tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3891434218564545511.post5261353697289679298..comments2024-03-28T19:56:42.305-05:00Comments on Alexander Pruss's Blog: TruthmakersAlexander R Prusshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05989277655934827117noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3891434218564545511.post-7897152329088215382009-08-01T03:55:48.027-05:002009-08-01T03:55:48.027-05:00Thinking out loud, Alanyser takes 'S will P...Thinking out loud, Alanyser takes 'S will P' to be false if S might not P. I have not seen the point of taking 'will' to always mean 'will definitely'; but it now occurs to me that it may be a good approach if we do take omniscience to mean that God knows <i>p</i> if <i>p</i>, perhaps...Martin Cookehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11425491938517935179noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3891434218564545511.post-80964413608448261562009-07-31T06:53:30.823-05:002009-07-31T06:53:30.823-05:00Hi Alex,
I would not dismiss bivalent logic, bein...Hi Alex,<br /><br />I would not dismiss bivalent logic, being a Presentist. It seems to me that the ordinary concept of truth is basically as Aristotle said, i.e. saying of what is (not) that it is (not). That is, it is a correspondance of our words (or propositional thoughts) with reality. So the truthmaker is naturally the relevant bit of reality. But we might call other stuff true, and then there would be other reasons why it was rightly called true.<br /><br />Say I suppose that S will be P, and then S is P, and so I take myself to have been right earlier. If S might not have been P, then under Presentism it was indefinite (rather than true) that S would be P, at that earlier time. So bivalent logic captures that correspondance with reality under Presentism. There is even so a sense of 'true' in which what I supposed was true earlier. I was, after all, saying of what was actually to be that it would actually be.<br /><br />But that latter correspondance is only with the artificial 'actual world' of possible 4-D worlds semantics (if Presentism is true). What makes it true (if it is indeed properly true) at the earlier time is then not only what was actually to be, but also our conventions about calling stuff true with hindsight. Nonetheless, the most basic sort of truthmaker, the one with the most metaphysical (rather than conventional) significance, is the (1) one...<br /><br /><i>suppose we deny that contingent propositions about the future are true or false, but accept excluded middle [...] if we understand omniscience as implying that God knows p if p, then omniscience requires God to know some contingent propositions about the future, even if none such are true.</i><br /><br />So God knows that S will P if S will P, but why should it be the case that S will P before S does P, if S might not P at that earlier time?Martin Cookehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11425491938517935179noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3891434218564545511.post-22883531456234865562009-07-23T16:11:35.281-05:002009-07-23T16:11:35.281-05:00There still is a difference between the truthmaker...There still is a difference between the truthmaker of p and of True(p), even on this solution: the truthmaker of True(p) includes p.<br />If one thinks all and only true propositions have truthmakers, it's hard to avoid saying that "True(p) iff there is a truthmaker for p" is a theory of truth, with all the consequent puzzles. ("(p)(x)(x is not a truthmaker for p or this sentence does not express p)")Alexander R Prusshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05989277655934827117noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3891434218564545511.post-27822075567142374342009-07-23T14:57:28.365-05:002009-07-23T14:57:28.365-05:00One way to think of truthmak*ing* is that it is an...One way to think of truthmak*ing* is that it is an internal relation between a representation and the *truthmaker*. If you have both the proposition and the truthmaker, then you have the one related to the other by truthmaking relation.<br /><br />But, one could then add, internal relations are not additions of being, so there really isn't a truthmaking relation, there's just bits of the world and the representations. <br /><br />I'm not sure how this relates to deflationary and non-deflationary theories of truth. In fact, a lot of truthmakers think of truthmaking theory as a way to avoid offering a theory of truth and just go on and do metaphysics. It would be interesting if it turned out, as you seem to argue, that you can't do that—that a conception of truthmaking and theories of truth are not independent.Jonathan D. Jacobshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02913077212736834794noreply@blogger.com