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3 - Truth-makers

from Part I - Setting the stage

Kevin Mulligan
Affiliation:
University of Geneva
Peter Simons
Affiliation:
University of Leeds
Barry Smith
Affiliation:
State University of New York
E. J. Lowe
Affiliation:
University of Durham
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Summary

When I speak of a fact … I mean the kind of thing that makes a proposition true or false.

(Russell 1972: 36)

Making true

During the realist revival in the early years of this century, philosophers of various persuasions were concerned to investigate the ontology of truth. That is, whether or not they viewed truth as a correspondence, they were interested in the extent to which one needed to assume the existence of entities serving some role in accounting for the truth of sentences. Certain of these entities, such as the Sätze an sich of Bolzano, the Gedanken of Frege, or the propositions of Russell and Moore, were conceived as the bearers of the properties of truth and falsehood. Some thinkers, however, such as Russell, Wittgenstein in the Tractatus, and Husserl in the Logische Untersuchungen, argued that instead of, or in addition to, truth-bearers, one must assume the existence of certain entities in virtue of which sentences and/or propositions are true. Various names were used for these entities, notably ‘fact’, ‘Sachverhalt’, and ‘state of affairs’. In order not to prejudge the suitability of these words we shall initially employ a more neutral terminology, calling any entities which are candidates for this role truth-makers.

The fall from favour of logical realism brought with it a corresponding decline of interest in the ontology of truth. The notions of correspondence and indeed of truth itself first of all came to appear obscure and ‘metaphysical’. Then Tarski’s work, while rehabilitating the idea of truth, seemed to embody a rejection of a full-blooded correspondence.4 In the wake of Tarski, philosophers and logicians have largely turned their attentions away from the complex and bewildering difficulties of the relations between language and the real world, turning instead to the investigation of more tractable set-theoretic surrogates. Work along these lines has indeed expanded to the extent where it can deal with a large variety of modal, temporal, counterfactual, intentional, deictic, and other sentence-types.

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Publisher: Acumen Publishing
Print publication year: 2008

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