What I say

"What she said" in the vernacular is a way of expressing or agreeing with what the speaker just said. We can extend this useful idea in all kinds of ways. E.g.

(1) we can apply a negation operator. Thus 'not what she said'.

(2) we can apply it recursively. Thus

A: Snow is white
B:what A said
C:what B said

and so on. Note that all three are statements, each of them says something. Thus to say something is either (i) to say something without reference to another statement. This is the boundary condition. (ii) to reference some other statement which also says something. This is the recursive case.

(3) We can use other pronouns than the third person. E.g. to saying to C, 'not what you said', thus disagreeing with C, and thus disagreeing that snow is white. In the first person 'what I said', emphasising again what you said before, 'not what I said', changing your mind, as we do. And finally 'not what I am saying'. Does this say anything? No. It is a recursive case that has no boundary condition.

(4) Finally, we can ask a question. Thus 'what C says?', to which the answer could be 'what C says', or just 'Snow is white', or 'not what C says', thus 'Snow is not white'. As for 'not what I am saying?', there is no appropriate answer, given that 'not what I am saying' has no boundary condition, as in case (3) above.

Truth and conspiracy

A nice companion to my 2010 post:

For the simple truth is that truth is often hard to come by, and that once found it may easily be lost again. Erroneous beliefs may have an astonishing power to survive, for thousands of years, in defiance of experience, with or without the aid of any conspiracy. The history of science, and especially of medicine, could furnish us with a number of good examples. One example is, indeed, the general conspiracy theory itself I mean the erroneous view that whenever something evil happens it must be due to the evil will of an evil power. Various forms of this view have survived down to our own day.

(Karl Popper, from the Annual Philosophical Lecture read before the British Academy on January 20th, 1960. First published in the Proceedings of the British Academy, 46, 1960, and separately by Oxford University Press, 1961).

Signification and assertion

Every departmental science has a subject, and its literature talks about or refers to that subject. Physics talks about heavy bodies and momentum and energy, chemistry talks about compounds, biology talks about flora and fauna etc. What does semantics, the science of meaning, talk about?

And there is the problem. Sometimes we cannot refer to what we signify.






Frege recognised this problem in 1892, in his essay ‘On Concept and Object’. A sentence consists of words, each of which has a signification or sense. What the whole sentence signifies is thus a compound of the senses corresponding to the words. (See e.g. his undated letter to Jourdain, in Frege’s Philosophical and Mathematical Correspondence, ed Gabriel and Hermes, 1980). The possibility of understanding a sentence we have never heard before depends on this property. What the sentence signifies is something new and perhaps previously unknown to us, but the signification of the words of which it is composed must be known, otherwise we would be incapable of understanding the sentence. For example ‘Socrates is a man’ is composed of the expressions ‘Socrates’ and ‘is a man’, both of which we know and understand.

The problem that Frege grapples with in ‘On Concept and Object’ is that while we can talk about what ‘Socrates’ signifies, namely Socrates himself, we can’t talk about what ‘is a man’ signifies. Or suppose we can. Let’s refer to it by the expression ‘The signification of “is a man”’. Will that do? No, because that expression is what Frege calls an Object term, an expression that refers to an object like Socrates. Thus the sentence ‘The signification of “is a man” is an Object’ is true. But it cannot signify an object, otherwise the sentence ‘Socrates is a man’ would be composed of two terms for objects. But two such terms cannot compose a sentence, any more than ‘Socrates Plato’ can. The sentence would be a mere list of words. Frege says, enigmatically ‘the concept horse is not a concept’, and attributes it to ‘an awkwardness of language’.

There is a similar problem regarding what I call signs of assertion. Consider

It is false that Socrates is a horse

I have not asserted that Socrates is a horse. On the contrary, I have denied it. Yet the four words ‘Socrates is a horse’ occur inside the eight word sentence ‘It is false that Socrates is a horse’. Perhaps we can explain this as follows. The eight word sentence can be split into ‘It is false’ and ‘that Socrates is a horse’. The latter is what Frege calls an object term. It refers to something a mad person might assert as true, the very thing I stand in the relation of denying to. So the meaning of the eight word sentence is changed by putting ‘It is false’ in front, and so if the meaning of the whole sentence is a composite of the meaning of ‘it is false’ and ‘that Socrates is a horse’, the composite is what ‘It is false that Socrates is a horse’ signifies. But of course that can’t be so, for the very fact that we could signify that Socrates was not a horse, would require that Socrates not being a horse was a fact. Worse, ‘It is true that Socrates is a horse’ would signify Socrates being a horse, so would require the existence of Socrates being a horse. Both those contradictory facts would have to exist in order for the contradictory sentences to be significant. Impossible!

Frege alludes to this problem in a much later essay (‘Negation’) published in 1918. He distinguishes between a question (my example is ‘is Socrates a horse’) from the thought corresponding to an answer like ‘yes’ or ‘no’. For if the sense of the question contained the sense of ‘yes’ or ‘no’, then the question would contain its own answer. The question would express a thought ‘whose being consists in its being true’.

Grasping the sense [of the question] would at the same time be an act of judging, and the utterance of the interrogative sentence would at the same time be an assertion, and so an answer to the question. But in an interrogative sentence neither the truth nor the falsity of the sense may be asserted.

Fair enough, but Frege does not see this as a challenge to his compositional semantics. Consider ‘Is Socrates a horse? No’. The first part signifies the question. If adding the sign ‘No’ completes the sense, then what is signified by the whole thing, namely question plus answer, must indeed be something whose being consists in being true, which Frege apparently denies.

In summary, if the signification of the whole is made up of the signification of the parts, then we should be able to refer to the signification of the whole, if semantics is to be a proper science. But we can’t, otherwise the subject of our science would include items like Socrates not being a horse, as well as Socrates being a horse. Which is impossible. Therefore semantics is not a science, at least not a proper science.

Lunatic, Liar or Lord?

I have now scanned in Question 2 of the Prologue to Scotus' Ordinatio. There is much of interest here.  There is the well-known allusion to the defeat of the Egyptians at the battle of Hims (also known as the battle of Wadi al-Khazandar)  in 1299. The battle was on 22-23 December 1299, but the news did not reach Oxford until the summer of 1300, which is taken as evidence that Scotus began the revision of the Ordinatio then. He writes that, with the co-operation of God, Islam will soon be ended "for it is greatly weakened in the year of Christ 1300, and many of its devotees are dead and some have fled".  This was gravely lacking in foresight.

There is also a reference to Josephus' history of the Jews, which for a long time was used as evidence for the "historical Jesus".  Josephus questions whether Jesus was really a man, says he was the worker of miracles, and was the Messiah.  We are not now certain whether this passage is authentic, or a Christian interpolation.

And there is an argument that must be a very early version of the one now known as Lunatic, Liar or Lord?, popularised by C.S. Lewis and many other Christian apologists.

The argument as we now have it is that Christ (or in other versions, the Christians who wrote the gospels) either deceived by conscious fraud, and so was a liar, or was himself deluded, and so a lunatic, or was telling the truth, and so was the Lord. This is the 'trilemma'. The argument (1) that Jesus (or the Christians who wrote the gospels) could not have been lying, because Christianity forbids lying, (2) that he could not have been deluded, because of the evidence of his rationality (or the rationality of the Christians who wrote or preached the gospels).

Scotus argument is essentially the same, although a little more complex. I will discuss it later.

Does everyone believe something?

Anthony asks whether ‘that it will rain next week’ is something. The quotes are scare quotes, but I could rephrase his question using real quotes. Does the noun phrase “that it will rain next week” name anything? And if so, what kind of thing is it? Is it located in space? Indeed, is it located in time? If I say that grass is green today, and you say the same thing tomorrow, is what you say tomorrow numerically identical with what I say today? Is the object of saying, stating, thinking, believing etc. a timeless eternal object, located nowhere in space itself? Is that Platonic idea consistent with nominalism?

I'm not sure a logician needs to worry about questions like these. A logician is worried about whether an arguments like

Everything said by Tom is true
That snow is white is said by Tom
That snow is white is true

or
Tom believes that snow is white
Tom believes something

are valid.  And surely they are.  If Tom believes that snow is white, then the simplest answer to the question of what 'that snow is white' refers to is simply that it is what Tom believes. Why bring space and time into it?

The insoluble problem of future tense statements

Vallicella finally addresses the problem of Excluded Middle and Future-Tensed Sentences.  A prediction in 1996 that the FTSE would reach 10,000 by 2011 would have been wrong at the time the prediction was made.  As he points out (using the US Dow index as his example), subsequent events merely made it evident that the content of the prediction was false, rather than bring it about that the prediction had a truth-value.  Not even God can restore virginity*.

This suggests that the Law of Excluded Middle applies to future tense statements, but this causes him puzzlement, expressed in the following 'aporetic triad'.

1. Law of Excluded applies unrestrictedly to all declarative sentences, whatever their tense.
2. Presentism: Only what exists at present exists.
3. Truth-Maker Principle: Every contingent truth has a truth-maker.

They can't all be true, according to him, because the conjunction of any two implies the negation of the third. So here is a genuine insoluble problem. Each has a strong claim to our acceptance, but all of them cannot be true together.

Is that right? First, I don't see why the three statements are logically inconsistent.  Why can't the truthmaker for a future tense statement exist now, in the present? However, presumably Maverick buys the argument I gave here.  If the truthmaker exists now, and given that we cannot change the immediate present or the past, we cannot change the truthmaker’s existence. So we cannot change the future, for the truthmaker that exists now makes the future true, but we can change the future, ergo etc.  So we can assume the additional premise

4. The truthmaker for any contingently true proposition exists only at the time for which the proposition is true.

By the expression 'time for which' a proposition is true, I am attempting to translating the medieval Latin pro tempore, meaning, roughly, any time at which any present tense statement corresponding to a non present tense statement is true. For example, if I truly say 'it will rain next week', when today is 3 December 2011, the time for which my statement is true = any day next week, i.e. the week commencing Monday 5 December.  The corresponding present tense statements are 'it is raining today', uttered on Monday, or on Tuesday, Wednesday etc.

But statements 1-4 above cannot all be true.  If only things in the present exist, future truthmakers do not exist. It may be that they will exist, but they don't now.  So the statement 'it will rain next week' has no truthmaker (although, if it does rain, it may be that it will have one).  And yet law of excluded middle surely applies to any statement whatever.  If it does rain next week, and I say that it will rain next week, then surely we can say next week that 'Edward was right'.

Which of the four statements above is incorrect?  (Rhetorical question, for those who read my blog regularly).

*Pace Peter Damian.

The lazy argument for not doing anything

When inspiration fails, I turn to the Maverick’s site to look for easy pickings, and, lo, I find his post from Tuesday about future contingents. Bill starts with a tolerably useful distinction between the two senses of ‘proposition’ that caused so much anguish for Anthony (and me) the other day

Accordingly, a proposition is the sense of a context-free declarative sentence. A context-free sentence is one from which all indexical elements have been extruded, including verb tenses. Propositions so construed are a species of abstract object. This will elicit howls of outrage from some, but it is a view that is quite defensible.

I.e. proposition in the sense the medievals used it is “context-free declarative sentence”. A proposition in the modern sense is the sense (or ‘meaning’) of a context-free declarative sentence. (The medievals sometimes distinguished between a spoken proposition, i.e. context-free declarative sentence, and a ‘mental proposition’, i.e. the sense of a context-free declarative sentence.

Bill continues with a version of the ‘lazy argument’ for not doing anything, as follows.

1. Either I will be killed tomorrow or I will not.
2. If I will be killed, I will be killed no matter what precautions I take.
3. If I will not be killed, then I will be killed no matter what precautions I neglect.
Therefore
4. It is pointless to take precautions.

This is a breathtakingly rotten argument. Is it true that I will be killed in France tomorrow, I will be killed even if I take the precaution of not going to France? Surely not. It cannot be true that I will have been killed in France, even though I have not gone to France. The argument is only effective if we believe in truthmakers. For if the proposition ‘I will be killed in France tomorrow’ is true now, then Truthmakerists say it has a truthmaker now, i.e. some state of affairs that ‘makes it’ true. But if the truthmaker exists now, and given that we cannot change the immediate present or the past, we cannot change the truthmaker’s existence. So we cannot change the future, for the truthmaker that exists now makes the future true.

The early Duns Scotus has a nice argument against this which I discussed in a post in 2009. Scotus writes

It must be understood that a proposition about the future can be understood to signify something in the future in two ways. So that the proposition about the future signifies it to be true now that something in the future will have to be true [verum esse habebit] (for example, that ‘you will be white at a’ signifies it now to be in reality so that at time a you will be white). Or it can be understood that it signifies now that you will be white then: not that it signifies that it is now such that then you are going to be white, but that it signifies now that then you will be white. For to signify it to be [the case] now that you will be white at a, signifies more than to signify that you will be white at a.*

I take it that “signify it to be [the case] now that you will be white at a” means signifying that a truthmaker exists now for ‘will be white at a’.

*From a translation I made in 2009, which may be different from the corresponding translation (of Aristotle’s Perihermenias) that is now going through the usual process at CUA publications.

Brandon has a thoughtful comment on an approach to truthmakers that turns the current discussion on its head.

If I recall correctly David Brightly at some point commented that it was possible to take a view in which truthmaker theory goes at things backward -- takes propositions as given facts and then tries to find the reality to suit, whereas one could take reality as the given fact and then look at how propositions express it (or fail to do so). I think this latter approach is more promising. If Truthmaker Maximalism and Necessitarianism are both true -- if you can find a truthmaker for every true proposition and the link between truthmakers and true propositions is not loose but logically rigorous -- then this would virtually guarantee that the approach was fruitful in and of itself. But if either of them is false, then truthmaker theory is, at the very most optimistic assessment, missing something important.

I can't find where David Brightly said this but, yes, that's right.  If I manage (unlikely) to draw a faithful representation of my garden, then we don't take the picture and find the reality (a garden) to suit.  Rather, the garden is the given, and then we look at how well the picture resembles it.  Aquinas (and Scotus) say something along these lines.

A simple definition for truthmaker?

Brightly suggests a rule for finding a truthmaker for any proposition p, viz., any entity t such that 't exists' entails p will do the job. Thus we have an 'equation' to solve. When p = 'Vallicella exists' a solution would appear to be t = Vallicella.

I'm not sure that will do. For a start, it suggests that every truthmaker T of a non-existential proposition is a truthmaker for at least two propositions, namely the non-existential one, and also the existential one 'T exists'. E.g. let T be the truthmaker for 'it is day'. Then it is the trutmaker for that, and also the truthmaker for 'T exists'.

Also, more worryingly, the entailment relation is very easy to satisfy. If p is true, then its truthmaker is any (existing) entity x whatsoever, since x exists, and p is true, i.e. if x = a then 'a exists' and p are both true, and we have entailment. Entailment only failing when the antecedent is true and the consequent false. (I think, I always get lost with entailment).

Presentism and truthmaking

Anthony, who occasionally asks some very good questions (I'm sorry I don't have time to address them all), asks in a comment to this post whether my position on truthmakers is inconsistent with my presentism. I'm not sure exactly where he is coming from, but I agree there may appear to be an inconsistency when I use singular terms like 'Socrates' to refer to non-present, and therefore non-existing individuals.

I explained this a while back. See this post and the posts it links back to. The verb 'refers to' is, I claim, a logically intransitive verb. This concept I have tried to explain to the Maverick on many occasions, with little apparent success (smiley face icon).

The truthmaker for 'Socrates exists'

No one agrees, so let’s look again at the premiss (3) of my earlier argument. I claim that the truthmaker for ‘A exists’ is not A itself. I argue as follows. If Socrates himself is the truthmaker for ‘Socrates exists’ then, from the definition of truthmaker, Socrates makes the proposition ‘Socrates exists’ true. But that is manifestly false, given that Socrates no longer exists. I.e. the proposition

(*) Socrates makes the proposition ‘Socrates exists’ true

is manifestly false. For he cannot make that proposition true unless it is true. But it is false. Socrates no longer exists, so ‘Socrates exists’ is false. So Socrates does not make the proposition ‘Socrates exists’ true, and therefore, by the definition of truthmaker, Socrates himself is not the truthmaker of ‘Socrates exists’.

Breathtakingly rotten arguments

Maverick has a post here, which I haven't had time to give full attention to.  He says that my infinite regress argument against truthmakers is 'breathtakingly rotten'.  This wrongly implies there can be degrees of goodness or badness in arguments.  Not true: an argument is either valid, or it is not.  All invalid arguments are equally bad, and all valid arguments equally good.  And I think my argument is perfectly valid, as follows.

1. There are truthmakers (assumption)
2. If the truthmaker for 'A exists' is not A itself, this leads to a contradiction (by infinite, vicious regress)
3. The truthmaker for 'A exists' is not A itself
4. (Contradiction) Therefore there are no truthmakers

It seems clear that Vallicella accepts consequence (2), but rejects assumption (3).  So he accepts the argument is valid, and therefore (by implication) accepts that it is good, and therefore not 'breathtakingly rotten'.  Whether (3) is true or false is a separate argument, and I haven't seen any such argument against it, nor any replies to my arguments for it.

A separate thread of the debate, which he refers to in that post, is whether the notion of a truthbearer implies the notion of a truthmaker.  I think it does, but haven't given any conclusive arguments for this, yet.

Representation, truth, and infinite regress

I have argued (e.g. here and here that the notion of a ‘truthmaker’ leads to an infinite regress. If there is such a truthmaker, an entity that makes a proposition like ‘Socrates sits’ true - let it be A - then it comes into existence when Socrates sits down, and ceases to exist when he stands up. But then there would have to be a further truthmaker for A existing. I.e. the sentence “A exists” can be true or false, and so requires a further truthmaker B, that makes it true when B exists. But then “B exists” requires yet another truthmaker, and so on ad infinitum.

A similar problem attaches to the idea of representation (and at bottom, I believe, it is the same problem). Can the trueness or faithfulness of a representation – itself be represented? We say a picture is a true or faithful representation of what it represents. Aquinas says that truth is the adaequatio - literally the ‘equality’ or perhaps ‘adequacy’ – of thought to reality. This is like the modern concept of a ‘mapping’ or even ‘correspondence’ is similar – imagine the thought being like a picture or map that we could lay against the reality and match each element of the map against an equal and corresponding element of the reality that is mapped. But how do we represent the accuracy or ‘equality’ of the representation itself? The accuracy or trueness of the representation is itself an aspect of reality, and must be captured, but is not itself a feature of the representation. For accuracy is a relation, and the representation is only one term of the relation.

To represent the accuracy, we need a further representation – imagine a picture of both the represented object and the representation, with mapping lines drawn between the corresponding elements. But then this is also a representation. To represent its accuracy, we would have to represent it together with the two objects it represents, together with further lines joining both the mapped elements and the mapping lines. This is something too complicated to draw or even to imagine, but even that would not be enough, for we still have a representation. The accuracy of this must also be represented, and so on ad infinitum.

The problem is inescapable. If we buy the idea of a ‘truthbearer’ (a proposition, a thought, whatever), the idea of a ‘truthmaker’ comes with it. The truthbearer is one term of the relation, the truthmaker is the other. But the truthmaker can’t be the other term, because truth is a relation, and the truth includes the existence of the relation, as well as the existence of its two terms. Just as the accuracy of a representation cannot itself be represented, so the truth of a truthbearer cannot itself be expressed.

There was no eclipse yesterday

There was in fact no eclipse yesterday, as I predicted two days ago.  Hence my prediction was right.

There will not be an eclipse tomorrow

I checked on the NASA website here, which confirms there will be no eclipses tomorrow (16 November 2011), although there will be a partial solar eclipse on November 25.

So are the statements “there will be no eclipse on 16 November 2011” and “there will be an eclipse on 16 November 2011” both true? We don’t know for absolute certainty, of course. The whole universe may blow up at midnight, or the second coming may happen, or God may just stop the solar rotation of the earth. But we should not confuse mere epistemic considerations with considerations of truth and falsity. It is almost certain that there will not be an eclipse tomorrow, therefore it is almost certain that the proposition “there will be no eclipse on 16 November 2011” is true. Therefore, if the truthmaker-theorists are correct, it is almost certain that the proposition has a truthmaker. But what is that truthmaker?

According to Vallicella, a truthmaker should not be confused with the physical cause of some proposition being true. So the truthmaker for the eclipse proposition is not the current motion of the solar system and associated gravitational laws. So what is it?

On failing to understand

Maverick has a nicely observed post here on the different senses of 'I do not understand', as used by philosophers.  For the sake of completeness I have copied it here.
---------------------------------------------------------------
CJFW was fond of use (i). If he said 'I do not understand' you knew that something very bad was coming your way. I'm not immune to it. And as a brief ad hominem can I point out the Peter Lupu is not immune to it either – I've lost count of the times he has said it, usually in sense (ii).

On this one, I genuinely don't understand what a truthmaker is. Its broad definition is: something that causes a truthbearer (a 'proposition') to be true. Part of my difficulty is with 'truthbearer'. What sort of thing is it? Is it a mental item like a thought? Is it a physical item of some kind? Or is it a Platonic abstract object? I'll assume the latter.

And what sort of causal relation obtains between truthmaker and truthbearer. Bill has said that it is not a cause that is mediated by some physical event or state, in the way that the sun rising is the cause of truth of the proposition 'it is day'. The truthmakerist holds there is something 'in between' the sun rising and the truth of the proposition, and this 'in betweenie' is being-day-ness or something like that. Is that right?

So there is supposedly some direct, unmediated causal relation between a physical item (the state of affairs 'being day') and an an abstract Platonic entity. And I am finding that difficult to get my head round, in sense (iii).

I also have the difficulty with future tensed statements like 'the sun will rise tomorrow'. Does that proposition exist as a truthbearer now, or tomorrow? Does its truthmaker exist now or tomorrow? I commented on that problem here. If the truthmaker for a future tensed proposition exists now, it seems difficult to avoid logical determinism. But if it exists in the future, we have to explain its coming-into-existence. Is the coming-into-existence or actual-existence part of the state of affairs that constitutes the truthmaker? Then it seems difficult to avoid the infinite regress problem I already pointed out.

And at this point my head is swimming with such difficulties and confusions that I can only confess misunderstanding in sense (iii) alone.

Contradictions do not exist

By chance, I found where ‘contradictions do not exist’ came from. See chapter seven (“The Exploiters and the Exploited”) of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

I'll give you a hint. Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.

Taken literally, i.e. in the standard logical use, this is horribly wrong, even if the intended meaning is not. A ‘premiss’, in traditional logic, is one of a set of propositions that are used to support the conclusion of an argument. Being ‘wrong’ is not a term of traditional logic, but ‘false’ is clearly what is meant. It is certainly true that if two or more propositions involve or imply a contradiction, then at least one of them is false. But that does not imply, as Rand imagines, that contradictions do not exist. For a contradiction is simply defined as two premisses (or propositions) that contradict each other. If the premisses exist, so does the contradiction, just as a left and a right shoe make a pair.

What Rand probably meant was that contradictory premisses cannot be true. That is perfectly correct, and is the Principle of Contradiction itself. So she probably meant something quite simple and obvious, indeed a law of logic. Why she chose to put it that way is more difficult. Perhaps by ‘facing a contradiction’, she meant facing the state of affairs that is the truthmaker for a contradiction. And of course there could be no such truthmaker, even if there were truthmakers for other propositions (which I deny, of course).

Two clear arguments against truthmakers

The Maverick Philosopher challenges me to lodge one clear objection against the idea of a truthmaker.  Very well.

The background. I originally objected that in order to make its proposition p true, a truthmaker must exist. Let the truthmaker be T. Then, when the proposition ‘T exists’ is true, p will be true. But (I hold) the truthmaker of ‘T exists’ cannot be T, anymore than the truthmaker of ‘Socrates sits’ can be Socrates. Let it be T*. But now we must ask about the truthmaker of “T* exists”. This cannot be T*, by the same reasoning. Therefore there must be another truthmaker T**, and so on ad infinitum.  The Maverick objects to my initial assumption that the truthmaker of ‘T exists’ cannot be T itself. For if it is, there is no regress (or at least, not a vicious one), and my argument fails.

That is by way of a preliminary. The whole dispute depends on whether the truthmaker of ‘T exists’ is T itself, and I shall now give two arguments that it cannot.

The first argument assumes that the meaning of a singular proposition (i.e. sentence) does not depend on whether its singular term has a referent. ‘Socrates sits’ means the same whether there is such a person as Socrates or not. Plenty of philosophers (direct referentialists) disagree with this assumption, but I believe Maverick does not. Thus it is contingent whether any object falls under the proper name ‘Socrates’ (used in the standard sense to mean a certain Athenian philosopher, the teacher of Plato). Thus it cannot be that Socrates makes the proposition ‘Socrates exists’ true. I.e. the proposition

(*) Socrates makes the proposition ‘Socrates exists’ true

is false, because Socrates does not exist. Maverick may object that in the past it made (past tense) the proposition true. I reply: even if that is conceded, (*) is still false. Maverick may then object that ‘makes’ is to be understood tenselessly, as in propositions like ‘2 plus 2 equals 4’. I reply: if so, he must then explain why Socrates sometimes (tenselessly) makes the proposition ‘Socrates exist’ true (i.e. when Socrates is alive) and sometimes (tenselessly) he fails to make it true (now he is dead, or before he is born). There must be some additional factor. Hence the truthmaker of ‘Socrates exists’ cannot be just Socrates himself, and I rest my case.

My second argument is from future tense propositions. Assume that it will rain tomorrow, and so ‘it will rain tomorrow’ is true. Does the truthmaker for that proposition exist today, or only tomorrow, when it rains? If only tomorrow, then I argue as before. What causes the truthmaker to come into existence. It cannot be the truthmaker itself, for the reasons already argued. But if the truthmaker exists today, and thus exists for all time, in a sort of date-stamped way like ‘it will rain in London on 11 November 2011’, then the future is already determined. But the future is not determined, ergo etc.

A thought whose being consists in its being true?

The question being discussed here about truthmakers has some affinity with a question discussed by Frege in his late essay “Negation”. He compares grasp of a thought with understanding of a question. And, just as we can understand a question without understanding the correct answer, so he argues that there cannot be a thought ‘whose being consists in its being true’

The content of a question is that as to which we must decide. Consequently truth cannot be counted as going along with the content of the question. When I raise the question whether the Sun is bigger than the Moon, I am seeing the sense of the interrogative sentence 'Is the Sun bigger than the Moon?' Now if this sense were a thought whose being consisted in its being true, then I should at the same time see that this sense was true. Grasping the sense would at the same time be an act of judging; and the utterance of the interrogative sentence would at the same time be an assertion, and so an answer to the question. But in an interrogative sentence neither the truth nor the falsity of the sense may be asserted. Hence an interrogative sentence has not as its sense something whose being consists in its being true.
[...]
And since the sense of an interrogative sentence is always also inherent in the assertoric sentence that gives an answer to the question, this separation must be carried out for assertoric sentences too. It is a matter of what we take the word 'thought' to mean. In any case, we need a short term for what can be the sense of an interrogative sentence. I call this a thought. If we use language this way, not all thoughts are true. The being of a thought thus does not consist in its being true. (Negation, from Translations from Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, ed. Peter Geach, p.125).

I wonder if a ‘truthmaker’ as understood by the advocates of truthmaking is the same sort of thing as Frege’s marvelous but impossible thought. Something that if we perceived it for what it was, would simultaneously communicate to us the truth of what it includes.

First picture of a truthmaker

This blog is always first!  Following up the first reported sighting of a truthmaker for the proposition 'this watch is on the table' nearly 100 years ago in June 1915*, the South West London metaphysics research laboratory can proudly announce it has located a picture of it.

Problems remain, however.  Is 'this watch' a pocket watch? Or a Patek Phillipe or one of those pink Barbie watches beloved of little girls?  What kind of table is it?  The picture suggests it may be a George II card table. But it may be George III, or one of those nasty cheap imitations with a veneer so thin you could peel it off with no more than a plastic safety razor.

Where on the table is the watch?  This early sighting suggests bottom right, but clearly anywhere on the table will do.  You could turn the watch at any angle, or even turn it face down.  All these possible states of affairs will make the proposition true.  Are they different truthmakers, then?  Or are they in reality the same truthmaker? But then what does it look like?  The watch would have to lie at every possible position and every angle on the table, like a multiple exposure picture - imagine those time-lapse pictures of busy city streets, with the red lights streaming like a ribbon on one side, and the white front lights on the other.

I suspect more research is needed.  Back to the laboratory.

*"Diese Uhr liegt auf dem Tisch" - Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914-16  p.69