Truthmakers, Entailment and Necessity
نویسنده
چکیده
The hallowed path from language to universals has been by way of the correspondence theory of truth: the doctrine that whenever something is true, there must be something in the world which makes it true. I will call this the Truthmaker axiom. The desire to find an adequate truthmaker for every truth has been one of the sustaining forces behind traditional theories of u n i v e r s a l s . . . Correspondence theories of truth breed legions of recalcitrant philosophical problems• For this reason I have sometimes tried to stop believing in the Truthmaker axiom. Yet, I have never really succeeded. Without some such axiom, I find I have no adequate anchor to hold me from drifting onto the shoals of some sort of pragmatism or idealism. And this is altogether uncongenial to me; I am a congenital realist about almost everything, as long as it is compatible with some sort of naturalism or physicalism, loosely construed. [4, pp. 122, 123]
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