critical notices | 567

Reference
Meltzoff, A. and A. Gopnik. 1993. The role of imitation in understanding persons and
developing a theory of mind. In Understanding Other Minds: Perspective from

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Autism, eds S. Baron-Cohen, H. Tager-Flusberg, and D. Cohen, pp. 335–66. New
York: Oxford University Press.

Truth and Truth-Making

JULIAN DODD

Grass is green. This is why the proposition <grass is green> is true. And the point
generalizes. The truth of many true propositions is determined by – one might say
grounded in – how things stand in reality. To put things a little more precisely, for
many true sentences taking the place of ‘p’, the following is true:
(TD) <p> is true because p.
Naturally, liar-type sentences wreak their usual havoc, if they take the place of the
occurrences of ‘p’ in (TD); and some may regard analytic truths, or even necessary
truths more generally, as providing exceptions to (TD). But let us put such compli-
cations to one side. The moral is this: the members of a large subset of the true
propositions have their truth determined by reality in the sense captured by (TD).
So far, so uncontroversial. But notice this. In the early- to mid-twentieth century, a
few philosophers began to speak (perhaps unreflectively), not just of propositions
being determined as true by how things stand in reality, but of propositions being
made true by entities in reality. Russell, for example, took a fact to be ‘the kind of
thing that makes a proposition true or false’ (1956: 182), while Austin claimed that
‘[i]t takes two to make a truth’ (1950: 23). This move was a substantial one, for talk
of entities acting as truth-makers introduces a controversial elaboration of (TD). To
return to our original example, the claim is no longer merely that <grass is green> is
true because grass is green; it is that grass is green is made true by some thing.
This elaboration is, in effect, a commitment to the following truth-maker principle:
a principle that may be subject to the same class of restrictions as (TD):
(TM) Necessarily, if <p> is true, then <p> has at least one truth-maker.
To be committed to (TM) is to be a truth-maker theorist, and the elaboration and
development of truth-maker theory has steadily gathered pace since the 1980s, largely
inspired by the forceful and eloquent work of its originators (C.B. Martin and D.M.
Armstrong) and its second wave of defenders (which included John Fox, John Bigelow
and the truth-making trio of Kevin Mulligan, Peter Simons and Barry Smith).1

1 Armstrong, in his 2004 work (1), acknowledges his teacher, Martin, as the greatest influ-
ence on his own truth-maker theory. Fox’s work is found in his 1987, while Bigelow’s

Analysis Reviews Vol 70 | Number 3 | July 2010 | pp. 567–571 doi:10.1093/analys/anq003

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568 | critical notices

Truth and Truth-Making, edited by E.J. Lowe and Adolf Rami,2 is a collection of
papers that aims to ‘provide several ways of assessing the correctness of [(TM)]’; and
this the volume sets out to do so by gathering together ‘the most important articles on

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truth-making of the last three decades as well as new essays by leading researchers in
the field’. (Both quotations are from the book’s back cover.) In my view, this project is
a qualified success.
Rami’s introduction to the essays does a sound job of setting out the many chal-
lenges facing truth-maker theory, effectively examining issues such as the following:
how the truth-maker relation is best explicated; whether (and if so, how) the
truth-maker principle should be restricted; whether the truth-maker principle can be
satisfactorily motivated; and whether truth-maker theory has the explanatory weight
that truth-maker theorists claim for it. A serious drawback with the book, however, is
that not all of the papers collected really contribute to the volume’s stated aim of
enabling the assessment of the correctness of (TM). Let me explain why.
First, the papers included in Part I of the book – those taken to represent the most
important articles on truth-making of the last 30 years – are a bit of a mixed bag.
‘Truth-makers’, by Mulligan, Simons and Smith, ‘Truth-makers, entailment and
necessity’, by Greg Restall, and David Lewis’s ‘Truth-making and difference-making’
are, without question, seminal. ‘Truth-makers’ effectively kick-started truth-maker
theory when it was first published in 1984, and although, in my view, it fails to
explain why we should accept the truth-maker principle, the lucidity of its vision,
together with its interesting suggestion that tropes (or as the authors call them,
‘moments’) are the truth-makers of inessential predications, together illustrate its sig-
nificance. Restall’s article, meanwhile, has genuinely advanced our understanding of
truth-maker theory by demonstrating the untenability of what has struck many as the
prima facie correct account of the truth-maker relation: i.e. that which treats a
truth-maker of <p> as an item whose existence entails that <p> is true. In response,
Restall points out two things: first, that on such a view, any existent entity
is the truth-maker of any necessary truth; and, second, that when this account of
truth-making is combined with the independently plausible disjunction thesis,3 it
turns out that that every truth is made true by everything (90). As a consequence,
Restall’s paper has forced truth-maker theorists to rethink the nature of the
truth-maker relation, and, inasmuch as such attempted reconfigurements all face
problems of their own, Restall has indirectly called into question the tenability of
and, ultimately, the motivation for truth-maker theory.
On this latter question, Lewis’s paper is, of course, a delight. It would not be unfair
to say that many philosophers attracted to the idea of truth-making are less interested
in motivating the truth-maker principle itself than they are in solving the plethora of
puzzles that truth-maker theory invites: puzzles concerning, for example, the finding
of truth-makers for general, modal or negative truths. Lewis has a wider perspective.

major contribution to truth-maker theory is in his 1988. Mulligan, Simons and Smiths’
seminal article is their 1984.
2 Truth and Truth-Making, edited by E.J. Lowe and A. Rami (Acumen, 2009. x þ 262 pp.
£18.99 paper).
3 This thesis states that if a is a truth-maker for <p _ q>, then either a is a truth-maker for
<p> or a is a truth-maker for <q>.
 critical notices | 569

Starting with the problem of finding truth-makers for negative truths, Lewis first of all
weakens the truth-maker principle to the Bigelow-style claim that truth supervenes on
whether things are (110): this way, the truth-maker theorist can say that negative

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truths are true for lack of false-makers. But even this claim, Lewis suggests, may be
too strong (112–13). Could there not be two possible worlds that contained the same
entities and yet differed with respect to what was true at them? (Such worlds would
differ with respect to how their common objects and properties are arranged.) As
Lewis points out, a positive answer to this question amounts to a decision to call off
the search for truth-makers, even for inessential predications. The challenge to the
would-be truth-maker theorist is to reply to this deflationary move. To my knowl-
edge, only one supporter of truth-maker theory has really picked up the baton on this
issue, and that is Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra, whose ‘Why truthmakers’ is included in
this volume.
There are, then, some papers in the collection that meet the editors’ aims. But not
all of the papers do this. Mulligan’s ‘Truth and the truth-maker principle in 1921’ is a
study of the metaphysics of Alexander Pfänder, ‘author of the third or fourth most
important treatise on logic to appear in 1921’ (39). Largely as a result of the paper’s
specialized historical focus, but also because of a conflation of the idea that truth is
grounded in reality with a full-blown truth-maker principle, Mulligan’s essay cannot
be said, hand on heart, to be one of the most important articles on truth-making of the
last three decades. For sure, the paper is written by one of the most significant figures
in the history of truth-maker theory, but that is a different matter.
Alas, the same must be said of the extract from Armstrong’s Truth and
Truthmakers that features as Chapter 7. The tone of this extract, befitting its origin
in a book that serves more to display a philosophical point of view than to argue
rigorously for it, is ruminative and elucidatory, rather than analytical. Armstrong is
the towering figure in the history of truth-maker theory, but I think that the editors
would have done better to have included a more argumentative piece of writing from
his considerable oeuvre. Perhaps an extract from Chapter 8 of A World of States of
Affairs (1997), in which Armstrong uses the truth-maker principle to argue for an
ontology of states of affairs, would have given the reader more to get her teeth into.
Part II of the volume perhaps gets closer to doing what it says on the tin. Each of the
authors is, indeed, a leading researcher in the field, and there is much to be learned
from their essays. Herbert Hochberg’s contribution – a discussion of the presence of
truth-maker theory in the metaphysics of Abelard – is scholarly and enlightening, but
probably of limited interest to most metaphysicians currently working in the field: at
times, it reads more as a piece of philosophical archaeology than a contribution to the
debate as to truth-maker theory’s correctness. However, the remainder of the papers
should certainly be read by anyone working seriously in the field. Josh Parsons’s ‘Are
there irreducibly relational facts?’ convincingly argues that truth-maker theorists
should not posit any truthmakers for relational truths that are not already truth-
makers for non-relational truths. Marian David, meanwhile, probes the nature of
the relation between the correspondence theory of truth and the truth-maker principle
and, in the course of so doing, argues both that the truth-making relation is
non-symmetric (153) and that correspondence theorists presume it to be asymmetric
(154), thereby raising the question of whether the correspondence theory really does
(as many have assumed) commit its holders to the truth-maker principle. The question
of how these two doctrines are connected is a tricky one that truth-maker theorists
570 | critical notices

have not yet satisfactorily answered. Anyone interested in this issue should start by
reading David’s paper.
E.J. Lowe, bitten by the bug of truth-maker theory but concerned by the problems

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for the conception of truth-making as entailment raised by Restall, argues that we
should regard a as a truthmaker of <p> just in case it is part of the essence of <p>
that it is true if a exists (209). This way, according to Lowe (209–10), the problem
posed by necessary truths is avoided. It is not part of the essence of <7 þ 5 ¼ 12> that
it is true if The Eiffel Tower exists, since what makes that proposition the proposition
that it is has nothing to do with a tower in France. It is, rather, part of the essence of
the said proposition that it represents 12 as the sum of 7 and 5; and, since these
numbers essentially stand in the said arithmetical relation, it follows that it is part of
the essence of the said proposition that it is true if these numbers exist. For Lowe, 7, 5
and 12 jointly serve as the truthmakers of <7 þ 5 ¼ 12> (210).
Well, I find myself sceptical of such a move, if only because the notion of an entity’s
essence is, to me, obscure. Lowe’s appeal to Locke’s explication of ‘essence’ – i.e. that
an entity’s essence is ‘the very being of any thing, whereby it is, what it is’ (207) – is
less than helpful on this score. And while it might be said that an object’s essence is the
real counterpart of a term’s definition, the thesis that an object can be defined takes us
no nearer towards clarity.
Similar notes of scepticism – this time concerning the pretensions of truth-maker
theory in general – are raised by Paul Horwich in his ‘Being and truth’. Horwich
argues, not entirely unexpectedly, that the metaphysically explanatory ambitions of
truth-maker theory can be expressed in a way that does not involve truth at all:
namely, by means of claims of the form <p because a exists> (188–89). He then
further contends that even these explanatory claims are false: the existence of, say, the
fact that grass is green does not explain why grass is green; on the contrary, such a fact
exists because grass is green (193). In this sense, Horwich claims, being is not basic
(198).
No doubt, Rodriguez-Pereyra, whose paper and postscript that close the volume,
will look askance at Horwich’s arguments here. For Rodriguez-Pereyra, a proper
understanding of the groundedness of truth – the fact that many instances of (TD)
are true – commits us to truths having truth-makers. According to Rodriguez-Pereyra,
if true propositions are grounded, if grounding is a relation and if relations link
entities, then true propositions must be grounded in entities: that is, there must be
entities – i.e. truth-makers – that do the grounding.
This argument is controversial and has been resisted in print. Rodriguez-Pereyra
robustly responds to published objections in his postscript, and here we can say,
without fear of contradiction, that the debate on this crucial matter has been
pushed forward. While I remain unconvinced by Rodriguez-Pereyra’s replies (espe-
cially those aimed at me), he is an all-too-rare example of a truth-maker theorist who
engages directly with the sceptical opposition. Truth and Truth-Making is a good
book, but it would have been a better one, had it included more debate between
the opposing camps represented by Rodriguez-Pereyra and Horwich. As is so often
the case in philosophy, the deepest questions facing truth-maker theory concern its
motivation and rationale, rather than its elaboration.4

4 Many thanks to David Liggins, who gave me helpful comments on the penultimate draft of
this review.
 critical notices | 571

The University of Manchester

Oxford Road
Manchester M13 9PL

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julian.dodd@manchester.ac.uk

References
Armstrong, D.M. 1997. A World of States of Affairs. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Armstrong, D.M. 2004. Truth and Truthmakers. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Austin, J.L. 1950. Truth. In: Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supp. Vol. 116.
Reprinted in Truth, ed. G. Pitcher. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964: 23.
Bigelow, J. 1988. The Reality of Numbers. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Fox, J. 1987. Truthmaker. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 65: 188–207.
Mulligan, K., P. Simons, and B. Smith. 1984. Truth-Makers. Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research 44: 287–321.
Russell, B. 1956. The Philosophy of Logical Atomism. In Logic and Knowledge,
ed. R. Marsh, 182–83. London: Allen & Unwin.

Oxford Studies in Metaphysics: Vol. 5

GRAEME A. FORBES

Oxford Studies in Metaphysics: Vol. 5, suffers from something of an identity crisis.1 It

isn’t sure whether it is a book or a journal. It is ostensibly an anthology of recent work
in metaphysics, with a mixture of invited and submitted papers and the competition
winning paper from the annual Oxford Studies in Metaphysics Younger Scholar Prize.
This is the fifth such anthology, however, and they seem to be coming out at the pace
of one a year.
Because it is an anthology, I will not have time to comment on all papers, but will
say a few things about selected highlights. The volume contains four sections, with
papers grouped around themes within metaphysics. The first section contains a paper
by Peter van Inwagen, (‘Changing the Past’) and two responses, one (‘Can a Soufflé
rise twice?’) by Peter Forrest, and a second (‘Van Inwagen on Time-travel and
Changing the Past’) by Hud Hudson and Ryan Wasserman. The second section is
on persistence through time, and contains a paper by Anthony Eagle (‘Location and
Perdurance’), a reply to Eagle by Cody Williams, and a reply to Williams by Eagle.

1 Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, Volume 5. Edited by D. Zimmerman. Oxford University

Press, 2010. 336 pp. £50.00 cloth, £19.99 paper.

Analysis Reviews Vol 70 | Number 3 | July 2010 | pp. 571–577 doi:10.1093/analys/anq051

ß The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust.
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