Truth And Truthmakers

This book, first published in 2004, makes a compelling case for truthmaking and its importance in philosophy.

Demonstrates how truthmaking can be used to make progress all across philosophy, but without its usual theoretical baggage.

The concept of truthmaking is attracting much attention in contemporary metaphysics. This work asks how the truthmaker principle should be formulated, whether it is well motivated, whether it genuinely has the explanatory roles claimed for it, and whether more modest principles might serve just as well.

Truth depends in some sense on reality. But it is a rather delicate matter to spell this intuition out in a plausible and precise way. According to the theory of truth-making this intuition implies that either every truth or at least every truth of a certain class of truths has a so-called truth-maker, an entity whose existence accounts for truth. This book aims to provide several ways of assessing the correctness of this controversial claim. This book presents a detailed introduction to the theory of truth-making, which outlines truth-maker relations, the ontological category of truth-making entities, and the scope of a truth-maker theory. The essays brought together here represent the most important articles on truth-making in the last three decades as well as new essays by leading researchers in the field of the theory of truth and of truth-making.

Mark Jago offers a new metaphysical account of truth. He argues that to be true is to be made true by the existence of a suitable worldly entity. Truth arises as a relation between a proposition - the content of our sayings, thoughts, beliefs, and so on - and an entity (or entities) in the world.--

A central question in philosophy is whether and how truth depends on the world. In isolation this question is so abstract that it is hard to address in an illuminating way. Instead, Trenton Merricks looks at how answers to this question bear on a variety of other philosophical debates. The result is a well-grounded discussion of the nature of truth that in its turn casts new light on these philosophical debates themselves.

Truth is one of the central concepts in philosophy, and has been a perennial subject of study. Michael Glanzberg has brought together 36 leading experts from around the world to produce the definitive guide to philosophical issues to do with truth. They consider how the concept of truth has been understood from antiquity to the present day, surveying major debates about truth during the emergence of analytic philosophy. They offer critical assessments of the standard theories of truth, including the coherence, correspondence, identity, and pragmatist theories. They explore the role of truth in metaphysics, with lively discussion of truthmakers, proposition, determinacy, objectivity, deflationism, fictionalism, relativism, and pluralism. Finally the handbook explores broader applications of truth in philosophy, including ethics, science, and mathematics, and reviews formal work on truth and its application to semantic paradox. This Oxford Handbook will be an invaluable resource across all areas of philosophy.

Truths are determined not by what we believe, but by the way the world is. Or so realists about truth believe. Philosophers call such theories correspondence theories of truth. Truthmaking theory, which now has many adherents among contemporary philosophers, is the most recent development of a realist theory of truth, and in this book D. M. Armstrong offers the first full-length study of this theory. He examines its applications to different sorts of truth, including contingent truths, modal truths, truths about the past and the future, and mathematical truths. In a clear, even-handed and non-technical discussion he makes a compelling case for truthmaking and its importance in philosophy. His book marks a significant contribution to the debate and will be of interest to a wide range of readers working in analytical philosophy.