it is 'reasonable' to believe in him. (Greg L. Bahnsen, Van Til's Apologetic: Readings and Analysis, P & R Publishing, 1998, p. 124, fn. 108, emphasis added.)

This is the exact opposite of clear. Atheists believe that there in no God, and thus that the Christian God does not exist, and the philosophically sophisticated among them have argued against the reasonableness of believing that the Christian God exists using both 'logical' and 'probabilistic' arguments.  So how could it be clear even to the atheist that if the Christian God exists, it is reasonable to believe that God exists?  Bahnsen's claim makes no sense.  It makes no sense to say to an atheist who sincerely thinks that he has either proven, or rendered probable, the nonexistence of  God that it is nonetheless reasonable for him to believe that God exists even if in fact, and unbeknownst to the atheist, God does exist.

Bahnsen is missing something very important: although truth is absolute, reasonableness is relative.  This is why an atheist can find it unreasonable to believe that the Christian God exists even if it is true that the Christian God exists.  Let me explain.

I do not need to spend many words on the absoluteness of truth. I've made the case numerous times.  Here for example. In any case, whatever  presuppositionalists  such as Bahnsen think of the details of my arguments, they will agree with my conclusion that truth is absolute. So that is no bone of contention between us.

Reasonableness or rational acceptability is something else again.  It is not absolute but can vary from person to person, generation to generation, social class to social class, historical epoch to historical epoch, and in other ways.  Let's quickly run through a few familiar examples.

1) Falling bodies. It 'stands to reason' that the heavier an object the faster it falls if dropped from a height. It's 'logical' using this word the way many ordinary folk often do.  Wasn't Aristotle, who maintained as much in his Physics, a reasonable man? But we now know that the rate of free fall (in a vacuum) is the same in a given gravitational field regardless of the weight of the object in that field.  So what was reasonable to Aristotle and his entire epoch was not reasonable to Galileo and later epochs. Rational acceptability is relative.

2) For the ancients, water was an element. For John Dalton (English chemist, early 19th cent.) it was a compound, HO. For us it is H₂O. Has water changed over the centuries? No. Truth is non-relative. What it is reasonable to believe has changed. Rational acceptability is relative.

3) Additivity of velocities. It 'stands to reason' that if I am on a train moving in a straight line with velocity v₁  and I throw a ball in the direction of the train's travel with velocity v₂, then the velocity of the ball will be v₁ + v₂. It also 'stands to reason' that this holds across the board no matter the speed of the objects in question. But this belief, although reasonable pre-Einstein, is not reasonable post-Einstein. Once again we see that rational acceptability is relative.

4) Sets and their members. Suppose S is a set and T is one of S's proper subsets. Then every member of T is a member of S, but not every member of S is a member of T. Now suppose someone comes along and asserts that there are sets such that one is a proper subset of another and yet both have the same number of members.  Many if not most  people would find this assertion a highly unreasonable thing to say.  They might exclaim that it makes no bloody sense at all. And yet those of us who have read Georg Cantor find it reasonable to maintain.  If N is the set of natural numbers, and E is the set of even numbers, and O is the set of odd numbers, then E and O are disjoint (have no members in common), and yet each is a proper subset of N which the same cardinality (number of members) as N.

5) When I was a very young boy I thought that, since I am right-handed, my right hand and arm had to be weaker than my left hand and arm because I use my right hand and arm more. Was that reasonable for me to believe way back then? Yes! I had a reason to hold the empirically false belief. Of course, my little-boy reasoning was based on a false analogy. If you flex a piece of metal back and forth you weaken it. If you a flex a muscle back and forth you strengthen it. Use it and use it up?  No, use it or lose it!

Examples are easily multiplied beyond all necessity. The point, I trust, is clear: while truth is absolute, rational acceptability is relative. What is true may or may not be reasonable, and what is reasonable may or not be true. 

What Bahnsen and the boys appear to be assuming is that both truth and reasonableness (rational acceptability) are absolute.   Well they are -- but only for God, only from God's point of view.  God is the IRS, the ideally rational subject. He knows every truth and he knows every truth without possibility of mistake. So for God every truth, being a known truth, is in accordance with divine reason, and everything in accordance with divine reason is true.  But we do not occupy the divine point of view. To put it sarcastically, only a 'presupper' does.

But of course neither we nor the presuppositionalists occupy the divine point of view. They only think they do.  But that conceit is the whole essence of presuppositionalism, is it not?  

An Overlooked Argument for the Resurrection

Michael J. Kruger

In my jargon, the argument is rationally acceptable, but not rationally compelling (rationally  coercive, philosophically dispositive). There is no getting around the fact that, in the end, you must decide what you will believe and how you will live. In the end: after due doxastic diligence has been exercised and all the arguments and considerations pro et contra have been canvassed. The will comes into it.

Don't confuse argument with  proof or faith with knowledge.  And forgive me for this further repetition: We cannot decide what the truth is, but we must decide what we will accept as the truth. The truth is what it is in sublime and objective indifference to us, our hopes, dreams, needs, wants,  and wishes. But the only truth that can help us, and perhaps save us, is the truth that we as "existing individuals" (Kierkegaard) existentially and thus subjectively appropriate, that is, make our own. In this sense lived truth is subjective truth. In this sense, S. K. is right to insist that "truth is subjectivity" in Concluding Scientific Postscript.

More in this vein in Notes on Kierkegaard and Truth.

'Post-Truth'

'Post-truth' is a silly buzz word, and therefore beloved by journalists who typically talk and write uncritically in trendy ways. There is no way to get beyond truth or to live after truth.  All of our intellectual operations are conducted under the aegis of truth.

Read the rest at Substack.

Politics, Lies, and Counterfactuals

Suppose I say

1) Had Jeb Bush won the 2016 Republican  nomination for president, Hillary Clinton would have won the presidential election.

We know, of course, that Donald J. Trump won the 2016 election. Suppose an Anti-Trumper calls me a liar for asserting (1).  Have I lied?  That depends on what a lie is.

What is a lie?

A lie is not the same as a false statement. For one can make a false statement without lying: one may sincerely believe that what one is asserting is true when in fact it is false. The intention to deceive is essential to a lie.  No lie without the intention to deceive. A lie, then, is an intentional misrepresentation of what one either knows to be the case or sincerely believes to be the case for the purpose of deceiving one's audience.

Now what is the case is actually the case as opposed to possibly the case. So on the definition just given, one cannot lie about the merely possible.  It follows that one cannot lie about what might have been or what could have been. Therefore, I cannot be fairly accused of telling a lie if I assert (1). There simply is no fact of the matter as to whether or not, had Jeb won the nomination, Hillary would or would not have won the election.

On my analysis, then, there are two necessary conditions for a statement's being a lie.  (i) The statement must express a person's intention to deceive his interlocutor(s), and (ii) there must be some actual fact about which the one who lies intends to deceive them. Note that one who lies on a given occasion need not be a liar because a liar is one who habitually lies, and one who lies needn't be in the habit of lying.

Can one lie about a counterfactual state of affairs?

It follows from my analysis that there cannot be any lies pertaining to counterfactual states of affairs. Counterfactual conditionals, however, have as their subject matter counterfactual states of affairs, which is to say, states of affairs that are really possible but not actual.  So no counterfactual is a lie. Note that I said really possible, not epistemically possible. I am assuming that Reality, with majuscule 'R,'  is not exhausted by the actual or existent: there are merely possible states of affairs that subsist mind-independently. (That which subsists is but does not exist.) 

But what I just wrote is not self-evident: I don't want to paper over the fact that the problem of the merely possible and its ontological status is deep and nasty and will lead us into a labyrinth of aporiai and insolubilia.  More about this later.

Now (1) is either true or if not true, then false, but no one knows, or could know, which it is. So no one can rightly call me a liar for asserting (1).  

If I am not lying when I assert (1), what am I doing?  I am offering a reasonable, but practically unverifiable, speculation.  And the same goes for a person who denies (2). Consider a second example. 

Donald Trump famously boasted, 

2) Had it not been for all the illegal votes, I would have won the popular vote as well as the electoral college vote.

Leftists, who compile long lists of Trump's supposed lies, had among their number some who counted (2) -- an accurate paraphrase of what Trump said, not an exact quotation -- as a lie.

But it is obviously not a lie. The worst you could call it is an unlikely, self-serving speculation.  He did not assert something he knew to be false, he asserted something he did not know to be true and could not know to be true. Again, there is no underlying fact of the matter. 

Trump haters who compile lists of his 'lies,' need to give a little thought as to what a lie is; else their count will be wrong. 

Before proceeding to a third example, let me record an aporetic pentad  for later rumination and delectation:

1) Counterfactuals have truth-values: some are true and the rest are false.

2) The true ones are contingently true.

3) Contingent truths have truth-makers.

4) Truth-makers are obtaining, i.e., actual states of affairs.

5) Counterfactuals are about non-actual, merely possible, states of affairs.

These propositions are individually plausible but collectively inconsistent. Is the problem genuine or pseudo? If genuine, how solve it? Which proposition should we reject?  I hope to come back to this problem later.

A third example. London Ed quotes and comments upon a recent assertion of mine:

“He [David Frum] neglects to observe, however, that the devastation of that country [Ukraine] would not have occurred had Trump been president.”

Ed comments:

Trump’s presidency ended January 20, 2021. The invasion of Ukraine was 24 February 2022. What might have happened (another counterfactual) under a continued Trumpian presidency that would have prevented Putin’s invasion? The build up of Russian troops began March and April 2021, although the Russian government repeatedly denied having plans to invade or attack.

What might have happened is that Putin would have been dissuaded from invading  Ukraine out of fear of what Trump would do to him and his country should he have invaded.

Related: Counterfactuals and Hypothesis Testing in Political Science

God, Doubt, Denial, and Truth: A Note on Van Til

Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith, 4th ed., P&R Publishing, 2008, p. 294: "To doubt God is to deny him."

I take that to mean that to doubt that God exists is to deny that God exists. The obvious objection to this is that doubt and denial are very different propositional attitudes. In most cases, one can doubt that p without denying that p.  I can doubt that Biden will get a second term without denying that he will. 

In almost all cases. But in every case?  Suppose we replace 'p' with 'truth exists.'  Can we doubt that truth exists without denying that truth exists.  No! In the case of truth, the distinction between doubt and denial collapses. 

To doubt that truth exists is to presuppose that truth exists. For if you doubt that truth exists, you are doubting whether it is true that truth exists.  The same goes for denial. If you deny that truth exists, you affirm that it is true that truth does not exist. 

Whether you doubt or deny that truth exists, you presuppose that truth exists. Truth is such that doubt and denial are the same. Truth cannot be doubted and it cannot be denied. The existence of truth is the ultimate transcendental condition of all our intellectual operations, doubt, denial, affirmation, predication, reasoning, and so on. So we may say:

To doubt truth is to deny her.

Of course, it remains that case that doubt and denial are different propositional attitudes. But in the case of truth, doubt becomes denial.

Therefore,  if God is identical to truth, then Van Til is right: "To doubt God is to deny him." If God is identical to truth, then God is the ultimate transcendental condition of all our intellectual operations, including giving arguments for God's nonexistence! If so, then Van Til and his followers are not begging the question against atheists and agnostics by simply assuming what they need to prove; they are giving a noncircular transcendental argument for the existence of God.

But is God identical to truth? Is it true that God is identical to truth? These remain open questions. I grant that if God is identical to truth, then God exists as the necessary condition of all affirmation, denial, and argument, including atheistic argument.  But how do we know that the antecedent of this conditional is true?

It may be that in reality apart from us, God and truth are the same. But from our point of view, the only POV available to us, God and truth are not the same. To see this, note that it is conceivable (thinkable without contradiction) that God not exist, but not conceivable that truth not exist. So it might be true that God exists and it might be true that God does not exist.  The 'might' in the preceding sentence in both of its occurrences is epistemically modal. It is epistemically possible that God exist and epistemically possible that God not exist.  For all we know, either could be the case. But it is epistemically necessary that truth exist: we cannot help presupposing it.  Given that we know anything at all, truth must exist. So the argument could be put like this:

a) That truth exists is epistemically necessary: we cannot help presupposing that it exists.

b) That God exists is not epistemically necessary: we can conceive the nonexistence of God.

Therefore

c) God cannot be proven to exist by proving that truth exists.

Therefore

d) The Transcendental Argument for God fails as a proof.

How to Tell the Truth without being Truthful

Multiple are the modes of mendacity.  Obama, Biden, Hillary and their ilk are masters of these modes. May a pox, but no pax, be upon them. Over at Substack, a quick look at one of the modes.

'Post-Truth'

A buzz word much bandied about in 2016, usually in connection with Donald J. Trump.

Top o' the Stack.

You will learn something from this piece if you have an attention span. Too much twit-shit and your span may shrink to a point. You may transmogrify into a tweeting twit whose brain is fit only to flit.

Truth and Accuracy

Their difference explained at Substack. 

Notes on Kierkegaard and Truth

From a December, 1985 journal entry.

........................

Why does Søren Kierkegaard maintain that truth is subjectivity, and in the Danish equivalents of those very words? What could he mean by such a strange assertion?

To rehearse the obvious: S. K. does not mean that truth is subjective or relative, varying with persons, places, times, perspectives, or any other index. The Dane presupposes that truth is objective. But then what could the central claim of Concluding Unscientific Postscript, "truth is subjectivity," mean?

Since Kierkegaard assumes the objective truth of Christianity, and does so without question or caveat, the only issue for him is the subjective appropriation of Christian truth. To appropriate is to make one's own, and the one in question is not the abstract one in general, but in every case the concrete existing individual. S. K.'s greatness is his honesty in expounding the demands that genuine Christianity makes on the would-be Christian and in exposing the state-sponsored Christianity Inc. of his day. Given the tacit presupposition of Christianity's truth, it makes sense for S. K. to say that truth is subjectivity. For it is not the objective truth of Christianity that is an issue for him, but the individual, and thus necessarily subjective, task of becoming a Christian. That is my charitable reading of the famous dictum.

But to be precise in our use of terms, truth is by its very nature objective, not subjective; what is subjective is truthfulness. Only a person can correctly be said to be truthful in the primary sense of the term. It would make no sense to describe propositions as truthful any more than it would make sense to say that persons have truth-values or stand in entailment relations or correspond to reality.

Objective truth and subjective truthfulness, though distinct,  are related. (It is worth noting that 'objective and 'subjective' in the immediately preceding sentence are redundant qualifiers: truth would not be what it is if it were not objective, and truthfulness would not be what it is if if were not a personal attribute.) They are related in that one can be truthful only by respecting the truth, by living in accordance with it, by refraining from lying, deceit, and deception, by telling the truth.

Subjective, lived, existential truth is entirely vacuous if disengaged from objective truth; at the limit subjective truth thus disengaged is indistinguishable from vicious self-will. It then becomes what in contemporary parlance is called 'my truth.' But there is no such thing as my truth; truth by its very nature is objective. What is mine can only be my appropriation or non-appropriation of the truth, truth that cannot be mine. One cannot appropriate and live the truth unless there is truth to be appropriated.

I said that truth and truthfulness are related. But I don't want to give the impression that while truthfulness requires truth, truth can subsist without truthfulness. That may be, but it is not obvious and may be reasonably controverted. So I now take a further step by stating that truth and truthfulness are mutually implicative. They are, if you will,  'dialectically related:' no one without the other, and no other without the one. It is clear that truthfulness implies truth; less clear, but arguable is that truth implies truthfulness. That is to say: there cannot be objective truth without subjectivity, without a truthful subject.  Can I prove it? No. But I can make a case for it, a case that renders the thesis reasonable to believe.

Truth is made for the mind at least in this sense: Objective truth is necessarily such that is it possibly recognized by someone. Truth mediates between mind and reality.  Truth is the truth of reality in both the objective and subjective senses of the genitive. Truth is about reality, but it is also reality's truth. Reality's truth is reality's intelligibility, its aptness to be understood. So if it is objectively true that Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun, then that truth, that true proposition, is necessarily such that it is possibly recognized or known by someone.  But it cannot be possibly known unless there actually exists someone who can know it. Now what is really possible must be grounded in the abilities and powers of actual agents. But there are many truths that are not possibly known by any finite agent. And yet they too are possibly known because knowability is an essential property of every truth. Therefore, their knowability is grounded in the actual power to know of an actual being. "And this all men call God."

Now that was rather quick, wasn't it? But I meant it merely as a sketch for an argument to be laid out rigorously. (The modal moves I made invite close scrutiny.) So laid out, the argument still won't be rationally compelling, but then no substantive argument in philosophy or theology for that matter is rationally compelling.  But many such arguments do supply grounds for reasoned belief which all that is available to us here below.

So suppose God exists. He is the truthful subjective source of all objective truth. In God, truthfulness and truth are one, the subjective and the objective coalesce. The mutually implicative relation of truthfulness and truth is as tightly grounded as could be. This is exactly what we should expect give the divine simplicity for which there many arguments. 

To sum up. Truthfulness for us here below is a matter of the subjective appropriation of objective truth. Read in this sense, S. K. 's dictum is defensible. It is not truth that is subjective, but truthfulness. 

There is no truthfulness without truth. This is well-nigh evident if not self-evident. That there is no truth without truthfulness is less clear but arguable as above.

Nietzsche on Conviction

Top o' the Stack

The Pragmatic and the Evidential

Substack latest.

On believing beyond the evidence. Immoral? Irrational?

Consensus and Truth

Consensus is no guarantee of truth.  If all or most of the experts in some subject area agree that p, it does not follow that p is true. But that is not to say, or imply, that consensus has no bearing on truth. A consensus of unbiased and uncoerced experts in a field is a reliable guide to truth in that field, assuming that the consensus is real and not the fabrication of, say, climate hoaxers.

Consciousness is an Illusion . . .

. . . but truth is not?  An inconsistency in Dennett.

Over at the Stack.

Relativism and Dogmatism

Substack latest

My Substack snowball is getting bigger and bigger. Time to monetize? Well, it's a labor of love and I've got enough loot to last me my sublunary tenure, assuming the Dementocrat destruction of the economy is kept within certain bounds. 

I believe that Enough is Enough when it comes to material stuff. Whatever we are here for, we are not here to pile up loot and land. You have heard it said that in the end a man needs only six feet. And not even that if the crematorium is his body's last stop.

On the other hand, as foibled as we are psychologically, people tend to value more what they pay for. And if they are paying, then they may pay closer attention 'to get their money's worth.'

Or maybe they think like this: "This guy gives away his content for free; he must not think it is worth much."

On the third hand, If I sell a product, then I am in thrall to my customers and must cater to their wants and desires. This thrall thwarts my independence. I'm big on the latter. 

So you can expect my articles to stay free, free for me and free for thee.

Einstein, Relativity, and Relativism

Substack latest.

Tulsi Gabbard Defends Objective Truth . . .

. . . at a rally to end child mutilation. Gabbard's  three-minute address begins at 19:30 and runs until 22:42. "Without recognition that there is such a thing as truth, there are no boundaries in our society, which why we are where we are."

That something so obvious needs to be stated explicitly shows how far we have fallen.  But precisely because we have fallen so far, Tulsi Gabbard is to be applauded for having courageously stated it. That it should take courage to state something so obvious is yet another index of our social decline.

And now, if you can spare ten minutes, listen to Chloe Cole's story at 47:15-57:50. 

Wife and Life, Truth and Practice

My wife is easy-going, tolerant, forgiving, good-hearted, and unselfish. Hungry, she bought herself a Costco hot dog and then, without my asking,  gave me the lion's share,* concerned that I was hungry! I chose well in matters marital. 

Human nature leaves a lot to be desired. And yet there is goodness and nobility in some people. The world is ugly, but there is also beauty in it. Life can seem meaningless, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing," and yet it also at times appears under the aspect of ultimate Sense and Rightness.

You will have to decide which of these seemings to live by. Try both and see which is more conducive to happiness. The one that makes you happier has a solid claim on being the truer. That the truth should in the end thwart us strikes me as implausible.  But the question cannot be resolved theoretically. You resolve it by living, thoughtful living, each for himself and by himself. 

Titans once bestrode Harvard Yard.** Josiah Royce was one, William James the other. The latter held that truth is "the good in the way of belief." I commend that thought to your delectation, examination, and practical implementation. 

______________

*Time was, when the lion's share of something was the whole of it. Despite my linguistic conservatism, I have acquiesced in the latter-day usage according to which the lion's share of something is most of it. If lions could speak, they would protest the semantic dilution.

**Pygmies now rule.

Truth is not a Leftist Value

Posted today on my Facebook page. I could not resist making some additions for the present venue.

.............................

My title is a Dennis Prager riff. But it needs a bit of nuancing, a job for a philosopher, not a talk show host.  Truth is a value for leftists in an instrumental sense: they will tell the truth if it serves their agenda. If it doesn't, they feel justified in lying. So perhaps we should say that for a leftist, truth is not an absolute value. They don't respect it as an objectively binding norm.

 

For a leftist, especially the 'woke' species thereof, truth is simply a matter of perspective: it is the perspective of a particular power-hungry individual or tribe. The perspective is true to the extent that it enhances the power of the power-unit whose perspective it is.

 

The underlying metaphysics and epistemology is Nietzschean. Now this here's Facebook, and not the place to get all academic. But perhaps now you understand why a leftard like the Ladder Man is enamored of Nietzsche.

 

Die Welt is der Wille zur Macht und nichts anders!

Das Kriterium der Wahrheit is die Steigerung des Machtgefühls! 

 

"The world is the Will to Power and nothing besides!"

"The criterion of truth is the increase in the feeling of power."

It is also worth pointing out that coherence is not a leftist value either. Lefties say all sorts of things that make no sense in pursuit of their agenda. For example, "Walls are immoral." (Pelosi); "Diversity is our strength." (Pelosi and numerous other leftards.) Here too the absolute-instrumental distinction kicks in.

 

The problem with "Walls are immoral" is not that it is false, but that it makes no sense, and therefore does not satisfy a necessary condition of a proposition's having a truth-value. A wall cannot be either moral or immoral; only a person who uses a wall for one purpose or another.

 

But try explaining that to a destructive knucklehead like Madame Speaker! You won't get through to her because power is the cynosure of her political machinations. She was always a dingbat, but now she is a dingbat wrapped in senility. And a clear and present danger to the Republic, as witness her ill-advised Taiwan junket.

 

A decrepit donkey should not poke a dragon with a stick.

E. J. Lowe's Presentism and the Reality of the Past

We lost the brilliant E. J. Lowe (1950-2014) at an early age. We best honor a philosopher by thinking his thoughts, sympathetically, but critically. Lowe writes,

When we say that Caesar has ceased to exist, what we really should mean is that he is no longer a part of reality at all, any more than Sherlock Holmes is, in fact, a part of reality . . . . This, of course, raises the question of how we can so much as talk about Caesar now that he no longer exists simpliciter -- how we can speak about 'that which is not.' It also raises the question of how we can still distinguish between the ontological status of Caesar and that of Holmes, and resist saying that Caesar has 'become' a fictional object in something like the sense in which Holmes is. But these questions are not, perhaps, so difficult to answer, once we understand aright the metaphysical picture that is being proposed. With regard to the second question, we can still say that Caesar really did exist, unlike Holmes. And with regard to the first, we can say that the proper name 'Julius Caesar' is perfectly meaningful, not because it now has an existing referent, but because its use is historically traceable back to a referent that did exist -- pretty much in line with the 'causal' theory of reference advanced by Saul Kripke. ("How Real is Substantial Change?" The Monist, vol. 89, no. 3, 2006, p. 285. Italics in original.)

What no longer exists did exist but does not now exist.  That's just what 'no longer exists' means. But is it true that what no longer exists does not exist at all? Lowe answers in the affirmative.  Of  course, what no longer exists does not exist now, but that is tautologically true and of no metaphysical interest.  Lowe is telling us something of metaphysical interest about time, existence, and their 'relation.' He is telling us that what no longer exists and is wholly past has been annihilated. Not only does a past item not exist now, it simply does not exist: it does not exist simpliciter as we say in the trade. It is no longer a member of the sum total of what exists. When a thing passes away it falls off the cliff of Being into the abyss of Nonbeing.  And so I cannot say, now and with truth, of Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) that he would have been 100 years old this year had he lived. But I just did! I referred to him successfully and I made a true statement about him, that very person. And what were the birthday celebrations in his hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts about if they were not celebrating his birth? However things stand with respect to the future, the past surely seems to have a share in reality.  If the past has no share in reality, what do historians study?  Will you tell me that they study the causal traces in the present of past events? But if the past has no share in reality, if the past is not, then those traces are traces of nothing, and the historian is not an historian but a student of some weird merely present things.  Will you tell me that the past WAS? Well, that's surely true, but not to the point. The question is whether what WAS has a share in reality as opposed to being annihilated, reduced to nothing, by the passage of time. 

In general, what should a Lowian presentist say about past-tensed contingent truths? There are plenty of them, whether we know them or not, and whether or not the things they are about have left any causal traces in the present.  And they are true now. It is the case that Julius Caesar was assassinated.  What makes it true now that Caesar was assassinated?  Surely nothing that now exists makes it true, and if only what exists now exists simpliciter, then nothing makes true contingent past-tensed truths.  Some say that such truths are brute truths: they are just true without anything that explains their being true, or that grounds their being true, or that 'makes' them true. This is a very bad answer as I could easily show; in any case it appears not to be Lowe's answer given his acceptance of truthmakers:

I should also reveal that I am an adherent of the truthmaker principle, according to which all truths -- all contingent positive truths -- require the existence of a truthmaker; something which, by existing, makes them true. (288, bolding added)

On the face of it, there is a tension, if not a contradiction, in Lowe's position. His presentism commits him to saying that nothing that now exists could serve as the truthmaker of a past-tensed positive (affirmative) truth such as the one expressed by 'Julius Caesar existed.' But if all contingent affirmative truths need truthmakers, as per the quotation, then so does the truth that Julius Caesar existed, in which case Lowe is telling us both that past-tensed truths must have, and cannot have, truthmakers.  That certainly appears to be a contradiction. Is there a way around it? For maximal logical clarity, I cast the puzzle in the mold of an aporetic triad:

a) All contingent affirmative truths need truthmakers.
b) 'Julius Caesar existed' expresses a contingent affirmative truth.
c) 'Julius Caesar existed' cannot have a truthmaker.

This trio is collectively inconsistent: its members cannot all be true. Since (b) records a pre-philosophical datum, it cannot be philosophically denied. (An historian might attempt to show it false, but then I would simply change the example.) So the question boils down to whether we accept the truthmaker principle as explained by Lowe (to which explanation I have no objection)  or accept instead Lowe's (non-ersatzist) presentism. (Lowe rejects ersatzism.) We cannot accept both, as Lowe appears to do.  Thus I smell a logical contradiction.  Or is this an olfactory hallucination on my part? 

Lowe tells us that the proposition that Julius Caesar exists "is now false but was once true." (289) For "it formerly had a truthmaker -- namely, Julius Caesar himself -- but no longer does." (289)  If a proposition can change its truth value from true to false, then, given the truthmaker principle, the proposition in question had a truthmaker, but has one no longer. Fine, how is this relevant? The question concerns the truthmaker of the proposition that Julius Caesar existed. The question is  not whether the proposition that Caesar exists had a truthmaker.  The question is: what makes it true that Caesar existed is true? What makes it true now that Caesar existed can't be the fact that Caesar exists had a truthmaker but has one no longer.  For what makes it true now that the proposition that Caesar exists had a truthmaker? Nothing at all if presentism is true. 

Lowe maintains that a truthmaker is "something which, by existing, makes them [positive contingent truths] true."  Truthmakers, then, must exist to do their jobs: there are no nonexistent truthmakers. But on presentism only what exists at present exists simpliciter. Wholly past truthmakers do not exist. So it is simply irrelevant to invoke them if the question concerns the truthmakers of presently true past-tensed truths.

As I see it, Lowe cannot  solve what is called the 'grounding problem,' a problem that ineluctably arises for him because of his (laudable) commitment to truthmakers.  The problem, simply put, is that past-tensed contingent affirmative truths (true propositions) need ontological grounds, i.e., truthmakers. He cannot solve the problem because of his creationist-annihilationist version of presentism.

I now turn to the other problem Lowe mentions in the passage quoted above, the problem of  referring to what no longer exists given the presentist view that what no longer exists does not exist at all.   Lowe tells us that "the proper name 'Julius Caesar' is perfectly meaningful, not because it now has an existing referent, but because its use is historically traceable back to a referent that did exist . . . ." Lowe mentions Kripke's causal theory of reference.  It is difficult to see how there could be any historical tracing if all of past history has been annihilated by the passage of time. 

More needs to be said. But brevity is the soul of blog, as some wit once opined.

Stalin the Bookman

Here is a review of Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin's Library: A Dictator and his Books. Excerpts:

He was also an avid reader. Roberts’s book begins as an analysis of the personal library Stalin left behind, scattered around his various dachas and offices. It comprised some 25,000 volumes, covering a wide range of subjects including Marxism, political and military history, economics, biographies and classic works of Russian literature. Some surviving books have found their way into the archives, to be studied by scholars for insights into the dictator’s mind.

But this is no dry examination of dusty texts. Roberts takes us through Stalin’s life and shows how his reading molded his actions. Books transformed the bright seminary student into a ferocious revolutionary, prepared to sacrifice family, friends and a vast array of enemies — capitalists, kulaks, fellow Bolsheviks, imperialists, Trotskyist deviationists and millions of ordinary Soviet citizens — on the altar of his rigid dogmas.

[. . .]

Roberts emphasizes throughout that Stalin was an intellectual, whose firm belief in Marxism was grounded in a deep study of the subject; that his actions, however cruel, cynical and misguided, stemmed from the conviction that he was building the world’s first socialist state, which would be a model for the rest of humanity. By insisting on Stalin’s seriousness, and his profound faith in Marxism as modified by Lenin and the experience of revolution in Russia, Roberts perhaps downplays the fearful cost in human suffering involved. As a result, the book can seem to gloss over the gruesome awfulness of Soviet society — not to mention the serious mistakes for which Stalin was personally responsible, including his refusal to believe that his ally Hitler would attack him until he actually did.

The Babbitts of the world heap scorn upon philosophy because it "bakes no bread," to which my stock reply is: "Man does not live by bread alone." Matthew 4:4 has Jesus saying as much, and continuing, "but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God."  While not disagreeing with Christ's words, this philosopher says that man does not live by bread alone but also by ideas the implementation of some of which will ameliorate and the implementation of others of which will devastate, securing  bread for some and denying it to others.

Ideas matter. They matter most when they are enmattered by men of power who bring them from the heaven of ideas to this  grubby earth of blood, sweat, and tears. Whether they work weal or woe will depend on their truth, assuming that there is truth in William James' dictum that the true is the good by way of belief.

But why should (the knowledge of) truth be conducive to human flourishing? Must it be? This is an important and unavoidable question, one that itself testifies to the importance of ideas. I mention it only to set it aside. For now.

Addendum (4 March 2022). Dmitri D. comments:

The book review (and the book "Stalin's library" if the review is accurate) is a complete nonsense. Stalin desperately wanted to appear as intellectual but he never was one. He indeed read a lot, but was a terrible student judged by his seminary grades and intellectuals who knew him closely. He executed his private philosophy tutor among hundreds of thousands of others.

 

Here is a quote from an old guard Bolshevik from Wikipedia's article on Jan Sten, Stalin's executed tutor:

 

Hardly anyone knew Stalin better than Sten. Stalin, as we know, received no systematic education. He struggled to understand philosophical questions, without success. And then, in 1925, he called in Jan Sten, one of the leading Marxist philosophers of that time, to direct his study of Hegelian dialectics. Sten drew up a program of study for Stalin and conscientiously, twice a week, dinned Hegelian wisdom into his illustrious pupil. Often he told me in confidence about these lessons, about the difficulties he, as a teacher, was having because of his student's inability to master the material of Hegelian dialectics. Jan often dropped in to see me after a lesson with Stalin, in a depressed and gloomy state, and despite his naturally cheerful disposition, he found it difficult to regain his equilibrium...The meetings with Stalin, the conversations with him on philosophical matters, during which Jan would always bring up contemporary political problems, opened his eyes more and more to Stalin's true nature, his striving for one-man rule, his crafty schemes and methods...As early as 1928, in a small circle of his personal friends, Sten said: "Koba [a nickname for Stalin] will do things that will put the trials of Dreyfus and Beilis in the shade."

 

Truth and Power

'Speaking truth to power' is a phrase leftists love when they are out of power; in power, they exercise it, and truth be damned. They imbibed mendacity with their mothers' milk.

Truthmaker Maximalism Questioned

 0) What David Armstrong calls truthmaker maximalism is the thesis that every truth has a truthmaker.  Although I find the basic truthmaker intuition well-nigh irresistible, I have difficulty with the notion that every truth has a truthmaker.  Thus I question truthmaker maximalism (TM). Alan Rhoda has recently come out in favor of TM in a penetrating weblog entry. After sketching my position, I will try to pinpoint my disagreement with  Rhoda.

1) Compare *Peter is tired* and *Every cygnet is a swan.*  I will argue that truths  like the first need truthmakers while truths like the second do not.  A declarative sentence enclosed in asterisks names the primary truthbearer expressed by the sentence when assertively uttered or, more generally, assertively tokened.  A truthbearer is anything appropriately characterizable as either true or false when 'true' and 'false' are used in their sentential as opposed to their ontic senses. ('True friend' and 'false teeth' feature ontic senses of 'true' and 'false'.) Candidate truthbearers include assertively tokened sentences in the indicative mood, statements, asseverations, judgments, Fregean Gedanken, Bolzanian Saetze an sich and more. By definition, a truth is a true truthbearer, whatever  truthbearers are taken to be.) 

2) Intuitively, *Peter is tired,* being contingently true, both due to its dependence on the existence of Peter, and on Peter's accidentally possessing the property of being tired, is in need of something external to it that 'makes' it true or determines it to be true, or serves as the ontological ground of its truth.  (An ontological ground is not the same as an empirical cause.) *Peter is tired* can't just be true. This is because its truth-value depends on the way the world is. It needs a truthmaker external to it. By 'external to it,' I don't just mean that the truthmaker of a truth must be distinct from it:  this condition is satisfied by a distinct proposition (or other type of truthbearer) that entails *Peter is tired.* Entailment, however, is not truthmaking: entailment connects propositions to propositions; truthmaking connects extra-propositional entities (states of affairs for Armstrong) to propositions. What I mean when I say that a contingent truth needs something external to it to 'make' it true is that the truthmaker must be both distinct from the truthbearer and not, like the truthbearer, a 'representational entity' where the latter term covers such items as assertively uttered sentences, judgments, Fregean thoughts/propositions (the senses of context-free sentences in the indicative mood), and whatever else counts as a truthbearer.  In other words, a truthmaker of a contingent atomic truth such as *Peter is tired* must be outside the sphere of representations: it must be extralinguistic, extramental, and extra-propositional.  Thus the truthmakers of propositions like *Peter is tired* cannot belong to the category of propositions.  The ontological ground of  a contingent proposition's being true cannot be an entity within the sphere of propositions.  

3)  The truthmaker of *Peter is tired* cannot be a proposition; but it also cannot be utterly unlike a proposition.  Consider Peter himself, that very concrete individual.  It is clear that he could not be the truthmaker of *Peter is tired.*  Granted, if Peter were not to exist, then the proposition in question could not be true.  There are no truths about what does not exist. But although Peter or Peter's existence is a necessary condition of the truth of  every true proposition about him, that very individual, it is not the case that Peter or Peter's existence is a sufficient condition of the truth of contingent propositions about him if these propositions are predications such as *Peter is tired.*   (I am open to the suggestion that Peter himself suffices for the truth of *Peter exists.*) That Peter by himself cannot be the truthmaker of contingent predications about him can be proven or at least argued as follows. 

Argument from Necessitation.  Assume for reductio that Peter by himself can serve as truthmaker of contingent predications about him. Now, by truthmaker necessitarianism, whatever truthmakers are, they broadly logically  necessitate the truth of their corresponding truthbearers.  So if X is the truthmaker of *Peter is tired at t,* then there is no possible world in which X exists and *Peter is tired at t* is not true.  But there are plenty of worlds in which Peter exists but *Peter is tired at t* is not true.  So Peter by himself cannot be the truthmaker of *Peter is tired at t.*

Argument from Selection.  Consider any two true affirmative atomic contingent monadic propositions about Peter such as *Peter is tired at t* and *Peter is hungry at t.*  If Peter by himself can serve as the truthmaker of one, then he can serve as the truthmaker of the other.  But they obviously require numerically different truthmakers.  So Peter is the truthmaker of neither of them.  Although different truths can have the same truthmaker, this is not the case when both truths are atomic, even if both are about the same individual.  The truthmakers of such atomic propositions as that Peter is a philosopher and that Peter is a violinist must be distinct and they must match up with, or select, their truthbearers.  To do this, the truthmakers must have an internal structure isomorphic to the structure of the truthbearers.  In other words, the truthmakers must be proposition-like despite their not being propositions.  Extra-propositional but proposition-like!  What may look like a 'bug' is a 'feature' of truthmaker theory. It follows that Peter by himself cannot be the truthmaker of atomic contingent propositions about him.

4)  If Peter by himself cannot serve as truthmaker of the accidental predication  *Peter is F,* then neither can F-ness by itself.  The same goes for the set {Peter, F-ness}, the mereological sum (Peter + F-ness) and the ordered pair [Peter, F-ness].  For what is needed in addition to Peter and F-ness is a link in the truthmaker that corresponds to the copulative link in the proposition.  After all, not every possible world in which both Peter and F-ness exists is a world in which Peter is F.  There could be a world in which Peter exists and F-ness exists (by being instantiated by Paul) but in which Peter does not instantiate F-ness.  I am assuming that F-ness is a universal, but not that F-ness is a transcendent universal (one that can exist uninstantiated).  This is why concrete states of affairs are plausible candidates for the office of truthmaker, as in middle-period Armstrong.

5)  But even if one balks at the admission of concrete states of affairs or facts, one will have to admit that Peter himself -- assuming that this concrete individual is not assayed as a state of affair but as an individual -- cannot be the truthmaker of contingent propositions of the form *Peter is F.*  Some will say that tropes can serve as truthmakers.  Fine, but they too have a proposition-like structure.  If the trope Peter's-tiredness-at-t is the truthmaker of *Peter is tired at t,* then it is made true by an entity that has a proposition-like structure, a structure isomorphic to, and mirroring, the structure of the truthbearer.

6)  It seems to me that I have just definitively established that the truthmakers of accidental atomic predications like 'Peter is a philosopher' cannot be concrete individuals lacking a proposition-like structure.  I have also made it clear that we should not confuse the principle that there are no truths about nonexistent objects with the truthmaker principle.  We can call the first principle veritas sequitur esse (truth follows being).  What it says is that a truth cannot be true unless there are one or more items it is about.  Thus VSE requires that if Milo kicked Philo, this is true only if both Milo and Philo exist or have some mode of being other than existence. The truthmaker principle (TMP) goes beyond this in requiring the instantiation of the dyadic relation ---kicks___ by Milo and Philo, in that order.

7)  Consider now the analytic proposition *Every cygnet is a swan.*  As analytic, it is true solely in virtue of the meanings of 'cygnet' and 'swan.'  It is true ex vi terminorum.  Its truth is not contingent on the existence of any cygnets. Why does it need a truthmaker? It certainly does not need anything external to it to make it true. The concept cygnet includes the concept swan, so that, by sheer analysis of the subject concept, one can arrive at the truth in question.  That's why we call it, following Kant,  'analytic.'  Clearly, nothing external to an analytic proposition is required to make it true.  It follows that it cannot have a truthmaker.  Or rather it follows if  a truthmaker of a first-order truthbearer is an entity that is external to the truthbearer and resident in the realm of reality beyond the sphere of representations broadly construed.

Does this not decisively refute truthmaker maximalism?  There are plenty of analytic truths, but none of them has or can have a truthmaker.  For if you say that an analytic truth needs a truthmaker, then you are saying that it needs something external to it to 'synthesize,' to bring together, subject and predicate concepts. But analytic truths are precisely not synthetic in that (Kantian) sense.  But I hear an objection coming.

8) "*Every cygnet is a swan* does have a truthmaker, namely, the fact that cygnet includes swan."  This is a confused response.  There would not be a analytic truthbearer at all if cygnet did not include swan.  The very existence of the proposition *Every cygnet is a swan* requires that the first concept include the second.  So there is no need of an ontological ground of the truth of this proposition. One could of course say that in the analytic case the truthbearer is its own truthmaker.  But it is better to say that in the analytic case there cannot be a truthmaker as 'truthmaker' was defined in #2 above. 

9) Here is where Alan Rhoda will disagree:

Some philosophers say that truthmaking is asymmetric rather than anti-symmetric, but that is a mistake. Asymmetry disallows the possibility of self-grounding truthbearers. Anti-symmetry allows for that possibility. And this is something we should allow, because conceptually necessary propositions (e.g., all triangles have three sides) are their own truthmakers. If the proposition exists—whether it exists [as] a Platonic object, an idea in God’s mind, or something else—its very existence supplies a parcel of reality sufficient to explain and ground its own truth.

10) For me, truthmaking is an asymmetric relation whereas for Alan it is an antisymmetric relation. Thus I am maintaining that, for any x, y, if x makes-true y, then it is not the case that y makes-true x.  This implies that no truthbearer is its own truthmaker or truth-ground. It implies that in no case is the truthmaker of a truth (a true truthbearer) that very truth. It implies that the truthmaker of a truth is in every case 'external' to that truth in the manner explained above.

Now a relation R is said to be antisymmetric just in case: for any x, y, if x stands in R to to y, and y stands in R to x, then x = y.  The antisymmetry of 'makes-true' allows for cases in which a proposition (or other truthbearer) is its own truthmaker. Thus Every cygnet is a swan is its truthbearer that is its own truthmaker.  This is Alan's position.

11) Here is a consideration in favor of my position. Truthmakers play an explanatory role. Now explanation is asymmetric: if x explains y, then it is not the case that y explains x.  This holds for causal explanation, but also for metaphysical explanation or metaphysical grounding.  It is the existence of Milo that metaphysically grounds the truth of Milo exists. And not the other way around. No one -- I hope! -- will say that that the truth of  Philo's belief that Milo exists is what makes it the case that Milo exists or that Shlomo's sincere assertive utterance of 'Milo is sleeping' is what makes it the case that Milo is sleeping.

Now if truthmakers play an explanatory role, and metaphysical explanation is asymmetric, then no truthbearer is its own truthmaker.  So in the case of analytic or conceptually necessary truths, we should say that they do not have and do not need truthmakers.  To maintain this is to reject truthmaker maximalism.

It is worth noting that my position is consistent with saying that  a truthbearer (whether a Platonic proposition, a divine thought, whatever) can serve as a truthmaker for a different truthbearer.  The Platonic proposition expressed by '7 is prime,' for example, makes-true the general Platonic proposition that there are Platonic propositions.

Your move, Alan.

 0) What David Armstrong calls truthmaker maximalism is the thesis that every truth has a truthmaker.  Although I find the basic truthmaker intuition well-nigh irresistible, I have difficulty with the notion that every truth has a truthmaker.  Thus I question truthmaker maximalism (TM). Alan Rhoda has recently come out in favor of TM in a penetrating weblog entry. After sketching my position, I will try to pinpoint my disagreement with  Rhoda.

1) Compare *Peter is tired* and *Every cygnet is a swan.*  I will argue that truths  like the first need truthmakers while truths like the second do not.  A declarative sentence enclosed in asterisks names the primary truthbearer expressed by the sentence when assertively uttered or, more generally, assertively tokened.  A truthbearer is anything appropriately characterizable as either true or false when 'true' and 'false' are used in their sentential as opposed to their ontic senses. ('True friend' and 'false teeth' feature ontic senses of 'true' and 'false'.) Candidate truthbearers include assertively tokened sentences in the indicative mood, statements, asseverations, judgments, Fregean Gedanken, Bolzanian Saetze an sich and more. By definition, a truth is a true truthbearer, whatever  truthbearers are taken to be.) 

2) Intuitively, *Peter is tired,* being contingently true, both due to its dependence on the existence of Peter, and on Peter's accidentally possessing the property of being tired, is in need of something external to it that 'makes' it true or determines it to be true, or serves as the ontological ground of its truth.  (An ontological ground is not the same as an empirical cause.) *Peter is tired* can't just be true. This is because its truth-value depends on the way the world is. It needs a truthmaker external to it. By 'external to it,' I don't just mean that the truthmaker of a truth must be distinct from it:  this condition is satisfied by a distinct proposition (or other type of truthbearer) that entails *Peter is tired.* Entailment, however, is not truthmaking: entailment connects propositions to propositions; truthmaking connects extra-propositional entities (states of affairs for Armstrong) to propositions. What I mean when I say that a contingent truth needs something external to it to 'make' it true is that the truthmaker must be both distinct from the truthbearer and not, like the truthbearer, a 'representational entity' where the latter term covers such items as assertively uttered sentences, judgments, Fregean thoughts/propositions (the senses of context-free sentences in the indicative mood), and whatever else counts as a truthbearer.  In other words, a truthmaker of a contingent atomic truth such as *Peter is tired* must be outside the sphere of representations: it must be extralinguistic, extramental, and extra-propositional.  Thus the truthmakers of propositions like *Peter is tired* cannot belong to the category of propositions.  The ontological ground of  a contingent proposition's being true cannot be an entity within the sphere of propositions.  

3)  The truthmaker of *Peter is tired* cannot be a proposition; but it also cannot be utterly unlike a proposition.  Consider Peter himself, that very concrete individual.  It is clear that he could not be the truthmaker of *Peter is tired.*  Granted, if Peter were not to exist, then the proposition in question could not be true.  There are no truths about what does not exist. But although Peter or Peter's existence is a necessary condition of the truth of  every true proposition about him, that very individual, it is not the case that Peter or Peter's existence is a sufficient condition of the truth of contingent propositions about him if these propositions are predications such as *Peter is tired.*   (I am open to the suggestion that Peter himself suffices for the truth of *Peter exists.*) That Peter by himself cannot be the truthmaker of contingent predications about him can be proven or at least argued as follows. 

Argument from Necessitation.  Assume for reductio that Peter by himself can serve as truthmaker of contingent predications about him. Now, by truthmaker necessitarianism, whatever truthmakers are, they broadly logically  necessitate the truth of their corresponding truthbearers.  So if X is the truthmaker of *Peter is tired at t,* then there is no possible world in which X exists and *Peter is tired at t* is not true.  But there are plenty of worlds in which Peter exists but *Peter is tired at t* is not true.  So Peter by himself cannot be the truthmaker of *Peter is tired at t.*

Argument from Selection.  Consider any two true affirmative atomic contingent monadic propositions about Peter such as *Peter is tired at t* and *Peter is hungry at t.*  If Peter by himself can serve as the truthmaker of one, then he can serve as the truthmaker of the other.  But they obviously require numerically different truthmakers.  So Peter is the truthmaker of neither of them.  Although different truths can have the same truthmaker, this is not the case when both truths are atomic, even if both are about the same individual.  The truthmakers of such atomic propositions as that Peter is a philosopher and that Peter is a violinist must be distinct and they must match up with, or select, their truthbearers.  To do this, the truthmakers must have an internal structure isomorphic to the structure of the truthbearers.  In other words, the truthmakers must be proposition-like despite their not being propositions.  Extra-propositional but proposition-like!  What may look like a 'bug' is a 'feature' of truthmaker theory. It follows that Peter by himself cannot be the truthmaker of atomic contingent propositions about him.

4)  If Peter by himself cannot serve as truthmaker of the accidental predication  *Peter is F,* then neither can F-ness by itself.  The same goes for the set {Peter, F-ness}, the mereological sum (Peter + F-ness) and the ordered pair [Peter, F-ness].  For what is needed in addition to Peter and F-ness is a link in the truthmaker that corresponds to the copulative link in the proposition.  After all, not every possible world in which both Peter and F-ness exists is a world in which Peter is F.  There could be a world in which Peter exists and F-ness exists (by being instantiated by Paul) but in which Peter does not instantiate F-ness.  I am assuming that F-ness is a universal, but not that F-ness is a transcendent universal (one that can exist uninstantiated).  This is why concrete states of affairs are plausible candidates for the office of truthmaker, as in middle-period Armstrong.

5)  But even if one balks at the admission of concrete states of affairs or facts, one will have to admit that Peter himself -- assuming that this concrete individual is not assayed as a state of affair but as an individual -- cannot be the truthmaker of contingent propositions of the form *Peter is F.*  Some will say that tropes can serve as truthmakers.  Fine, but they too have a proposition-like structure.  If the trope Peter's-tiredness-at-t is the truthmaker of *Peter is tired at t,* then it is made true by an entity that has a proposition-like structure, a structure isomorphic to, and mirroring, the structure of the truthbearer.

6)  It seems to me that I have just definitively established that the truthmakers of accidental atomic predications like 'Peter is a philosopher' cannot be concrete individuals lacking a proposition-like structure.  I have also made it clear that we should not confuse the principle that there are no truths about nonexistent objects with the truthmaker principle.  We can call the first principle veritas sequitur esse (truth follows being).  What it says is that a truth cannot be true unless there are one or more items it is about.  Thus VSE requires that if Milo kicked Philo, this is true only if both Milo and Philo exist or have some mode of being other than existence. The truthmaker principle (TMP) goes beyond this in requiring the instantiation of the dyadic relation ---kicks___ by Milo and Philo, in that order.

7)  Consider now the analytic proposition *Every cygnet is a swan.*  As analytic, it is true solely in virtue of the meanings of 'cygnet' and 'swan.'  It is true ex vi terminorum.  Its truth is not contingent on the existence of any cygnets. Why does it need a truthmaker? It certainly does not need anything external to it to make it true. The concept cygnet includes the concept swan, so that, by sheer analysis of the subject concept, one can arrive at the truth in question.  That's why we call it, following Kant,  'analytic.'  Clearly, nothing external to an analytic proposition is required to make it true.  It follows that it cannot have a truthmaker.  Or rather it follows if  a truthmaker of a first-order truthbearer is an entity that is external to the truthbearer and resident in the realm of reality beyond the sphere of representations broadly construed.

Does this not decisively refute truthmaker maximalism?  There are plenty of analytic truths, but none of them has or can have a truthmaker.  For if you say that an analytic truth needs a truthmaker, then you are saying that it needs something external to it to 'synthesize,' to bring together, subject and predicate concepts. But analytic truths are precisely not synthetic in that (Kantian) sense.  But I hear an objection coming.

8) "*Every cygnet is a swan* does have a truthmaker, namely, the fact that cygnet includes swan."  This is a confused response.  There would not be a analytic truthbearer at all if cygnet did not include swan.  The very existence of the proposition *Every cygnet is a swan* requires that the first concept include the second.  So there is no need of an ontological ground of the truth of this proposition. One could of course say that in the analytic case the truthbearer is its own truthmaker.  But it is better to say that in the analytic case there cannot be a truthmaker as 'truthmaker' was defined in #2 above. 

9) Here is where Alan Rhoda will disagree:

Some philosophers say that truthmaking is asymmetric rather than anti-symmetric, but that is a mistake. Asymmetry disallows the possibility of self-grounding truthbearers. Anti-symmetry allows for that possibility. And this is something we should allow, because conceptually necessary propositions (e.g., all triangles have three sides) are their own truthmakers. If the proposition exists—whether it exists [as] a Platonic object, an idea in God’s mind, or something else—its very existence supplies a parcel of reality sufficient to explain and ground its own truth.

10) For me, truthmaking is an asymmetric relation whereas for Alan it is an antisymmetric relation. Thus I am maintaining that, for any x, y, if x makes-true y, then it is not the case that y makes-true x.  This implies that no truthbearer is its own truthmaker or truth-ground. It implies that in no case is the truthmaker of a truth (a true truthbearer) that very truth. It implies that the truthmaker of a truth is in every case 'external' to that truth in the manner explained above.

Now a relation R is said to be antisymmetric just in case: for any x, y, if x stands in R to to y, and y stands in R to x, then x = y.  The antisymmetry of 'makes-true' allows for cases in which a proposition (or other truthbearer) is its own truthmaker. Thus Every cygnet is a swan is its truthbearer that is its own truthmaker.  This is Alan's position.

11) Here is a consideration in favor of my position. Truthmakers play an explanatory role. Now explanation is asymmetric: if x explains y, then it is not the case that y explains x.  This holds for causal explanation, but also for metaphysical explanation or metaphysical grounding.  It is the existence of Milo that metaphysically grounds the truth of Milo exists. And not the other way around. No one -- I hope! -- will say that that the truth of  Philo's belief that Milo exists is what makes it the case that Milo exists or that Shlomo's sincere assertive utterance of 'Milo is sleeping' is what makes it the case that Milo is sleeping.

Now if truthmakers play an explanatory role, and metaphysical explanation is asymmetric, then no truthbearer is its own truthmaker.  So in the case of analytic or conceptually necessary truths, we should say that they do not have and do not need truthmakers.  To maintain this is to reject truthmaker maximalism.

It is worth noting that my position is consistent with saying that  a truthbearer (whether a Platonic proposition, a divine thought, whatever) can serve as a truthmaker for a different truthbearer.  The Platonic proposition expressed by '7 is prime,' for example, makes-true the general Platonic proposition that there are Platonic propositions.

Your move, Alan.

A Foolish Notion

Foolish  is the notion that the truth must not be spoken if it could possibly be used to harm someone or hurt his feelings.

I Walk the Line

Over at Facebook. The line between saying what needs to be said and being de-platformed. I don't much cotton to book burners and their latter-day equivalents. Free speech and open inquiry! Not for their own sakes, but in pursuit of the truth. Not 'my truth' or 'your truth,' but the truth.

Speaking Truth to Power

When a leftist speaks truth to power, it is not out of respect for truth, but out of respect for the power that he hopes to achieve by using truth-telling as a means to his end. 

True For and True

There are expressions that should be avoided by those who aim to think clearly and to promote clear thinking in others. Expressions of the form, ‘true for X’ are prime examples. In a logically sanitized world, the following would be verboten: ‘true for me,’ ‘true for you,’ ‘true for Jews,’ ‘true for Arabs,’ ‘true for the proletariat,’ ‘true for the bourgeoisie,’ ‘true for our historical epoch,’ and the like. Such semantic prophylaxis would disallow such sentences as ‘That may be true for you but it is not true for me.’

The trouble with expressions like these is that they blur the distinction between truth and belief. To say that a proposition p is true for S is just to say that S believes or accepts or affirms that p. This is because one cannot believe a proposition without believing it to be true. Of course, S’s believing that p, and thus S’s believing that p is true, does not entail that p is true. This is obvious if anything is. There are true beliefs and false beliefs, and a person’s holding a belief does not make it true. If you want to say that S believes that p, then say that. But don’t say that p is true for S unless you want to give aid and comfort to alethic relativism, the false and pernicious doctrine that truth (Gr. aletheia) is relative.  'Woke' folk love such obfuscatory expressions, but you don't want to give aid and comfort to them, do you?


A belief is always someone’s belief. This relativity of beliefs to believers explains why one person’s believing that p and another person’s believing that ~p is unproblematic. But truth is non-relative, or absolute. This is why it cannot be the case that both p and ~p. If you have truth, you have something absolute. There is no such thing as relative truth. Relative truth is not truth any more than negative growth is growth or a decoy duck is a duck or artificial leather is leather or faux marble is marble. In the expression, ‘relative truth,’ ‘relative’ functions as an alienans (as opposed to a specifying) adjective: it alienates or shifts the sense of ‘truth.’ Just as it makes no sense to say that there are two kinds of leather, real and artificial, it makes no sense to say that there are two kinds of truth, relative and absolute. Suppose someone sets out to list the kinds of leather. “Well, you got your horse leather, cow leather, alligator leather, artificial leather, real leather, artificially real leather, naugahyde, Barcalounger covering . . . .” One can see what is wrong with this.

The word ‘absolute’ scares some people. But the only reason I use it is to undo the semantic mischief caused by ‘relative truth’ and ‘true for X.’ In a logically perfect world, it would suffice to say ‘true’ or ‘leather.’ There would be no need to say ‘absolutely true’ or ‘real leather’ – “This here jacket a mahn is REAL leather, boy . . . .” If ‘relative’ and ‘artificial’ are (in the above examples) alienating adjectives, then ‘absolute’ and ‘real’ could be called de-alienating: they restore their rightful senses to words that semantic bandits divested them of.

One reason ‘absolute’ scares people is that it suggests dogmatism and infallibilism. Thus if I say that truth is absolute, some people think I am saying that the propositions I affirm as true I affirm as unquestionably or undeniably true. But that’s to confuse an ontological statement about the nature of truth with an epistemological statement about the way in which I accept the propositions I accept. It is consistent to maintain that truth is absolute while being a fallibilist, where a fallibilist holds that either no proposition held to be true, or no member of some restricted class of propositions held to be true, is known with certainty.

In sum, my point is that ‘true for X’ should be avoided since it gives aid and comfort to the illusion that truth is relative. But why exactly is that an illusion? I’ll leave that question for a separate post.

Against Ostrich Nominalism (2021 Update)

Cyrus asked me whether being an ostrich indicates a moral defect. He is invited to repeat his question in his own words in the Comments. Logically prior question: what is an ostrich? The entry below is a redacted version of one from January 2013.

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As magnificent a subject as philosophy is, grappling as it does with the ultimate concerns of human existence, and thus surpassing in nobility any other human pursuit, it is also miserable in that nothing goes uncontested, and nothing ever gets established to the satisfaction of all competent practitioners.  (This is true of other disciplines as well, but in philosophy it is true in excelsis.) Suppose I say, as I have in various places:

That things have properties and stand in relations is a plain Moorean fact beyond the reach of reasonable controversy. After all, my cat is black and he is sleeping next to my blue coffee cup.  ‘Black’ picks out a property, an extralinguistic feature of my cat.

Is that obvious?  Not to some.  Not to the ornery and recalcitrant critter known as the ostrich nominalist.  My cat, Max Black, is black.  That, surely, is a Moorean fact. Now consider the following biconditional and consider whether it too is a Moorean fact:

1. Max is black iff Max has the property of being black.

As I see it, there are three main ways of construing a biconditional such as (1):

A.  Ostrich Nominalism.  The right-hand side (RHS) says exactly what the left-hand side (LHS) says, but in a verbose and high-falutin' and dispensable way.  Thus the use of 'property' on the RHS does not commit one ontologically to properties beyond predicates.  (By definition, predicates are linguistic items while properties are extralinguistic and extramental.)  For the ostrich nominalist, predication is primitive and in no need of  philosophical explanation.  On this approach, (1) is trivially true.  One needn't posit properties, and in consequence one needn't worry about the nature of property-possession. (Is Max related to his blackness, or does Max have his blackness quasi-mereologically  by having it as an ontological constituent of him?) And if one needn't posit properties, no questions need arise about what they are: sets? universals? tropes? mereological sums? and so on.

B. Ostrich Realism.  The RHS commits one ontologically to properties, but in no sense does the RHS serve to ground or explain the LHS.  On this approach, (1) is false if there are no properties.  For the ostrich realist, (1) is true, indeed necessarily true, but it is not the case that the LHS is true because the RHS is true.  Such notions as metaphysical grounding and philosophical explanation are foreign to the ostrich realist, but not in virtue of his being a realist, but  in virtue of his being an ostrich. Peter van Inwagen is an ostrich realist.

C. Non-Ostrich Realism.  On this approach, the RHS both commits one to properties, but also proffers a metaphysical ground of the truth of the LHS: the LHS is true because (ontologically or metaphysically speaking, not causally)  the concrete particular Max has the property of being black, and not vice versa.

Note 1: Explanation is asymmetrical; biconditionality is symmetrical.

Note 2: Properties needn't be universals.  They might be (abstract) particulars (unrepeatables) such as the tropes of D. C. Williams and the abstract particulars of Keith Campbell.  Properties must, however, be extralinguistic and extramental,  by definition.

Note 3: Property-possession needn't be understood in terms of instantiation or exemplification or Fregean 'falling-under'; it might be construed quasi-mereologically as constituency: a thing has a property by having it as a proper ontological part.

Against Ostrich Nominalism

On (A) there are neither properties, nor do properties enter into any explanation of predication.  Predication is primitive and in need of no explanation.  In virtue of what does 'black' correctly apply to Max? In virtue of nothing.  It just applies to him and does so correctly.  Max is black, but there is no feature of reality that explains why 'black' is true of Max, or why 'Max is black' is true.  It is just true!  There is nothing in reality that serves as the ontological ground of this contingent truth.  Nothing 'makes' it true.  There are no truth-makers and no need for any.

I find ostrich nominalism preposterous.  'Black' is true of Max, 'white' is not, but there is no feature of reality, nothing in or at or about Max that explains why the one predicate is true of him and the other is not!?  This is not really an argument but more an expression of incomprehension or incredulity, an autobiographical comment, if you will.  I may just be petering out, pace  Peter van Inwagen.

Can I do better than peter?  'Black' is a predicate of English.  Schwarz is a predicate of German.  If there are no properties,  then Max is black relative to English, schwarz relative to German, noir relative to French, and thus no one color.  But this is absurd.  Max is not three different colors, but one color, the color we use 'black' to pick out, and the Germans use schwarz to pick out. When Karl, Pierre, and I look at Max we see the same color.  So there is one color we both see -- which would not be the case if there were no properties beyond predicates.  It is not as if I see the color black while Karl sees the color schwarz.  We see the same color.  And we see it at the cat.  This is not a visio intellectualis whereby we peer into some Platonic topos ouranios.  Therefore, there is something in, at, or about the cat, something extralinguistic, that grounds the correctness of the application of the predicate to the cat.

A related argument.  I say, 'Max is black.'  Karl says, Max ist schwarz.  'Is' and ist are token-distinct and type-distinct words of different languages.  If there is nothing in reality (no relation whether of instantiation or of constituency, no non-relational tie, Bergmannian nexus, etc.) that the copula picks out, then it is only relative to German that Max ist schwarz, and only relative to English that Max is black.  But this is absurd.  There are not two different facts here but one.  Max is the same color for Karl and me, and his being black is the same fact for Karl and me. Copulae as bits of language belonging to different languages are token-distinct and type-distinct. But they pick out the copulative tie that is logically and metaphysically antecedent to language.  Or will you say that reality is language all the way down? That way lies the madness of an absurd linguistic idealism.

Finally, 'Max is black' is true.  Is it true ex vi terminorum?  Of course not.  It is contingently true.  Is it just contingently true?  Of course not.  It is true because of the way extralinguistic reality is arranged. It is modally contingent (possibly false if true; possibly true if false), but also contingent upon the way the world is.  There's this cat that exists whether or not any language exists, and it is black whether or not any language exists.

Therefore, I say that for a predicate to be contingently true of an individual, (i) there must be individuals independently of language; (ii) there must be properties independently of language; and there must be facts or truth-making states of affairs independently of language.  Otherwise, you end up with (i) total linguistic idealism, which is absurd; or (ii) linguistic idealism about properties which is absurd; or (iii) a chaos, a world of disconnected particulars and properties.

The above is a shoot-from-the hip, bloggity-blog exposition of ideas that can be put more rigorously, but it seems to to me to show that ostrich nominalism and ostrich realism for that matter are untenable -- and this despite the fact that a positive theory invoking facts has its own very serious problems.

Metaphilosophical Coda: If a theory has insurmountable problems, these problems are not removed by the fact that every other theory has problems.  For it might be that no theory is tenable, while the problem itself is genuine.  If I argue against a position, that does not make me for its opposite. So when I argue against presentism in the philosophy of time that does not make me for eternalism, even if eternalism is the contradictory opposite of presentism.

One cannot exclude a priori the existence of genuine  aporiai or insolubilia.  Curators of logic museums take note.

How are God and Truth Related? (2021 Expanded Version)

By my count, there are five different ways to think about the relation of God and truth:

1) There is truth, but there is no God.

2) There is truth, and there is God, but God is not the ontological ground of truth.

3) There is truth, there is God, and God is the ontological ground of truth: truth ultimately depends for its existence on the existence of God. There is truth only because there is God. (This 'because' signifies a relation that is neither empirically-causal nor merely logical. Call it the relation of ontological grounding.)

4) There is no truth, because there is no God.

5) There is God, but no truth.

Ad (1). This is the view of  many if not most today. There are truths, and among these truths is the truth that God does not exist.  This, I take it, is the standard atheist view.  The standard atheist does not deny that there are truths; he presupposes that there are and that they are absolute. It is just that one of these truths is that there is no God.

Ad (2). This, I take it, would be the standard theist view among analytic philosophers.  There are truths, and one of the truths is that God exists. Consider a philosopher who holds that God is a necessary being and who also holds that it is necessarily the case that there are some truths. Such a philosopher would have to hold that the existence of God is logically equivalent to the existence of some truths. That is, he would have to hold that, necessarily God exists if and only if truths exist. But this philosopher would deny the truth of the subjunctive conditional, If, per impossibile, God were not to exist, then truths would not exist either. That is, he would deny that God is the ontological ground of truth.

Ad (3). This is the view that I am inclined to accept, were I to accept a view.  Thus I would affirm the subjunctive conditional lately mentioned. The difference between (2) and (3) is subtle. On both sides it is held that both the existence of God and the existence of some truths are necessary, but the Augustinian -- to give him a name -- holds that God is the ultimate 'source' of all truth and thus of all intelligibility, or, if you prefer, the ultimate 'ground' of all truth and intelligibility. Therefore, if, per impossibile, God were not to exist, truth would not exist either.

Ad (4). This is Nietzsche's view.  Tod Gottes = Tod der Wahrheit.  The death of God is the death of truth.  By 'truth' I of course mean absolute truth which cannot be perspectival or in any way relative.  Truth cannot be relative, as I have argued many times. 

Ad (5). I have the impression that certain post-modernists hold this. It is a view not worth discussing.

I should think only the first three views have any merit.  

But each of the three has difficulties and none of the three can be strictly proven.

A. I will argue against the admittedly plausible first view by arguing for the third view.

Among the truths, there are necessary truths such as the laws of logic. Now a truth is a true truth-bearer, a true proposition, say. (There are different candidates for the office of truth-bearer; we needn't list them here.) Now nothing can have a property unless it exists. (Call this principle Anti-Meinong). So no proposition can have the property of being true unless the proposition exists. By definition, a necessary truth is true in every metaphysically possible world. It follows that a necessarily true proposition exists in every possible world including worlds in which there are no finite minds.  (I assume, plausibly, that there are such worlds.)

But -- and this is the crucial move in this reasoning -- a proposition is a thought-accusative that cannot exist except in, or rather for, a mind.  Thus there are no truths in themselves that float free of minds. Now if there is no God, or rather, if there is no necessarily existent mind, then every mind is contingent. A contradiction ensues: there is a possible world W such that, in W, there exists a thought-accusative that is not the thought-accusative of any mind.  For example, the proposition expressed by '7 + 5 = 12' is true and exists in every possible world including those worlds in which there are no minds.  This contradiction ensues on the assumption that there is no necessarily existent mind.

Therefore, there is a necessarily existent mind. "And this all men call God."

If the argument just given is sound, then (3) is true, and (1) is false.

Here are the ways an atheist might respond to the argument for (3):

a) Deny that there are necessary truths.

b) Deny that truth is a property of propositions.

c) Deny Anti-Meinong, the principle that whatever has a property exists.

d) Deny that propositions are thought-accusatives; accept some sort of Platonism about propositions.

But each of these denials involves problems of its own. 

 

Narrative Coherence is not Enough

There is a logical gap between coherence and truth.

Reductive Presentism and the Truth-Value Links

What renders a statement about the past true? On one version of presentism, nothing does: statements about the past are brute truths. A rather more plausible version holds that "whatever renders a statement about the past true must lie in the present." (Michael Dummett, Truth and the Past, Columbia UP 2004, 75)  Craig Bourne labels this view "reductive presentism." (A Future for Presentism, Oxford UP 2006, 47 ff.)  But it too is untenable for various reasons, one of which is that it "conflicts with the truth-value links which assuredly govern our use of tensed statements." (ibid.) Dummett continues:

Such a truth-value link requires that if a statement in the present tense, uttered now, of the form "An event of type K is occurring," is true, then the corresponding statement in the past tense, "An event of type K occurred a year ago," uttered a year hence, must perforce also be true. (ibid.)

Suppose I now scratch my right ear and intone 'I am now scratching my right ear.'   If precisely a year later I were to say, 'I scratched my right ear exactly a year ago,' I would say something true. "But it might well be that in a year's time you would have forgotten that trivial action, and that every trace of its occurrence would have dissipated." (ibid.)  But then on reductive presentism, my statement, 'I scratched my right ear exactly  a year ago' would not be true.

It would not be true because there would be nothing presently in existence to render it true. No  memory, no video-taped recording, no causal trace whatsoever.

Do Past-Tensed Truths Need Truthmakers?

Cyrus wrote in an earlier thread,

In the linked article, you write:

That (some) truths refer us to the world as to that which makes them true is so obvious and commonsensical and indeed 'Australian' that one ought to hesitate to reject the idea because of the undeniable puzzles that it engenders. Motion is puzzling too but presumably not to be denied on the ground of its being puzzling.

But I question whether the scope of the “some” (that is, the scope of the obviousness and commonsensicality) extends to past tensed truths. I don't find it obvious that past tensed truths have truthmakers. Presumably presentists who reject it also don't find it obvious. (Some find it obvious that the past doesn't exist.) I guess what I'm asking is: Is there an objective way to measure obviousness? If there isn't, how much should we really be relying on it in our arguments?

That's a good comment and a good challenge. As Hilary Putnam once said, "It ain't obvious what's obvious."  So I don't think there is any objective way to measure obviousness, or, to use a better term, objective self-evidence. Nevertheless, I will die in the ditch for the first of my italicized sentences above. Surely there is at least one truth that cannot just be true, but needs a truth-ground that exists and indeed exists extramentally and extralinguistically. For example, 'BV is seated.'  That cannot just be true. It cannot be a brute truth. I have gone over this so many times I'm sick of it.  So let's move on.

Cyrus supra is not questioning whether there are truthmakers, nor is he raising the question as to the nature of truthmakers, i.e., the question of the category of entity to which they belong (Armstrongian states of affairs? tropes? etc.); he is raising the question whether past-tensed truths need truthmakers. I grant that the answer is not obvious.

One thing we should be clear about is that presentists needn't deny that past-tensed truths need or have truthmakers.  For they could hold, as some have held, that these truthmakers exist at present.  On presentism, whatever exists in time exists at the present time.  This is not the tautology that whatever exists (present tense) exists (present tense). This trivial truth is contested by no one. What the presentist is maintaining is that only what exists (present tense) exists tenselessly.  Presentism about what exists  in time is a restrictionist thesis: it restricts what tenselessly exists in time to what presently exists, i.e. what exists at present, or now.  (Note the ambiguity of 'presently' in ordinary English: if I say that I will visit you presently, that means in ordinary contexts that I will visit you soon, but not now.)

So we can divide presentists who accept truthmakers in general into two groups. Group One is composed of those who hold both that some past-tensed and some present-tensed truths have truthmakers, and Group Two is composed of those who accept that there are past-tensed truths but hold that they are all brute truths.

This is the view that I will try to argue against.  But first we need to lay another assumption on the table

I assume that there are past-tensed truths. For example, I assume that it is true, and indeed true now, that JFK was assassinated and that Socrates taught Plato.  (But don't get hung up on these examples: I could use different ones.) One might deny these (datanic) points in two ways. One could assert that all past-tensed truth-bearers are false. Or one could assert that no past-tensed truth-bearer is either true or false. For now we set these (lunatic) views aside.

The assumption, then, is that there are past-tensed truths.  The question is whether any of them need truthmakers given that present-tensed truths need truthmakers.

It is contingently true that I am alive. This is not a brute truth. Its truth requires, at a minimum, the existence of the living animal that wears my clothes. It is also true that after I am dead it will be true that I was alive today. If the first truth is not brute, how could the second truth be brute? The first truth is about me. It says that BV is alive. The second truth is also about me. It says that it will be the case that BV was alive. Now a proposition cannot be about a thing unless the thing exists. So in both cases the thing, me, exists. So both truths are grounded by my existence. If <I  am alive> asserted by me today has an ontological ground, and it clearly does, then <BV was alive> asserted after I am dead by a descendant also has an ontological ground. The two propositions differ merely in tense. Does that difference make a difference with respect to truth-making? It is not clear that it does. It is plausible to hold, with T. Merricks, that if presentism is true, then all truths about wholly past items are brute truths. Should we affirm the antecedent and infer the consequent by modus ponens? Or should we deny the consequent and deny the antecedent by modus tollens? It is not clear. The arguments appear to be equally good and cancel out. This is so given that the truth-makers of past-tensed truths about wholly past items cannot be located in the present. Perhaps some can be so located, but not all.

My interim conclusion is that presentism  is open to serious objection.  The fact that 'eternalism' is also is no good reason to accept presentism.

Truthmakers and Truth Conditions

The following is an excerpt from an old entry that makes a distinction we need to keep in mind in present discussions.

....................

Dan offers

(*) The sentence 'Al is fat' is true because Al is fat

to show that a truthmaker need not be an entity.

It seems to me, though, that Dan is confusing a truthmaker with a truth condition.  A truthmaker is concrete chunk of extralinguistic and extramental reality whereas a truth condition is just another sentence, proposition, or cognate item. Our old friend Alan Rhoda in an old blog post does a good job of explaining the distinction:

. . .truthmakers are parcels of reality . . . .

Not so with truth conditions. Truth conditions are semantic explications of the meaning of statements. They tell us in very precise terms what has to be true for a particular statement to be true. For example, a B-theorist like Nathan Oaklander will say that the truth conditions of the sentence "The 2006 Winter Olympics are over" is given by the sentence "The 2006 Winter Olympics end earlier than the date of this utterance". Thus truth conditions are meaning entities like statements that are used to spell out or analyze the meaning of other statements.
 

Dan's (*) merely sets forth a truth condition. It doesn't get us off the level of propositions and down to the level of truthmakers.

Another important point has to do with the asymmetry of truthmaking: if T makes true p, it does not follow that p makes true T.  It's an asymmetry of explanation. If one thing explains another, it does not follow that the other explains the one. The truthmaker theorist takes seriously the project of metaphysical explanation. Truthmakers explain why true truthbearers are true, but not vice versa.  Dan's (*), however, entails the following non-explanatory biconditional:

(**) The sentence 'Al is fat' is true iff Al is fat.

But (**) has nothing to do with truthmaking; it is but an instance of Quine's disquotational schema according to which the truth predicate is but a device of disquotation. We remain on the level of sentences (propositions, etc.)

In sum, I see no merit in Dan's suggestion that there are truthmakers but they needn't be entities. That shows a failure to grasp the notion of a truthmaker. What Dan should say is that there is no need for truthmakers. He might also try arguing that the truthmaking relation is bogus or unintelligible since it is neither a logical relation nor a causal one.

Presentism and Truthmakers: A Reply to David Brightly

I first want to apologize to David Brightly for not paying more attention to his ongoing gentlemanly critique of my ideas at his weblog, tillyandlola: Comments on the Maverick.    Although our minds work in very different ways, this is scant excuse for my not having engaged his incisive and well-intentioned critique more fully.  I shall make amends in this Lenten season and beyond. On 28 April 2019, he posted the following:

Presentism and Truthmakers

 

Bill runs through the truthmaker objection to presentism:  truths about the past are truths now and hence need present truthmakers yet under presentism there don't seem to be any.  Let's consider a variant of Bill's example: 

S. Kennedy commanded PT109.  

That's true.  But what in the present grounds this truth? On the face of it, that's a rather weird question.  Why should we expect there to be something about the world now that grounds a truth about the past? But Bill has a point I think: we say that S is true, now.  Bill rightly dismisses Ed Feser's half-hearted attempt to reconcile presentism and truthmakerism.  So what should we say about this puzzle?

Consider this sentence:

T.  Kennedy commands PT109.

In 1943 T was true and we may suppose that in 1943 the world was in some way that made it true.  But now in 2019 that way has long since ceased to be and T is no longer true.  How then do we express the way of 1943 from the vantage point of 2019?  We can't just use T as that is false.  Instead, the rules of English, unchanging over the intervening period, tell us to use S, a modification in tense of T.  The past way, once expressed by T is now expressed by S.  S is not a brute truth.  It's a rule-governed transformation of a made truth.  

 

.............................

 

Brightly appreciates that it won't do to say that (S) is just true.  As a contingent truth, (S) needs something external to it to explain its being true.  It needs a truthmaker. David also appreciates that, while the past-tensed (S) is true at present, on presentism  nothing that exists at present  could serve as the truthmaker of (S). Brightly's theory seems to be that because the past-tensed (S) is a rule-governed transformation of the present-tensed (T), and because (T) was a "made truth," i.e, was a truth having a truthmaker, (S) has a truthmaker too, namely the truthmaker of  (T).

 

But note that (T) WAS made true in 1943 by something that existed then, but does not exist now. So it is difficult to see how the truthmaker of (T) that DID exist, but does not now exist, can serve as the truthmaker of S.  (S) is true at present, and such a truth, if it has a truthmaker, has an existent truthmaker, a truth maker that on presentism presently exists. Equivalently, although (T) WAS true in 1943, it is false now.  Being false now, it has no truthmaker now. So if the truthmaker of (S) now is the truthmaker (T) had then, then (S) has no truthmaker now.  

 

Brightly might simply be denying that past-tensed contingent truths such as (S) need truthmakers. But if present-tensed contingent truths need them -- and they obviously do -- then it it is difficult to see how the mere passage of time can absolve them of this need when these present-tensed truths become past-tensed truths by that "rule-governed transformation" that David spoke about.  For example, 'I am blogging' is now true, but in an hour it will be false. An hour from now 'I was blogging' will be true.  Now abstract from tense and indexicality. The result is BV blogs. The bolded expression picks out the tenseless propositional content that is common to the present-tensed 'BV is blogging' (or 'BV blogs')  and the past-tensed 'BV was blogging' (or 'BV blogged.')

 

It is the contingency of that propositional content, and its reference beyond itself, that requires that there be a truthmaker for said content.  The tense of the content is irrelevant to the requirement.  So if present-tensed truths need truthmakers, then so do past-tensed truths.  The mere passage of time cannot abrogate the requirement.

 

If so, then the truthmaker objection to presentism is up and running. For on presentism, the present alone exists. But if so, then there are no past-tensed contingent truths: there is nothing in reality to ground their truth. The upshot would appear to be a denial of the reality of the past.  

Lie or Exaggeration or Bullshit? Politics in an Age of Bullshit

A redacted re-post from 30 November 2016

......................................

Over the weekend, Donald Trump bragged in signature style that he “won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” Lefties are calling the statement a lie.  But it is no such thing.  In the typical case, a lie is a false statement made with the intention to deceive.  In the typical case, one who lies knows the truth, but misrepresents it to his audience out of a desire to deceive them.  But no one knows the truth-value of Trump's braggadocious conditional.  It could be true, but neither Trump nor anyone else has any evidence of its truth.  Although verifiable in principle, it is not practically verifiable.

When lefties call a statement a lie which is not a lie should we say that they are lying about what it is?

Was Trump exaggerating when he made his remark?  That's not right either.

I think what we have here is a species of bullshit in the sense pinned down by a noted philosopher.  According to Harry Frankfurt, a  statement is bullshit if it is

. . . grounded neither in a belief that it is true nor, as a lie must be, in a belief that it is not true. It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth — this indifference to how things really are — that I regard as of the essence of bullshit." (emphasis added)

Professor Frankfurt has a fine nose for the essence of bullshit.  The bullshitter is one who 'doesn't give a shit' about the truth value of what he is saying.  He doesn't care how things stand with reality. The liar, by contrast, must care: he must know (or at least attempt to know) how things are if he is to have any chance of deceiving his audience.  Think of it this way: the bullshitter doesn't care whether he gets things right or gets them wrong; the liar cares to get them right so he can deceive you about them.

Now if the bullshitter does not care about truth, what does he care about? He cares about himself, about making a certain impression. His aim is to (mis)represent himself as knowing what he does not know or more than he actually knows. Frankfurt again:

. . . bullshitting involves a kind of bluff. It is closer to bluffing, surely than to telling a lie. But what is implied concerning its nature by the fact that it is more like the former than it is like the latter? Just what is the relevant difference here between a bluff and a lie? Lying and bluffing are both modes of misrepresentation or deception. Now the concept most central to the distinctive nature of a lie is that of falsity: the liar is essentially someone who deliberately promulgates a falsehood. Bluffing too is typically devoted to conveying something false. Unlike plain lying, however, it is more especially a matter not of falsity but of fakery. This is what accounts for its nearness to bullshit. For the essence of bullshit is not that it is false but that it is phony. In order to appreciate this distinction, one must recognize that a fake or a phony need not be in any respect (apart from authenticity itself) inferior to the real thing. What is not genuine need not also be defective in some other way. It may be, after all, an exact copy. What is wrong with a counterfeit is not what it is like, but how it was made. This points to a similar and fundamental aspect of the essential nature of bullshit: although it is produced without concern with the truth, it need not be false. The bullshitter is faking things. But this does not mean that he necessarily gets them wrong. (emphasis added)

When did the Age of Bullshit begin in American politics?  Perhaps with the inauguration of Bill Clinton.  But it really gets underway with Barack Obama.  Obama is the shuck-and-jive precursor of Trump.  So let's recall some of his antics.

As Frankfurt points out, the essence of bullshit is a lack of concern for truth.  But truth and consistency are closely related notions.  Two statements are consistent (inconsistent) just in case they can (cannot) both be true.  Now I do not know if there are any cases of Obama contradicting himself synchronically (at a time), but there are plenty of examples of him contradicting himself diachronically.  He said things as a senator the opposite of which he says now.  Victor Davis Hanson supplies numerous examples in Obama as Chaos:

. . . when the president takes up a line of argument against his opponents, it cannot really be taken seriously — not just because it is usually not factual, but also because it always contradicts positions that Obama himself has taken earlier or things he has previously asserted. Whom to believe — Obama 1.0, Obama 2.0, or Obama 3.0?

When the president derides the idea of shutting down the government over the debt ceiling, we almost automatically assume that he himself tried to do just that when as a senator he voted against the Bush administration request in 2006, when the debt was about $6 trillion less than it is now.

The problem here is not merely logical; it is also ethical: the man is not truthful.  Truth, falsity, consistency, inconsistency pertain to propositions, not persons.  Truthfulness, deceitfulness, lack of concern for truth and consistency -- these are ethical attributes, properties of persons.  Obama the bullshitter is an ethically defective president.  When Nixon lied, he could be shamed by calling him on it.  That is because he was brought up properly, to value truth and truthfulness.  But the POMO Obama, like that "first black president" Bill Clinton, apparently can't be shamed.  It's all bullshit and fakery and shuckin' and jivin'.  There is no gravitas in these two 'black' presidents, the one wholly white, the other half-white.  Everything's a 'narrative' -- good POMO word, that -- and the only question is whether the narrative works in the moment for political advantage. A narrative needn't be true to be a narrative, which is why the POMO types like it.  Hanson has Obama's number:

But a third explanation is more likely. Obama simply couldn’t care less about what he says at any given moment, whether it is weighing in on the football name “Redskins” or the Travyon Martin trial. He is detached and unconcerned about the history of an issue, about which he is usually poorly informed. Raising the debt ceiling is an abstraction; all that matters is that when he is president it is a good thing and when he is opposing a president it is a bad one. Let aides sort out the chaos. Obamacare will lower premiums, not affect existing medical plans, and not require increased taxes; that all of the above are untrue matters nothing. Who could sort out the chaos?

[. . .]

The media, of course, accepts that what Obama says on any given day will contradict what he has said or done earlier, or will be an exaggeration or caricature of his opponents’ position, or simply be detached from reality. But in their daily calculus, that resulting chaos is minor in comparison to the symbolic meaning of Obama. He is, after all, both the nation’s first African-American president and our first left-wing progressive since Franklin Roosevelt.

In comparison with those two facts, no others really matter.

Is There Such a Thing as Metaphysical Explanation?

M. L. writes,

 

I've been enjoying your critique of [Peter] van Inwagen. [The reader is presumably referring to  my "Van Inwagen on Fiction, Existence, Properties, Particulars, and Method" in Studia Neoaristotelica: A Journal of Analytical Scholasticism, 2015, vol. 12, no. 2, 99-125]  I was initially astonished at his claim that metaphysics/ontology doesn't explain, but it also got me curious about where the explanation is going on in ontological accounts (especially of properties, however construed).

 

I'm doing a Ph.D. in metaontology and I'm contrasting neo-Quinean (van Inwagen) and neo-Aristotelian (Lowe) approaches. 

 

Can you direct me to where you might have written about, if indeed you have, how it is ontology/metaphysics explains?

 

Well, I haven't discussed the issue head-on in a separate publication, but I have discussed it en passant in various contexts. Below is a re-do of a 2012 weblog entry that addresses the question and may spark discussion. Combox open.

 

...........................

 

Let 'Tom' name a particular tomato.  Let us agree that if a predicate applies to a particular, then the predicate is true of the particular.  Predicates are linguistic items.  Tomatoes are not. If Tom is red, then 'red' is true of Tom, and if 'red' is true of Tom, then Tom is red. This yields the material biconditional

1. Tom is red iff 'red' is true of Tom.

Now it seems to me that the following question is intelligible:  Is Tom red because 'red' is true of Tom, or is 'red' true of Tom because Tom is red?  'Because' here does not have a causal sense.  So the question is not whether Tom's being red causes 'red' to be true of Tom, or vice versa.  So I won't speak of causation in this context.  I will speak of metaphysical/ontological grounding.  The question then is what grounds what, not what causes what.   Does Tom's being red ground the application (the being-applied)  of 'red' to Tom, or does the application (the being-applied) of 'red' to Tom ground Tom's being red?

I am not primarily concerned with the correct answer to this question, but with meaningfulness/intelligibility of the question itself.

Grounding is asymmetrical: if x grounds y, then y does not ground x.  (It is also irreflexive and transitive.)  Now if there is such a relation as grounding, then there will be a distinctive form of explanation we can call metaphysical/ontological explanation.  (Grounding, even though it is not causation, is analogous to causation, and metaphysical explanation, even though distinct from causal explanation, is analogous to causal explanation.)

Explaining is something we do: in worlds without minds there is no explaining and there are no explanations, including metaphysical explanations.  But I assume that, if there are any metaphysical grounding relations, then  in every world metaphysical grounding relations obtain.  (Of course, there is no grounding of the application of predicates in a world without languages and predicates, but there are other grounding relations. For example, if propositions are abstract objects that necessarily exist, and some of the true ones need truth-makers, then truth-making, which is a grounding relation, exists in worlds in which there are no minds and no languages and hence no sentences.)

Grounding is not causation. It is not a relation between event tokens such as Jack's touching a live wire and Jack's death by electrocution.  Grounding is also not a relation between propositions.  It is not a logical relation that connects propositions to propositions.  It is not the relation of material implication, nor is it entailment (the necessitation of material implication), nor any other logical relation wholly situated at the level of propositions.  Propositions, let us assume, are the primary truth-bearers. 

In our example, grounding is not a relation between propositions -- it is not a logical relation -- since neither Tom nor 'red' are propositions. 

I want to say the following.  Tom's being red grounds the correctness of the application of 'red' to Tom.  'Red' is true of Tom because (metaphysically, not causally or logically) Tom is red, and not vice versa.  'Red' is true of Tom in virtue of  Tom's being red.  Tom's being red is metaphysically prior to the truth of 'Tom is red' where this metaphysical priority cannot be reduced to some ordinary type of priority, whether logical, causal, temporal, or what have you.  Tom's being red metaphysically accounts for the truth of 'Tom is red.' Tom's being red makes it the case the 'red' is true of Tom.  Tom's being red makes 'Tom is red' true.  

I conclude that there is at least one type of metaphysical grounding relation, and at least one form of irreducibly metaphysical explanation. 

We can ask similar questions with respect to normative properties.  Suppose Jesus commands us to love one another.  We distinguish among the commander, the act of commanding, the content of the command, and the normative property of the commanded content, in this case the obligatoriness of loving one another.  If Jesus is God, then whatever he commands is morally obligatory. Nevertheless, we can intelligibly ask whether the content is obligatory because Jesus/God commands it, or whether he (rightly) commands it because it is obligatory.  The 'because' here is neither causal not logical.  It is metaphysical/ontological.

 

This of course a variation on the old Euthyphro Dilemma in the eponymous Platonic dialog.

 

I freely admit that there is something obscure about a grounding relation that is neither causal nor logical. But of course logical and causal relations too are problematic when subjected to squinty-eyed scrutiny. 

 

I conclude with a dogmatic slogan. Metaphysics without metaphysical explanation is not metaphysics at all.  

The Infirmity of Truth

Having the truth is no defense in the court of the politically correct. For that court lies in the precincts of power, and here below truth is no match for power unless those who are truthful also have power.  But the paths to power are often paved with lies and their necessity. Rare then is the truthful one who attains power with his truthfulness intact.  

Narratives and the Left

Leftists love narratives because a narrative needn't be true to be a narrative. Their assessment criteria are identity-tribal rather than logical.  A good narrative is a coherent  story that enhances the tribe's power. Whether true or false is not to the point, the point being power. Truth is not a leftist value. It is not a norm that constrains their speaking and thinking.   That is not to say that leftists don't sometimes speak the truth; they do when it serves their purposes. They don't when it doesn't.  Truth for a leftist has a merely instrumental value, not an absolute value.  

Some have the chutzpah to deny that there is truth, which is different from admitting that there is and denying its value.  There is no truth, they hold, only power. If you ask them whether it is true that there is no truth, only power, they dismiss the very question with a power move.  They either have no intellectual conscience or they suppress it. They enforce the power-is-all doctrine which is not admitted to be a doctrine.  A doctrine is a teaching, and a teaching can be true or false; but then a transcendental norm comes back in, the norm of truth. So the 'consistent' leftist cannot allow himself to think; he must power his way through.

Denying truth and its value, they deny logical consistency and its value.  For consistency is defined in terms of truth. Propositions are collectively logically consistent just in case they can all be true.  So you can't get through to a leftist who maintains both that there is no truth, only power, but then complains that racist whites dominate blacks.  There is no objecting  to that if the world at bottom is just power centers battling it out.  There can't be anything wrong with whites dominating blacks if all is power in the end.  If all is power, and I have the power to enslave you, and the power to ward of any unpleasant (to me) consequences of my enslaving you, then why shouldn't I? If all is power, then there is nothing beyond power to which appeal can be made. If might makes right, then there is no right.  It is inconsistent to hold that all is power and that some of its deployments are evil.  If all is power, there is no good and evil. Any attempt to reduce good and evil to power terms results in the elimination of good and evil. But, as I said, you can't reach hard-core leftists  because they will just make another power move and dismiss the question of consistency as they dismissed the question of truth.

If there is right irreducible to might, that right is impotent here below if every broker in this broken world is a power broker. Only those spiritually sensitive to right and its claims can guide might in the ways of right, but such sensitive souls do not flourish in this mighty brutal world.

Meinertsen on the Merely Apparent Existence of Thick Particulars

This is the second in a series on Bo Meinertsen's 2018 book. It is part of a 'warm-up' for a review article to appear in Metaphysica.  Here is the first installment.

A thick particular in the parlance of David Armstrong is an ordinary particular taken together with its non-relational properties. But an ordinary particular is distinct from each and from all of its properties: it is that which has these properties. If we consider an ordinary particular in abstraction from its properties, what we have before our minds is the particular qua particular. From here it is but a short step to the much maligned and hotly contested bare or thin particular. Meinertsen ably defends bare or thin particulars as constituents of states of affairs in Chapter 5.

A tomato will serve as an example. Call it 'Tom.' There are any number of contingent truths about Tom. Tom is red; Tom is ripe; Tom is round; etc.  Meinertsen and I agree that these truths need truthmakers. As I would put it, they can't just be true. What in the world makes them true? For Meinertsen, states of affairs (STOAs) play the truthmaker role.  A (first-order) state of affairs is a unified complex consisting of the instantiation of a property by a thin particular, or the instantiation of a relation by two or more thin particulars. Instantiation is an asymmetrical external relation that, in the monadic case, connects a thin particular to a property thereby forming a state of affairs.  The truth that Tom is red is thus made true by the state of affairs, Tom's being red, where the subject constituent is a thin particular, thin-Tom if you will, and not thick-Tom, Tom together with his intrinsic properties. And the same goes for the truth that Tom is ripe, and the truth that Tom is round.  For each truth there is a truthmaking state of affairs, a thin state of affairs we can call it since it includes only one of thick-Tom's properties.  

Now take the conjunction of all of Tom's intrinsic properties. The result is a conjunctive property.  Call it the nature N of Tom. The instantiation of this nature by a thin particular is a state of affairs.  This is because N is a bona fide property, and the instantiation of any property by a thin particular is a state of affairs. This state of affairs is a thick state of affairs, and is identical to the thick particular, Tom. So the following comment (in the earlier thread) by Meinertsen comes as a bit of a surprise:

As to (4), well, in my view, thick particulars aren’t real STOAs, merely apparent ones. It’s true that I assay a thick particular as the instantiation of N, the conjunctive property that is the conjunction of its intrinsic properties. But I also argue that conjunctive properties are truthmaking reducible (TM-reducible) - i.e. only existing at the level of truths, not at the level of truthmakers - and that the instantiation (‘instantiation’) of a TM-reducible property isn’t a real STOA.

This is puzzling because the dialectic started with a really existent thick particular, Tom together with his properties, but seems to end with the elimination of the starting point and the demotion of the thick particular to a mere appearance.

The reasoning seems to proceed as follows. The contingent truth that a is F needs a truthmaker, and so does the contingent truth that a is G. But the conjunction of the two truths -- which is 'automatically' true given the truth of the conjuncts -- does not need its own truthmaker.  So these three truths need only two truthmakers. There is no need for a third truthmaker because the truth of the conjunctive proposition supervenes on the truth of its conjuncts. It's an aletheiological 'free lunch.'

Now consider the conjunction C of all the truths about a, or about Tom in our example. What makes this conjunction true are the 'thin' states of affairs corresponding to and grounding each of the truths  in the conjunction. The 'thin' states of affairs do all the truthmaking work: there is no need for a separate 'thick' state of affairs to serve as truthmaker for the conjunction itself.  But if there is no need for 'thick' states of affairs, then there is no need to posit thick particulars in reality. (A thick particular just is a 'thick' state of affairs.)  So thick particulars are best regarded as merely apparent.

That is the argument as far as I can tell. Did I get it right, Bo?

Critique

But if there is no thick particular in reality, then what makes it the case that each of the thin particulars in each of the thin states of affairs is the same thin particular? Meinertsen speaks above of "the conjunctive property that is the conjunction of its intrinsic properties." (emphasis added) What is the antecedent of the pronoun 'its'?  That would have to be Tom in our example, thick-Tom, Tom together with all its properties. So the very identity of C -- its being the conjunction it is and not some other conjunction -- presupposes the reality of thick-Tom, Tom together with his intrinsic properties.  For C to exist and to be true, thick-Tom must exist. 

I conclude that one cannot take thick particulars to be merely apparent.  Their reality is presupposed if the STOA style of ontology is to get off the ground in the first place.

Now the tomato example is what Meinertsen rightly calls a "toy example." (5).  We philosophers employ such examples for convenience ignoring the fact, if it is fact, that tomatoes and other meso-particulars are not ontologically fundamental. So it may make sense to say that thick-Tom and his colleagues do not really exist. But surely the micro-entities of physics do exist and are thick particulars and thus 'thick' states of affairs. There have to be some thick particulars somewhere.

On p. 70, Meinertsen tells that at the level of truthmakers, there are no such things as molecules. Presumably he will say the same about their constituent atoms.  But what about sub-atomic particles?  Could he be telling us that, no matter how far down we go, we will never encounter anything fundamentally real?

Saturday Night at the Oldies: The Seder Scene in "Crimes and Misdemeanors"

"Crimes and Misdemeanors" is Woody Allen's masterpiece. Here is the Seder scene.

Addendum 8/26

The scene ends with Saul saying "If necessary, I will always choose God over the truth."  It works cinematically, but it is a philosophically lame response to the atheist Aunt May. It is lame because Saul portrays the theist as one who self-deceivingly embraces consolatory fictions despite his knowledge that they are fictions. Saul might have plausibly replied along one or both of the following lines.

1) It cannot be true that there is no God, since without God there is no truth.  The existence of truth presupposes the existence of God. Truth is the state of a mind in contact with reality. No minds, no truth. But there are infinitely many truths, including infinitely many necessary truths. The infinity of truths and the necessity of some them require for their ultimate support and repository an  infinite and necessary mind. "And this all men call God." So if there is no God, then there is no truth, in which case one cannot prefer truth over God in the manner of Aunt May.

Nietzsche understood this very well. He saw that the death of God is the death of truth. He concluded that there is no truth, but only  the competing perspectives of mutually antagonistic power-centers.

Now the above is a mere bloggity-blog sketch. Here is a more rigorous treatment.

2) Saul might also have challenged Aunt May as follows:

You say that it is true that there is no God, that there is no moral world-order, that might makes right, and so on. You obviously think that it is important that we face up to these truths and stop fooling ourselves.  You obviously think that there is something morally disreputable about cultivating illusions and stuffing the heads of the young with them, that morally one ought not do these things.  But what grounds this moral ought that you plainly think binds all of us and not just you?  Does it just hang in the air, so to speak? And if it does, whence its objective bindingness or 'deontic tug'?  Can you ultimately make sense of objective moral oughts and ought-nots on the naturalistic scheme you seem to be presupposing?  Won't you have to make at least a Platonic ascent in the direction of the Good?  If so, how will you stop the further ascent to the Good as self-existent and thus as  God?

Or look at this way, May. You think it is a value that we face reality, a reality that for you is Godless, even if  facing what you call reality does not contribute to our flourishing but in fact contributes to the opposite.  But how could something be a value for us if it impedes our flourishing? Is it not ingredient in the concept of value that a value to be what it is must be a value for the valuer? So even if it is true that there is no God, no higher destiny for humans, that life is in the end absurd, how could it be a value for us to admit these truths if truths they be?  So what are you getting so worked up over, sister? I have just pulled the rug out from under your moral enthusiasm!

Truth, Fallibilism, Objectivism, and Dogmatism

It is important not to confuse the question of the fallibility of our cognitive faculties, including reason, with the question whether there is truth.  Truth is one thing, fallibility another. A fallibilist need not be a truth-denier.  One can be both a fallibilist and an upholder of truth.  What's more, one ought to be both a fallibilist about some, but not all, classes of propositions, and an upholder of the existence of  truth. Indeed, if one is a fallibilist, one who admits that we  sometimes go wrong in matters of knowledge and belief, then then one must also admit that we sometimes go right, which is to say that fallibilism presupposes the existence of truth. If we can be wrong about how Epstein met his end, then we can be right.

I spoke above of truth sans phrase, without qualification. There is no need to speak of objective or of absolute truth since truth by its very nature is objective and absolute.  Talk of relative truth is incoherent.  Of course, what I accept as true or believe to be true may well be different from what you accept as true or take to be true.  But that does not show that truth is relative; it shows that we differ in our beliefs. Suppose you believe that Hillary Clinton ran a child molestation ring out of a Washington, D. C pizza joint. I don't believe that.  You accept a proposition that I reject. But the proposition itself -- that Hillary ran a molestation ring, etc. -- is either true or false independently of anyone's belief state.

So don't confuse being true with being-believed-by-someone-or-other.

But what about an omnisicent being? Doesn't such a being believe all and only true propositions?  I should think so if the omniscient being has beliefs and has them  in the way we do. But does he believe the truths because they are true, or are they true because he believes them?  This is a nice little puzzle reminiscent of Plato's Euthryphro Paradox, to be found in the eponymous dialog.  (Indeed it has the same structure as that paradox.)  Note that the puzzle cannot get off the ground without the distinction between truth and belief -- which is my point, or one of them.

(Like I said, it's all footnotes to Plato, but it's not all from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains.)

Just as a fallibilist is not a truth-denier, a truth-affirmer is not an infallibilist or 'dogmatist' in one sense of this word.  To maintain that there is objective truth is not to maintain that one is in possession of it in particular cases.  The upholder of the existence of truth need not be a dogmatist. One of the sources of the view that truth is subjective or relative is aversion to dogmatic people and dogmatic claims.

But if you reject the existence of objective truth on the basis of an aversion to dogmatic people and claims, then you are not thinking clearly.

It is important not to confuse the question of the fallibility of our cognitive faculties, including reason, with the question whether there is truth.  Truth is one thing, fallibility another. A fallibilist need not be a truth-denier.  One can be both a fallibilist and an upholder of truth.  What's more, one ought to be both a fallibilist about some, but not all, classes of propositions, and an upholder of the existence of  truth. Indeed, if one is a fallibilist, one who admits that we  sometimes go wrong in matters of knowledge and belief, then then one must also admit that we sometimes go right, which is to say that fallibilism presupposes the existence of truth. If we can be wrong about how Epstein met his end, then we can be right.

I spoke above of truth sans phrase, without qualification. There is no need to speak of objective or of absolute truth since truth by its very nature is objective and absolute.  Talk of relative truth is incoherent.  Of course, what I accept as true or believe to be true may well be different from what you accept as true or take to be true.  But that does not show that truth is relative; it shows that we differ in our beliefs. Suppose you believe that Hillary Clinton ran a child molestation ring out of a Washington, D. C pizza joint. I don't believe that.  You accept a proposition that I reject. But the proposition itself -- that Hillary ran a molestation ring, etc. -- is either true or false independently of anyone's belief state.

So don't confuse being true with being-believed-by-someone-or-other.

But what about an omnisicent being? Doesn't such a being believe all and only true propositions?  I should think so if the omniscient being has beliefs and has them  in the way we do. But does he believe the truths because they are true, or are they true because he believes them?  This is a nice little puzzle reminiscent of Plato's Euthryphro Paradox, to be found in the eponymous dialog.  (Indeed it has the same structure as that paradox.)  Note that the puzzle cannot get off the ground without the distinction between truth and belief -- which is my point, or one of them.

(Like I said, it's all footnotes to Plato, but it's not all from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains.)

Just as a fallibilist is not a truth-denier, a truth-affirmer is not an infallibilist or 'dogmatist' in one sense of this word.  To maintain that there is objective truth is not to maintain that one is in possession of it in particular cases.  The upholder of the existence of truth need not be a dogmatist. One of the sources of the view that truth is subjective or relative is aversion to dogmatic people and dogmatic claims.

But if you reject the existence of objective truth on the basis of an aversion to dogmatic people and claims, then you are not thinking clearly.

How are God and Truth Related?

By my count, there are five different ways to think about the relation of God and truth:

1) There is truth, but there is no God.

2) There is truth, and there is God, but God is not the ontological ground of truth.

3) There is truth, there is God, and truth ultimately depends on the existence of God. There is truth only because there is God.

4) There is no truth, because there is no God.

5) There is God, but no truth.

Ad (1). This I would guess is the view of  many if not most today. There are truths, and among these truths is the truth that God does not exist.  This, I take it, is the standard atheist view.

Ad (2). This, I take it, would be the standard theist view among analytic philosophers.  Consider a philosopher who holds that God is a necessary being and also holds that it is necessarily the case that there are some truths, but would deny the truth of the subjunctive conditional, If, per impossibile, God were not to exist, then truths would not exist either. 

Ad (3). This is the view that I am inclined to accept.  Thus I would affirm the subjunctive conditional lately mentioned. The difference between (2) and (3) is subtle. On both sides it is held that both God and truths are necessary, but the Augustinian -- to give him a name -- holds that God is the ultimate  'source' of all truth and thus of all intelligibility, or, if you prefer, the ultimate 'ground' of all truth and intelligibility.

Ad (4). This is Nietzsche's view.  Tod Gottes = Tod der Wahrheit.

Ad (5). I have the impression that certain post-Nietzschean POMO-heads hold this. It is a view not worth discussing.

I should think only the first three views have any merit.  

Each of the three has difficulties and none of the three can be strictly proven.

I will mention quickly a problem for the admittedly plausible first view.  

Among the truths there are necessary truths such as the laws of logic. Now a truth is a true truth-bearer, a true proposition, say. Nothing can have a property unless it exists. (Call this principle Anti-Meinong). So no proposition can have the property of being true unless the proposition exists. A necessary truth is true in every metaphysically possible world. It follows that a necessarily true proposition exists in every possible world including worlds in which there are no finite minds.  But a proposition is a thought-accusative that cannot exist except in, or for, a mind.  If there is no God, or rather, if there is no necessarily existent mind, every mind is contingent. A contradiction ensues: there is a world W such that, in W, there exists a thought-accusative that is not the thought-accusative of any mind.

Here are some ways an atheist might 'solve' the problem:

a) Deny that there are necessary truths.

b) Deny that truth is any sense a property of propositions.

c) Deny Anti-Meinong.

d) Deny that propositions are thought-accusatives; accept some sort of Platonism about propositions.

But each of these denials involves problems of its own which I would have no trouble unpacking.

Feser on Vallicella on Feser on the Truth-Maker Objection to Presentism

I argued in my first critical installment that Edward Feser in his stimulating new book, Aristotle's Revenge, does not appreciate the force of the truth-maker objection to presentism in the philosophy of time. Ed's response to me is here. I thank Ed for his response. Herewith, my counter-response.

So, as I say, I don’t think the “truthmaker objection” is very impressive or interesting.  Bill disagrees.  He asks us to consider the following propositions:

(1) There are contingent past-tensed truths.

(2) Past-tensed truths are true at present.

(3) Truth-Maker Principle: contingent truths need truth-makers.

(4) Presentism: Only (temporally) present items exist.

The problem, Bill says, is that “the limbs of this aporetic tetrad, although individually plausible, appear to be collectively inconsistent.”

But I would deny that there is any inconsistency.  There is a presently existing fact that serves as the truthmaker for past-tensed truths such as the truth that Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March – namely, the fact that Caesar really was assassinated on the Ides of March.  To be sure, Caesar no longer exists and his assassination is no longer taking place.  But the fact that he was assassinated on the Ides of March still exists.  

I take it that Ed accepts all four of the above propositions as stated. So far, agreement. We also agree that 'Julius Caesar was assassinated' is past-tensed, true, presently true, contingently true, needs a truth-maker, and has a truth-maker. But whereas I take the fearsome foursome to be collectively logically inconsistent, in that any three of the propositions, taken together, entails the negation of the remaining proposition,  Ed finds no logical inconsistency whatsoever. Hence he finds the truth-maker objection to presentism to be neither impressive nor interesting.

The nub of the disagreement is precisely this: Ed thinks that the fact that Caesar was assassinated suffices as truth-maker for 'Caesar was assassinated' even if presentism is true. That is precisely what I deny. If by 'fact that,' Ed means 'true proposition that,' then I say that Ed is confusing a truth-bearer with a truth-maker.  But I hesitate to tax him with such an elementary blunder. So I will take him to be saying that the truth-maker of 'Caesar was assassinated' is the fact of Caesar's having been assassinated.  This is a concrete state of affairs, the subject constituent of which is Caesar himself. This state of affairs cannot exist unless Caesar himself exists.  Now Feser grants the obvious point that Caesar no longer exists.  That is is a datum that no reasonable person can deny. It follows that the truth-making state of affairs no longer exists either. 

On presentism, however, what no longer exists does not exist at all.  Presentism is not the tautological thesis that only the present exists at present.  Everybody agrees about that. So-called 'eternalists' in the philosophy of time will cheerfully admit that only present items exist at present. But they will go on to say that wholly past and wholly future items exist as well, and just as robustly as present items. It is just that they exist elsewhen, analogously as Los Angeles, although elsewhere relative to Phoenix, exists just as robustly (or as anemically) as Phoenix.

It is important to be clear about this. Presentism is a hard-core, substantive,  metaphysical thesis, in the same metaphysical boat with the various anti-presentisms, e.g, the misnamed 'eternalism.'   Presentism is not logically true or trivially true; it is not common sense, nor is it 'fallout' from ordinary language.  Speaking with the vulgar I say things like, 'The Berlin Wall no longer exists.' I am using ordinary English to record a well-known historical fact. Saying this, however, I do not thereby commit myself to the controversial metaphysical claim that wholly past items are nothing at all and that present items alone exist, are real, or have being. The Berlin sentence and its innumerable colleagues are neutral with respect to the issues that divide presentists and eternalists.

Presentism is the controversial metaphysical claim that only the (temporally) present exists, period. Or at least that is the gist of it, pending various definitional refinements. On presentism, then, Caesar does not exist at all. If so, there is nothing to ground the truth that Caesar was assassinated. We don't even need to bring in truth-making facts or states of affairs.  It suffices to observe that, on presentism, wholly past individuals such as Caesar do not exist.  One should now be able to see that the grounding problem represented by (1)-(4) is up and running.  

It is a datum that 'Caesar was assassinated' (or the proposition expressed by an assertive utterance of the sentence) is a contingent, past-tensed truth. It is also a datum that this truth is true now.  Now my datum might be your theory. But since Feser will grant both of these datanic points, I need say nothing more here in their defense. Given the datanic points, and given that the problem is soluble, one must either accept the truth-maker principle and reject presentism, or accept presentism and reject the truth-maker principle. And this is what most philosophers of time do. Trenton Merricks, for example, does the latter. (Truth and Ontology, Oxford, 2007)  Back to Feser:

To get an inconsistency, Bill would have to add to the list some further claim like:

(5) Only facts about what does exist (as opposed to facts about what used to exist) can serve as truthmakers.

But that would simply beg the question against the presentist.  And of course the presentist would say: “There will be no inconsistency if you get rid of (5).  ‘Problem’ solved!”

Not at all. There is no need to add a proposition to the tetrad to generate inconsistency. It is of course understood by almost all truth-maker theorists that only existing truth-makers can do the truth-making job.  There are few if any Meinongian truth-maker theorists.  Few if any will maintain, for example, that 'There are golden mountains' is made true by Meinong's nonexistent golden mountain. That being well-understood, it must also be understood that truth-maker theorists do not hold that only presently existing items can serve as truth-makers.  They don't build presentism into truth-maker theory. What they hold is that some, if not all, truths need (existing) truth makers.  Truth-maker theory is neutral on the question that divides presentists from eternalists. Now the past-tensed  'Caesar existed' is true.  It cannot just be true: there must be something 'in the world,' something external to the sentential representation, that grounds its truth. But what might that be on presentism?  If only present items exist, then Caesar does not exist. And if Caesar does not exist, then there is nothing that could serve as the truth-maker of 'Caesar existed.'

One ought to conclude that the quartet of propositions supra is collectively inconsistent. If the tetrad is not a full-on aporia, an insolubilium, then either one must reject presentism or one must reject the truth-maker principle.

The Temporal Neutrality of Truth-Maker Theory and Whether I Beg the Question

I do not assume that only presently existing items can serve as truth-makers.  What I assume is that only existing items can serve as truth-makers.  To appreciate this, consider timeless entities.  God, classically conceived, is an example: he is not omnitemporal, but eternal. He doesn't exist in time at every time, but 'outside of' time.  Now consider the proposition that God, so conceived, exists.  What makes it true, if true? Well, God. It follows that a truth-maker needn't be temporally present, or in time at all, to do its job.  Or consider so-called 'abstract' objects such as the number 7. It is true that 7 exists.  What makes this truth true? The number 7! So again a truth-maker needn't be temporally present, or in time at all, to serve as a truth-maker. But it must exist. 

Truth-maker theory, as such, takes no stand on either of the following two questions: Does everything that exists exist in time? Does everything that exists in time exist at the present time?

I therefore plead innocent to Ed's charge that I beg the question. Consider 'Caesar existed.' I don't assume that this past-tensed truth needs a presently existing truth-maker to be true.  I assume merely that it needs an existing truth-maker to be true. It is not that I beg the question; it is rather that Feser fails to appreciate the consequences of his own theory. He fails to appreciate that, on presentism, what no longer exists, does not exist at all.  It is because Caesar does not exist at all that I say that 'Caesar existed' lacks a truth-maker on presentism. It is not because he doesn't exist at present. Of course he doesn't exist at present!

Feser's Dilemma

It seems to me that Ed is uncomfortably perched on the horns of a dilemma. Either the truth-maker of a past-tensed truth is fact that or it is a fact of.  But it cannot be a fact that, for such an item is just a true proposition, and no proposition can be its own truth-maker. For example, the fact that (the true proposition that) Caesar was assassinated cannot be what makes it true that Caesar was assassinated. On the other horn, the truth-maker of 'Caesar was assassinated' can be a fact of, i.e., a concrete state of affairs, but on presentism this fact does not exist. For on presentism, Caesar, who does not now exist, does not exist at all. Hence the fact of does not exist  either, for its existence depends on the existence of its constituents, one of which is the roman emperor in question.

I suggests that Ed does not see the dilemma because he equivocates on 'fact.'  That should be clear from his talk, above, of "facts about."  He wants to say that "facts about" are truth-makers. but no truth-making fact is about it constituents. A "fact about" can only be a proposition.  It is a fact about Caesar and Brutus that the latter stabbed the former (Et tu, Brute?), But that "fact about" is just a true proposition that needs a truth-maker. The gen-u-ine truth-maker, however, is not about anything.  For example, the truth-maker of 'I am seated' is a concrete fact-of that has as one of its constituents the 200 lb sweating animal who wears my clothes. This truth-making fact is not about me; it contains me.

Michael Dummett sees the problem with presentism very clearly:

. . . the thesis that only the present is real denies any truth-value to statements about the past or the future; for, if it were correct, there would be nothing in virtue of which a statement of either type could be true or false, whereas a proposition can be true only if there is something in virtue of which it is true. We must attribute some form of reality either to the past, or to the future, or both.  (Truth and the Past, Columbia UP, 2004, p. 74.)

Feser again:

The point I was trying to make, in any event, is that past objects and events were real (unlike fictional objects and events, which never were).  That fact is what serves as the truthmaker for statements about past objects and events.  Statements about present objects and events have as their truthmakers a different sort of fact, viz. facts about objects and events that are real.  

Ed and I will agree that Caesar's assassination is an actual past event: it is not something that merely could have happened way back when but didn't, nor is it a fictional event of the sort that one finds in historical novels. Ed is committed to saying that this event was real.  But if so, then it is true now that Caesar was assassinated. What makes it true?  Feser's answer is that the fact that Caesar was assassinated is what makes it true that Caesar was assassinated.  But this is not a satisfactory answer since it merely repeats the datum. It is given that Caesar was assassinated. The problem is to explain what makes this true given the truth of presentism.

It is obvious that the true proposition that Caesar was assassinated cannot be what makes it true that Caesar was assassinated. That would be to confuse a truth-maker with a truth-bearer. The truth-maker cannot be an item in the 'representational order'; it must be something in the 'real order' of concrete spatiotemporal particulars.  The truth-maker must be either Caesar himself, battle scars and all, or a concrete state of affairs that has him as a constituent. But if presentism is true, then there is no such man. And if Caesar does not exist, then no concrete state of affairs involving him exists.  But now I am starting to repeat myself.

Bill also writes:

I conclude that Feser hasn't appreciated the depth of the grounding problem. 'Caesar was assassinated' needs an existing truth-maker. But on presentism, neither Caesar nor his being assassinated exists. It is not just that these two items don't exist now; on presentism, they don't exist at all. What then makes the past-tensed sentence true?  This is the question that Feser hasn't satisfactorily answered.

End quote.  In fact I have answered it.  Yes, “Caesar was assassinated” needs an existing truthmaker.  And that truthmaker is not Caesar or his assassination (neither of which exist anymore) but the fact that he was assassinated (which does still exist – after all, it is as much a fact now as it was yesterday, and will remain a fact tomorrow).  To this Bill objects that “obviously this won't do [because] the past-tensed truth cannot serve as [its] own truth-maker.”  But again, this conflates facts with propositions, and these should not be conflated. 

Ed's response is a very strange one. I am suggesting that Ed might be conflating truth-makers with truth-bearers, truth-making facts with propositions.  He says he is not. Fine. But since I explicitly made the distinction, he cannot reasonably accuse me of conflating truth-making facts with propositions.  In any case, it definitely seems to me that Ed is succumbing to the conflation in question, as I have explained above.

Are My Objections Sound Only if I Have a Correct Alternative Theory?

This is a fascinating metaphilosophical question. Ed again:

One further point.  Even if the defender of the “truthmaker objection” could get around the criticisms I have been raising, the objection nevertheless will succeed only if some alternative to presentism is correct.  And as I argue in Aristotle’s Revenge, none of the alternatives is correct.  So it will not suffice for the critic merely to try to raise problems for the presentist’s understanding of truth-making.  He will also have to defend some non-presentist understanding of truth-making, which will require responding to the objections I’ve raised against the rivals to presentism.

In particular, the critic presupposes that we have a clear idea of what it would be for past objects and events and future objects and events to be no less real than the present is, and thus a clear idea of what it would be for such things to be truthmakers.  But I claim that that is an illusion.  The eternalist view is in fact not well-defined.  It is a tissue of confusions that presupposes errors such as a tendency to characterize time in terms that intelligibly apply only to space, and to mistake mathematical abstractions for concrete realities.  Indeed, on the Aristotelian view of time that I defend in the book, the approaches to the subject commonly taken by various contemporary writers are in several respects wrongheaded.  Again, what I say about the truthmaker objection must be read in light of the larger discussion of time in Aristotle’s Revenge.

I deny what Feser asserts in the second sentence of the quotation immediately above. The assertion seems to trade on a confusion of possible theories and extant theories. Even if there is no tenable extant competitor to Feser's version of presentism -- which is of course only one of several different versions -- it does not follow that there is no possible tenable competitor theory.  That is one concern. Another is more radical. 

It may be that all of the extant theories in the philosophy of time are untenable and open to powerful objections. In particular, I am not an 'eternalist' and I am very sensitive to the problems it faces. To mention one, it seems that eternalism needs an understanding of tenseless existence and tenseless property-possession that I suspect is unintelligible. Could all the extant theories be false? Why not? They might all, on deep analysis, turn out be logical contraries of each other.

An even more radical thought: It may be that all possible theories (all theories that it is possible for us to formulate)  in the philosophy of time are untenable and rationally insupportable in  the end  in such a way as definitively to give the palm to one of theories over all the others.

But even apart from the two radical proposals just bruited, it is not entirely clear why, if the objections I have raised are sound, I would have to consider Feser's (putative) refutations of the other theories.  If my objections are in fact sound, then I can stop right there.  In any case, I did in installment three of my ongoing critique consider Feser's notion that the truth-makers of past-tensed truths all exist at present.  By the way, it is not clear to me how this notion (causal trace theory) is supposed to cohere with what Feser says elsewhere in his section on time. How does it cohere with what we discussed above?  It is one thing to say that the truth-maker of 'Caesar was assassinated' is the fact that C. was assassinated, and quite another to say that the truth-maker exists in the present in the form of present effects of C.'s past existence.  

Time to punch the clock!

Is the Past Wholly Determinate? Edward Feser's Presentism, Part III

This is the third in a series. Part I here; Part II here.

On the principle of bivalence, every proposition is either true, or if not true, then false. Given that bivalence holds for what presently exists, it is difficult to see how it could fail to hold for what did exist. Why should the present, which is wholly determinate, become less than wholly determinate when it becomes past? However things stand with the future, one reasonably views the past as a realm of reality and thus as wholly determinate. Our knowledge of the past is spotty, but not the past itself. It WAS, and I would add: it ACTUALLY was.  When a thing passes away it does not pass from actuality to mere possibility; it remains actual, though no longer temporally present. Or so it would seem if we are realists about the past. The historian studies past actualities, not past possibilities. Compare Kierkegaard's engagement to Regine Olsen to his marriage to her.  There is a sense in which both events belong to the past. The crucial difference is that the first event actually occurred while the second was a mere possibility.  This is a difference that an adequate philosophy of time must be able to accommodate.  

One point to keep in mind is that if  the past is wholly determinate, as determinate as the present, this is the case whether or not determinism is true. The determinate is not to be confused with the determined. Consider the proposition that my grandfather Alfonso drank a glass of 'dago red' on New Year's Day, 1940. Bivalence ensures that the proposition is either true or false but not both. If the proposition is true and the event occurred, it doesn't matter whether the event was caused by prior events under the aegis of the laws of nature, or not. To say that the past is determinate is not to say that past events are determined; it is to say that, e.g., the past individual Alfonso V. cannot be such that he neither drank nor did not drink red wine on the date in question. It had to be one or the other if bivalence holds for the past.

Of course, no one now remembers whether or not this event occurred, and there is no written record or other evidence of the event's having occurred. If the event occurred, nothing in the present points back to it as to its cause.  Some past events, states, individuals, and property-instantiations leave causal traces in the present, but not all do.  My grandfather's gravestone and the dessicated bones lying beneath it are causal traces in the present of  a long-dead and wholly past individual. But there is nothing in the present that bears upon the truth of the proposition that Alfonso drank a glass of  red wine on New Year's Day, 1940,  assuming it is true. If true, it is true now but lacks a present truth-maker. 

Now if one were to hold both that there are truth-makers for all past-tensed truths, and that presentism is true, then one would have to hold that the past is not wholly determinate. For if presentism is true, all existing truth-makers must exist at present. (I assume, and I think Feser does as well, that there are no nonexistent or 'Meinongian' truth-makers.) But then there wouldn't be enough truth-makers for all the past-tensed truths. The following quartet of propositions is collectively inconsistent:

a) The past is wholly determinate: bivalence holds for every proposition about the past.
b) Presentism is true: only present items exist.
c) Contingent truths have (existing) truth-makers.
d) Not every contingent truth about the past has a presently existing truth-maker.

The members of the quartet are individually plausible but collectively inconsistent.  The first three propositions, taken together, entail that every contingent truth about the past has a presently existing truth-maker.  But this contradicts the fourth member, (d).  (d) is well-nigh self-evident as I have already established with the example of Alfonso and his wine. There is nothing that exists in the present that could make true the proposition in question, if it is true.  With how many men did Caesar cross the Rubicon? Were any of them barefoot? And when he met his end on the Ides of March, what was the exact size and shape and length and composition of the blade that entered his body?

So how do we solve this bad boy?  I suspect that it is insoluble, but to argue this out goes well beyond the scope of a mere blog post.  Some will solve it by abandoning  presentism.  This is precisely what Ed Feser will not do. But before discussing his suggestion, let me say just a little in support of (a).

Bivalence, as a principle of logic, strikes me as pretty solid.  But now consider: could the applicability of a principle of logic depend on when it is applied?  Could the passage of time restrict its application? Take identity: for any x, x = x.  Everything is self-identical. If this is true for temporally present values of 'x,' I should think it would be true also for past values of 'x.'  I am self-identical, but so is Alfonso, who is wholly past. When he ceased to exist, he didn't cease to be self-identical. When I refer to him now, I refer to the same man I referred to when I referred to him when he was alive. And when I cease to exist,  I won't cease to be self-identical.  I won't become self-diverse, or neither self-identical nor self-diverse.  The mere passage of time cannot bring it about that a principle of logic that applies to a thing in the present ceases to apply to that thing when it become past.

Likewise, when I cease to exist, I won't go from being a completely determinate individual to an incomplete object.  

Define a completely determinate, or complete, individual x as one  such that, for any pair of predicates, one the complement of the other, one member of the pair must be true of x, but not both, and not neither.  For example, 'non-smoker' is the complement of the predicate 'smoker.' If neither of these predicates is true of Peter, then Peter is an incomplete object.  Since Peter exists at present, he is one or the other. As it happens, he is a smoker.  When he dies, it will become true that he was a smoker, not that he was neither a smoker nor a non-smoker.

A Question for Feser

Feser is clearly a presentist: ". . . what actually exists in the strict sense is what exists now." (Aristotle's Revenge, 239) What then of the past and the future? It is trivially true, and mere fallout from ordinary language, that the (wholly) past is no longer. But it does not follow that the past is nothing or does not exist at all or has no reality. Feser appreciates the reality of the past. The question is whether he can adequately account for it.

The past and future exist now only in the loose sense that they are, as it were, causally contained in what exists now . . . . Future entities, states, and events are contained within the present as potentials which might be actualized. Past entities, states, and events are contained within the present insofar as their effects on the present remain. The present points forward to a range of things which might yet be caused to exist. The present also points backward toward formerly existing things qua causes proportionate to the effects that now exist. But again, what actually exists in the strict sense is what exists now. (Aristotle's Revenge, 239, italics in original.)

We are being told that wholly past items exist in that their effects in the present exist.  Here is an example, mine, not Feser's. Tom stood outside of Sally's window a few days ago.  That event on presentism does not exist. It is not just that it does not exist now -- which is trivially true -- it does not exist period. For on presentism, only what exists now exists period or simpliciter.  And yet  Tom's standing outside of Sally's window is not nothing: it actually occurred. The evidence that it occurred are Tom's distinctive footprints. On the causal trace theory, a version of which Feser is promoting, the reality of the past event is adequately accounted for by the footprints Tom left.  The theory is ontological, not epistemological. The footprints are not merely evidence of what occurred in the recent past; the footprints are the reality of what occurred in the recent past.

Now one objection to this scheme is that there are not enough present items to represent all past items.  There are not enough truth-makers in the present for all past-tensed truths. Big Al drank a glass of dago red on New Year's Day, 1940.  That event left no trace in the present. And yet it occurred. 

So if the past is wholly determinate and if past-tensed truths need truth-makers, then presentism is in trouble.  There are other objections to the causal trace theory.  I may consider them later.

Truth-Bearers and Truth-Makers: Disjoint Classes?

Wesley C. writes,

 

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. 

I didn't go into this because it would have expanded and complicated an already long and difficult entry. But the point is well-taken: it seems that some truth-bearers are truth-makers.  Let us assume that truth-bearers are abstract items, propositions in roughly Frege's sense.

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.

 

A Reader Proposes a Puzzle

This from Cyrus:

Suppose there is a possible world in which only God exists. Further suppose that that world is actual instead of this one. Further suppose divine simplicity. What is the truthmaker for the proposition “God exists, and nothing more” in that world?

If God alone exists, and God is simple, then there are no propositions in that world, and hence no true propositions, and therefore no need for truth-makers.  Too quick?

A Critique of Edward Feser's Defense of Presentism, Part I

Ed Feser very kindly sent me a copy of his latest book, Aristotle's Revenge: The Metaphysical Foundations of Physical and Biological Science (Editiones Scholasticae, 2019).  As I noted in my journal: 

Synchronicity. Feser's latest book, with its section on time and its defense of presentism, has arrived at just the right time -- as I am immersed in my chapter on time for my metaphilosophy book. A mere coincidence, no doubt!?

Herewith, some critical commentary by way of a 'thank you' to Ed for his ongoing generosity.

According to Feser, "The classical form taken by the A-theory [of time] is presentism, according to which only the present is real, with past events no longer existing and future events not yet existing (237-238) Let's focus on the past and not worry about the future. With respect to the past, the presentist idea is not adequately captured by saying that wholly past items no longer exist, since all who understand English will agree to that.  The presentist idea is that wholly past items do not exist at all. John F. Kennedy's assassination, for example, is a wholly past event.  (A wholly past event is one that doesn't overlap the present.)  Standard presentism implies that this event does not exist at all. It is not just that it does not exist at present -- which is trivially true -- but that it does not exist, period. As Feser himself says, on presentism, "there are no past events," (300) and "past things and events do not exist."(301)  These latter are accurate formulations.  But note carefully that the second formulation is accurate only if 'exists' is not read as present-tensed, in which case the formulation is tautological, but as 'exists simpliciter,' in which case it is not.  What exactly it means to 'exist at all' or to 'exist 'simpliciter' is part of the problem of formulating a coherent version of presentism that can withstand close scrutiny. For present purposes we will assume that we understand well enough what these phrases mean.

But then a certain 'grounding problem' or 'truth-maker problem' arises that very much impresses me, but leaves Feser unfazed: "it seems to me unimpressive." (300)  Here is my formulation of the grounding problem, so-called because it is the problem of providing ontological grounds for grammatically past-tensed truths.  Truth-makers, if there are any, are ontological grounds of true truth-bearers, whether declarative sentences, statements, propositions, whatever you deem to be the primary truth-bearers or vehicles of the truth-values.

1) There are contingent past-tensed truths.

2) Past-tensed truths are true at present.

3) Truth-Maker Principle: contingent truths need truth-makers.

4) Presentism: Only (temporally) present items exist.

The limbs of this aporetic tetrad, although individually plausible, appear to be collectively inconsistent. 'Kennedy was assassinated' is contingent, past-tensed, true, and known to be true. So (1) is true.  The sentence is also true at present.   It IS the case that JFK WAS assassinated.  So (2) is true.   

(3) is an exceedingly plausible principle, especially if restricted to contingently true affirmative singular propositions. Consider ' I am seated' assertively uttered by BV now as he sits in front of his computer. The sentence is (or expresses) a contingent truth.  Now would it be at all plausible to say that this sentence is just true?  Define a brute truth as a contingent truth that is just true, i.e., true, but not in virtue of anything external to the truth. The question is then: Is it plausible that 'I am seated' or the proposition it expresses be a brute truth?

I say that that is implausible in the extreme. There has to be something external  to the truth-bearer that plays a role in its being true and this something cannot be anyone's say-so. At a bare minimum, the subject term 'I' must refer to something extra-linguistic, and we know what that has to be: the 200 lb animal that wears my clothes.  So at a bare minimum, the sentence, to be true, must be about something, something that exists, and indeed exists extra-mentally and extra-linguistically.

Without bringing in truth-making facts or states of affairs, I have said enough to refute the notion that 'I am seated' could be a brute truth.  So far so good.

Now if 'I am seated' needs a truth-maker (in a very broad sense of the term), then presumably 'Kennedy was assassinated' does as well.  It can no more be  a brute truth than 'I am seated' could be a brute truth. 

Now Feser does not oppose truth-makers tout court.  He appears to be proposing a revision of  the truth-maker principle as formulated in (3). Could the truth-makers for past-tensed truths be different in kind from those for present-tensed truths? This is what Feser appears to be proposing: “. . . the truthmaker for the statement that Julius Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March is simply the fact that Julius Caesar actually was assassinated on the Ides of March, and nothing more need be said.” (Feser 2019, 301)  A little farther down, he writes, 

The whole point of presentism, after all, is that the past and future don't have the same kind of reality that the present does. Hence it shouldn't be surprising if the truthmakers for statements about the past and future are unlike the truthmakers for statements about the present. (301)

Feser seems to be proposing the following. In the case of the present-tensed 'BV exists,' the truth-maker is BV. But when BV is no more and it is true that BV existed, the truth-maker of the past-tensed truth will be the fact that BV existed and will not involve BV himself.

As it seems to me, this proposal betrays a failure to appreciate the difference between a fact construed as a true proposition, and a truth-maker, which cannot be a (Fregean or abstract) proposition. A truth-bearer cannot serve as a truth-maker. On one common use of 'fact,' a fact is just a true (abstract) proposition. We may refer to such facts as facts that. A fact that cannot serve as a truth-maker. Facts that need truth-makers. 'It is a fact that Venus is a planet' says no more and no less than 'It is true that Venus is a planet.' The factuality of a fact that is just its being true; if an item is true, however, it must be a truth-bearer and cannot be a truth-maker.

Now just as we can sensibly ask what makes it true that Venus is a planet, we can sensibly ask what makes it a fact that Venus is a planet. The answer must make reference to Venus itself which is neither a proposition nor a fact that, but a massive chunk of the physical world. What we need as a truth-maker is a fact of. What we need is the concrete state of affairs or fact of Venus' being a planet, a state if affairs which has as a constituent Venus itself. Therefore, nothing is accomplished by saying that what makes it true that Caesar was assassinated is the fact that Caesar was assassinated. That amounts to saying that what makes it true that Caesar was assassinated is the truth that he was assassinated. Obviously, no truth-maker has been specified. A truth-bearer cannot serve as a truth-maker.

Here is a second problem. Read again the second quotation:

The whole point of presentism, after all, is that the past and future don't have the same kind of reality that the present does. Hence it shouldn't be surprising if the truthmakers for statements about the past and future are unlike the truthmakers for statements about the present. (301)

The second problem is that on standard presentism, there is no distinction between kinds of reality. The claim is not that the wholly past and the wholly future have a different kind of reality or existence than the present, but that the past and future are not real or existent at all. On presentism, what no longer exists, does not exist at all. It passes out existence entirely; it does not retain a lesser kind of existence or exist in a looser sense of 'exist.'  As Feser himself says, “But the presentist holds that past things and events do not exist.” (301) 

I conclude that Feser hasn't appreciated the depth of the grounding problem. 'Caesar was assassinated' needs an existing truth-maker. But on presentism, neither Caesar nor his being assassinated exists. It is not just that these two items don't exist now; on presentism, they don't exist at all. What then makes the past-tensed sentence true?  This is the question that Feser hasn't satisfactorily answered. He wants to hold both to presentism and the truth-maker principle, but he hasn't shown how this is possible. Feser tells us that what makes it true that Caesar was assassinated is the fact that Caesar was assassinated, and that nothing more  need be said.  But obviously this won't do. The past-tensed truth cannot serve as it own truth-maker.  

Truth and Falsity from a Deflationary Point of View

The following equivalence is taken by many to support the deflationary thesis that truth has no substantive nature, a nature that could justify a substantive theory along correspondentist, or coherentist, or pragmatic,  or other lines.  For example, someone who maintains that truth is rational acceptability at the ideal (Peircean) limit of inquiry is advancing a substantive theory of truth that purports to nail down the nature of truth.  Here is the equivalence:

1)  <p> is true iff p.

The angle brackets surrounding a declarative sentence make of it a name of the proposition the sentence expresses. For example, <snow is white> --  the proposition that snow is white -- is true iff snow is white. (1) suggests that the predicate ' ___ is true' does not express a substantive property.  We can dispense with the predicate and say what we want without it. It suggests that there is no such legitimate metaphysical question as: What is the nature of truth?  Having gotten rid of truth, can we get rid of falsity as well?

A false proposition is one that is not true.  This suggests that 'false,' as a predicate applicable to propositions and truth-bearers generally, is definable in terms of 'true' and 'not.' Perhaps as follows:

2) <p> is false iff <p> is not true.

From (2) we may infer

2*) <p> is false iff ~(<p> is true)

and then, given (1),

2**) <p> is false iff ~p.

This suggests that if we are given the notions of 'proposition' and 'negation,' we can dispense with the supposed properties of truth and falsity. (1) shows us how to dispense with 'true' and (2**) show us how to dispense with 'false.'

But we hit a snag when we ask what 'not' means.  Now the standard way to explain the logical constants employs truth tables. Here is the truth table for the logician's 'not' which is symbolized by the tilde, '~'.

But now we see that our explanation is circular. We set out to explain the meaning of 'false' in terms of 'not' only to find that 'not' cannot be explained except in terms of 'false.' We have moved in a circle.

The Ostrich has a response to this:

. . . we can define negation without reaching for the notions of truth and falsity. Assume that the notion of ‘all possible situations’ is coherent, and suppose it is coherent for any proposition ‘p’ to map onto a subset of that set. Then ‘not p’ maps onto the complement. The question is whether the very idea of a complement of a subset covertly appeals to the concept of negation. But then that suggests that negation is a primitive indefinable concept, rather than what you are claiming (namely that it is truth and falsity which are primitive).

So let's assume that there is a set S of possible worlds,and that every proposition (except impossible propositions)  maps onto to an improper or a proper subset of S. The necessary propositions map onto the improper subset of S, namely S itself. Each contingent proposition p maps onto a proper subset of S, but a different proper subset for different propositions. If so, ~p maps onto the complement of the proper subset that p maps onto.  And let's assume that negation can be understood in terms of complementation.

The most obvious problem with the Ostrich response is that it relies on the notion of a proposition. But this notion cannot be understood apart from the notions of truth and falsity.  Propositions are standardly introduced as the primary vehicles of the truth-values. They alone are the items appropriately characterizable as either true or false. Therefore, to understand what a proposition is one must have an antecedent grasp of the difference between truth and falsity. 

To understand the operation of negation we have to understand that upon which negation operates, namely, propositions, and to understand propositions, we need to understand truth and falsity.

A second problem is this. Suppose contingent p maps onto proper subset T of S.  Why that mapping rather than some other? Because T is the set of situations or worlds in which p is true . . . . The circularity again rears its ugly head.

The Ostrich, being a nominalist, might try to dispense with propositions in favor of declarative sentences. But when we learned our grammar back in grammar school we learned that a declarative sentence is one that expresses a complete thought, and a complete thought is -- wait for it -- a proposition or what Frege calls ein Gedanke: not a thinking, but the accusative of a thinking. 

Truth and falsity resist elimination.