{"id":159,"date":"2006-04-08T02:24:00","date_gmt":"2006-04-08T06:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/?p=159"},"modified":"2021-12-14T16:34:53","modified_gmt":"2021-12-14T21:34:53","slug":"truthmakers-vs-truth-conditions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/2006\/04\/truthmakers-vs-truth-conditions\/","title":{"rendered":"Truthmakers vs Truth Conditions"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m involved in a vigorous discussion with Ocham and Tom on a couple earlier posts (Link1<\/a>, Link2<\/a>) concerning presentism and causation and we’ve gotten onto the issue of the relation between truthmakers and truth conditions. Are they the same thing? If not, what’s the difference?<\/p>\n

For what it’s worth, here’s my take.<\/p>\n

Most philosophers, myself included, hold to some version of the correspondence theory of truth, which basically says that some sort of ‘truth-bearer’ is “true” if and only if it represents reality in a manner that corresponds to how reality actually is. As Aristotle famously put it, “To say what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true” (Metaphysics 1011b25).<\/p>\n

As for truth-bearers, pretty much everyone agrees that these can be things like beliefs, statements, and propositions. I take propositions to be the primary truthbearers, however. Beliefs are true in virtue of having as their content a true propositions. Statements (by which I mean declarative sentences) are true in virtue of expressing a true proposition. But true propositions are not true in virtue of the truth of anything else. Rather, they are true in virtue of corresponding with reality.<\/p>\n

But what is it in reality in virtue of corresponding with it that “makes” a true proposition true? This is where ‘truthmakers’ come in. Truthmaking is a relation between some parcel of reality and a proposition. In general, a truthmaker T for a proposition P is any parcel of reality the existence of which is sufficient to necessitate and thereby ground the truth of P.<\/p>\n

For example, the proposition expressed by “Canines exist” is made true by the existence my in-laws’ dog Barkley. Even if no other dogs existed, that proposition would still be true just because of Barkley. But we don’t need Barkley to do the job – any canine with do. Since there are in fact many dogs, each of which is sufficient to necessitate the truth of that proposition, there are many distinct truthmakers for that proposition (as many as the number of subsets of dogs). Here’s the main point though, truthmakers are parcels of reality – in this case, ones that can bark, bite, and bury bones.<\/p>\n

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<\/span> 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.<\/p>\n

Here’s a way to keep the distinction between truthmakers and truth conditions clear. Remember the saying, “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me”? Well, sticks and stones can function as truthmakers (e.g., “This stone has a mass of 5 kg” is made true by the stone itself) but not as truth conditions. By contrast, truth conditions are just words; they can’t hurt you (physically), but they can help you articulate yourself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m involved in a vigorous discussion with Ocham and Tom on a couple earlier posts (Link1, Link2) concerning presentism and causation and we’ve gotten onto the issue of the relation between truthmakers and truth conditions. Are they the same thing? If not, what’s the difference? For what it’s worth, here’s my take. Most philosophers, myself\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=159"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":759,"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159\/revisions\/759"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}