A plea for inexact truthmaking
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A plea for inexact truthmaking Michael Deigan1 © Springer Nature B.V. 2019
Abstract Kit Fine (2017) distinguishes between inexact and exact truthmaking. He argues that the former can be defined from the latter, but not vice versa, and so concludes that truthmaker semanticists should treat the exact variety of truthmaking as primitive. I argue that this gets things backwards. We can define exact truthmaking in terms of inexact truthmaking and we can’t define inexact truthmaking in terms of exact truthmaking. I conclude that it’s inexact truthmaking, rather than exact truthmaking, that truthmaker semanticists should treat as the primitive semantic relation. Keywords Truthmaker semantics · Situation semantics · Minimality · Mereology · Philosophy of language In a series of recent papers, Kit Fine has begun to make a persuasive case for exact truthmaker semantics, a version of situation semantics with revolutionary aims.1 Possible worlds, the workhorse of the currently dominant framework for doing natural language semantics, fall by the wayside, replaced with finer-grained, fact-like states. But beyond this step, which had already been made by other situation semanticists, 1 Primarily Fine (2017c), which is an overview of the framework and some of its applications, but also Fine (n.d.[a],[b], 2012, 2014a, 2014b, 2016, 2017a, 2017b, 2018a, 2018b, 2018c) and Fine and Jago (2019). Some of the central ideas can be traced back to van Fraassen (1969). Besides Fine, Friederike Moltmann makes interesting use of exact truthmaker semantics (see Moltmann forthcoming, 2017, 2019), as does Tim Fernando: Fernando (2015). Closely related ideas have been developed more or less independently in work by several others: Cobreros et al. (2015), Correia (2016), Ferguson (2017), Gemes (1994, 1997), van Rooy (2000), van Rooij (2017), Yablo (2014, 2018), Rothschild and Yablo (n.d.), and Santorio (2018).
For their helpful comments and questions, I would like to thank Sam Carter, Justin D’Ambrosio, Federico Faroldi, Kit Fine, Stephan Krämer, Mark Maxwell, Kate Stanton, Nadine Theiler, Frederik Van De Putte, Timothy Williamson, two anonymous reviewers for Linguistics and Philosophy, and especially Zoltán Gendler Szabó. I am also grateful to audiences at Zoltán Gendler Szabó’s Spring 2016 seminar at Yale on situations and events, the 2017 Workshop on Hyperintensional Logics and Semantics at Ghent University, and NASSLLI 2018.
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Michael Deigan [email protected] https://mikedeigan.com/ Department of Philosophy, Yale University, New Haven, USA
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M. Deigan
Fine advocates adoption of his program’s namesake relation: exact truthmaking. This contrasts with the inexact truthmaking relation used in the familiar versions of situation semantics, usually called ‘support’ or ‘truth in a situation’.2 Whereas a situation must guarantee a sentence’s truth in order to be a truthmaker of either kind, it must be wholly relevant to the sentence—not containing parts which don’t contribute to making the sentence true—in order to be an exact truthmake
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