Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Entailment Thesis for truthmakers

The Entailment Thesis for truthmakers is that

  1. If x makes p true and p entails q, then x makes q true.
Mulligan et al. have the thesis, but it is surely false. For consider the following very plausible claim:
  1. If x is a fundamental entity—one such that facts about its existence do not reduce to facts about more fundamental entities—then x is a truthmaker for the proposition, p, that x exists, and every truthmaker of p is either identical with x or contains x as a part.
Now, let N be a fundamental necessary being, e.g., God, or maybe the empty set. Plausibly, N is not a part of Fred the electron. Now: let p be the proposition that Fred exists, and let q be the proposition that N exists. Then, by (2), Fred is a truthmaker for p, p entails q, but Fred is not a truthmaker for q.

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