Truth-makers

The belief that Mars is red is true, owing to the existence of a certain bit of reality, namely, Mars being red. In other words, the belief is made true by something like a fact. This chapter looks at the idea that a decent theory of making true might lay bare the nature of truth, and might support the intuition that truth is some sort of correspondence with reality. Each of the truth-maker theories favoured in the literature is composed of a heterogeneous variety of complex principles. For any given type of proposition atomic ones, negations, disjunctions, generalizations, counterfactuals, belief attributions, probability claims and so on each theory will have its own elaborate story about which alternative aggregations of facts would make true propositions of that type. The particular metaphysical claims that truth-maker theory uses the notion of truth to generalize are even less plausible than the truth-theoretic reformulations of them.