Truthmaker

A truthmaker for a proposition is the one concrete entity, by virtue of which this proposition is true (or would be true ). Philosophers have speculated that every true proposition requires a truth-maker. The classical doctrine of Parmenides is: what does not exist can not be thought. This was read as the doctrine that every true proposition requires a truth-maker, otherwise it is not of or about something. A false -maker for a proposition is that existing, force which a proposition is false.

The doctrine that every true proposition need a truth-maker, however, leads to difficulties. For example: what is the truth-maker for ethical, modal or mathematical theorems? In nonkognitivistischen Metaethiken the truth ability normative sentences is disputed, so that truth-makers are not referable to sentences of deontic logic and standard logic.

What about negations of existential statements ( " there are no unicorns " ) and universally quantified statements? It has been proposed: the totality of all things makes this true, or ( Richard M. Gale ): a aktualer State such that x1 is not a unicorn, x2 is none, etc. and everything is either x1 or x2 and so on.

David Lewis has proposed a more moderate truthmaker theory. Only for positive propositions, there must be truth-makers. What makes true negative statements is that they lack a wrong doer, that is a truth-maker is lacking for its negation. "There are no unicorns " is made ​​true by the fact that a truth-maker missing for " There are unicorns ". This could be conceived as a reconstruction of Aristotle's dictum: to talk about is true, of what is to say that it is, and of what is not that it is not.

Different truth-maker theories take different types of truth-makers. Some assume that sentences are made ​​true by facts, of which they act and are typically described by nominalization of the sentence: " Socrates is sitting " is made ​​true by " sitting of Socrates ".

Others teach that the truth-maker of this sentence is simply Socrates - is the existence of which the sentence.

The existence of truth-makers may seem like a speculative Glass Bead Game. But this question has now become important to many debates. The Australian philosopher John Leslie Mackie has argued about: the truth-makers for moral sentences would have to be so unusual that they can not possibly exist, and these rates must therefore be wrong.