Abstract
In this paper, I articulate and argue for a new truthmaker view of ontological commitment, which I call the “General Truthmaker View”: when one affirms a sentence, one is ontologically committed to there being something (or some things) that makes (or make) true the proposition expressed by the sentence. This view comes apart from Quinean orthodoxy in that we are not ontologically committed to the things over which we quantify, and it comes apart from extant truthmaker views of ontological commitment in that we are not ontologically committed to the truthmakers of our sentences.
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Notes
For more on truthmaking, see Beebee and Dodd (2005).
Though I’ll speak in terms of sentences being the bearers of truth and falsity, one can freely substitute whatever she takes to be the bearers of truth and falsity.
I think that all true sentences have truthmakers, which earns me the label ‘truthmaker maximalist’. But there are those who think that some true sentences have truthmakers, and other true sentences do not — negative existentials, perhaps. There is a danger for such people in accepting the General Truthmaker View. They would want to modify it in some way like the following: “If one affirms a sentence, then if the sentence has a truthmaker, then one is ontologically committed to there being something or some things that makes or make it true”. This is problematic, not in the least because one doesn’t occur any ontological commitments by uttering false sentences. I cannot think of an obviously unobjectionable modification.
More on this view in §6.1.
See Quine (1948) and its many descendants.
See Sider (2011).
See Heil (2003).
In his words: “[The ontological question] is rather: “Are there Fs?” where ‘there are’ is understood as having a fundamental sense.”(Sider 2011, 175)
Generally ‘O’ would be thought of as a predicate; but many people think the ontological question is, “what exists?”, and many think that ‘exists’ isn’t a predicate.
Obviously it’s tricky to spell out what it means for an entailment to be “obvious”, but I trust the notion is familiar enough and close enough to accurate to be helpful.
e.g., If one thinks that up quarks and down quarks satisfy O, then one is implicitly ontologically committed to quarks.
See Schaffer (2008), where Schaffer says that one’s ontological commitments are to what one says exists, despite thinking that grounded entities are an ontological free lunch.
I speak throughout the paper of English sentences and quantifiers and the like. The point generalizes, of course, to French and German and all other non-fundamental languages.
See Quine (1992, p. 25–27).
This is not the same sense of metaphysical commitment as in Mackie (1993), though it is similar.
Where “S quantifies over Fs” means that S accepts (in her most reflective and philosophical moods) a sentence such that her translation of that sentence into first-order logic contains a bound variable of which F is predicated.
The principle was named by Kripke in his (1979), and he poses the most famous problem for it as well; namely, that a person might believe “Londres est jolie” and “London is not pretty”, and therefore that London is pretty and that London is not pretty.
Quine (1970) famously used ““S” is true if and only if S” as a “theory” of truth, but one needn’t do so to endorse the T-schema—one can endorse it and think that neither the conditional nor the biconditional tell us what truth is.
See Schaffer (2010).
Again, the truthmaker theorist might deny this, saying that “there are Fs” is made true by things that are neither fundamental nor F. That project strikes me as much more difficult to motivate.
Most who think there is a fundamental quantifier think that it cannot be a restriction on the ordinary English quantifier (‘\(\exists _E\)’). Presumably their reason is that when we do ontology, we want to talk about everything (wave the hands wildly for emphasis), and restricted quantifiers don’t range over everything. McDaniel (2010) is a notable exception, though he thinks there are multiple fundamental quantifiers. I also disagree, but for different reasons; I defend the view in Rettler (MS).
I shall affix the subscript ‘\(_E\)’ to quantificational expressions to denote ordinary English quantification, and affix the subscript ‘\(_F\)’ to quantificational expressions to denote fundamental quantification. I’ll continue to use ‘exists’ and ‘\(\exists\)’, and I intend them to be ambiguous between ‘\(\exists _F\)’, \(\exists _E\)’, or some other existential quantifier.
My usage of ‘the fundamental quantifier’ may differ from that of Sider (2011) and others, since they think that fundamentality is primarily a property of ideology. Saying that “in the fundamental sense of the word ‘exists’, only fundamental things exist” is a substantive thesis; I defend it in [Rettler (MS)], but Sider and others deny it.
This entails that it’s not the case that there is\(_{F}\) a truthmaker for some sentence that isn’t ranged over by the English quantifier. I defend this claim in [Rettler (MS)].
This assumes that tables are not fundamental. If the reader thinks they are, she is invited to pick as an example something else that exists but is not fundamental.
Of course, not certain sentences, like “nihilism is false”. Just sentences about what exists.
It could not, of course, be three-legged unicorns; there is a limit as to what can do the truthmaking for sentences. This seems obvious, but you might wonder why it’s true. If we don’t say anything about what the truthmakers are, what eliminates unicorns as candidates? The answer is that I don’t have an argument against unicorns making true sentences about tables. And if you were to press me on the point, I would respond happily. After all, the truthmaker theorist thinks that this is just the sort of debate we should be having—not over whether “there are unicorns” is true, but about whether unicorns do any truthmaking.
Take ‘them’ and ‘they’ to be referring to a plurality of pluralities.
Normally we can introduce new words into a language, but this isn’t the case with the fundamental language.
Sider says it’s an open question whether the minions speak truly in the first case (though he thinks they don’t), and since in his story Nihilo doesn’t speak, he doesn’t discuss whether Nihilo would speak truly were he to talk about tables. He also says the minions certainly speak correctly, where ‘correctly’ is a technical term for something that is either (i) true or (ii) close to true and also useful or advantageous or something. I shall avoid this, because I don’t know what it means. If we can give a theory whereby the sentences are true, I think that theory is better—it has fewer primitives and respects the intuition that the minions are doing something right.
Perhaps she would claim not to understand “makes true” or “truthmaker”, and might resist phrasing her view in this way. But the thought would be something like what I’ve characterized her as thinking. Quine thought that “nothing is true but reality makes it so” (1970, p. 50), but modern Quineans tend not to talk much about truthmaking.
Compare “there are water molecules” being made true by two hydrogen atoms covalently bonded to a single oxygen atom.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for making this distinction, which helped me clarify my response to this quotation.
See also (van Inwagen 1998, 246ff).
Though I think the sufficiency thesis is also false. There are ingenious proposals to paraphrase our sentences in a way that’s consistent with ontological nihlism—the view that nothing exists—and the non-existence of all women. (See Hawthorne and Cortens (1995) and Turner (2011) on the former, and Church (1958) on the latter.) Ontological nihilists and women denialists should not be considered to have more ontologically parsimonious theories just because they’ve come up with some linguistic and logical tricks to avoid affirming the existence of certain things (or anything).
She might also say that what she said wasn’t in fact true, but quasi-true, or correct, or something else indicating falsehood but usefulness. But I’m less interested in these responses as in ones that maintain the truth of the assertion.
For more on the shortcomings of semantics in determining ontological commitment, see Ritchie (forthcoming).
It’s not as easy as it seems.
For more on this, see Melia (1995).
Perhaps the Quinean would say that Tom isn’t smart enough to ontologically commit to anything. But this would require a modification of the Quinean position in the form of an additional condition that a person must satisfy in order to be ontologically committed; e.g., “S must understand the sentence she affirms”. But of course Tom understands “the average family has 2.4 children”, and he really believes that it’s true. It seems unfair that he can dodge the commitment with which the rest of us are saddled by virtue of not being intelligent enough. I can’t see what the Quinean would want to add that would allow Tom to dodge commitment to average families that wouldn’t unacceptably generalize.
The specific truthmaker theory also says that she needn’t paraphrase (or be able to paraphrase) her sentence; she is just committed to the existence of the truthmaker.
And now it looks like she’s ontologically committed to total numbers! Though in comparison they seem relatively easy to paraphrase away.
Truthmaker monism is the view that there is one truthmaker. According to Schaffer (2010), the leading (and perhaps only) proponent of the view, the one truthmaker is the world.
The paper to which I’m referring is Mulligan et al. (1984), who cite as inspiration the Tractatus.
For such discussion, see Beebee and Dodd (2005).
Compare the following two quotations, which seem to be in tension: “I hold that the ontological commitments of a theory are just those things that must exist to make true the sentences of that theory” (Cameron 2008, 4) and “what has real being—what there really is—is what makes the true theory of the world true, and this is a proper subset of the things that theory says there are” (Cameron 2010, 250).
Thanks to an anonymous referee for this worry; I had thought a great deal about something like it, but the referee framed it very well, which helped me know how to respond.
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Rettler, B. The General Truthmaker View of ontological commitment. Philos Stud 173, 1405–1425 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0526-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0526-x