Truthmaking and Case-Making
Karen Bennett
Cornell University
1. The Basic Intuition
Here is the basic truthmaking intuition: what is true depends upon how the world is.
Truth—or, better, truth-value—depends on being. I find this intuition very plausible. After all,
what’s the alternative? That truth floats free of being? Surely that’s the kind of thought that
leads to berets, and a job in a bad Comp Lit department.
Trenton Merricks’ main goal in Truth and Ontology is to reject the basic intuition.
Nonetheless, we don’t need to send him away with a baguette tucked under his arm. He
certainly doesn’t think that truth has nothing to do with being. First, he believes that all truths
trivially depend on being, and indeed opens the book by saying:
That Fido is brown is true because Fido is brown. That the Trojans were
conquered is true because the Trojans were conquered. That hobbits do not exist
is true because hobbits do not exist. And so on. And so we might say that truth
‘depends on the world’. But such ‘dependence’ is trivial. No one would deny it.
(xiii).
Second, he believes that some truths substantively depend on being:
Truths about the mere existence of something must have truthmakers, and…
truths about what properties are actually had by actually existing things must
satisfy [the doctrine that truth supervenes on being] (xvii; see also 169).
What Merricks denies is that all truths substantively depend on being. The truths that “simply
fail to depend on being in any substantive way at all” (xiv) are those that are not about the actual,
present properties of actually, presently existing things. (Merricks is an actualist and a
presentist.) In particular, Merricks thinks that the category includes both counterfactuals and
truths entirely about the past. On Merricks’ view, propositions like if this glass were dropped, it
would break and there used to be dinosaurs are true, but their truth does not substantively
depend on the world. This is the central contention of his book.
There is a lot to like about Truth and Ontology. It makes substantial contributions to
ongoing debates about truthmaking, particularly to the question of what, beyond necessitation,
must be involved in the making-true relation. The chapters on modality and presentism are
thought-provoking, and the chapter on the doctrine that truth supervenes on being raises
important but neglected issues about how to think about global supervenience. Finally, the book
is economically written—it clocks in at under 200 pages!—and wonderfully clear. As a result, in
addition to making original contributions, it is a good way to get up to speed on the literature.
Still, this would be a boring essay if I didn’t raise some objections. I will raise three.
First, Merricks’ unexplicated notions of ‘trivial’ and ‘substantive’ dependence are opaque. My
best interpretation entails that his central conclusions are not really about truthmaking at all.
Second, his claim that some truths do substantively depend on being is inadequately explored.
Third, his discussion of the doctrine that truth supervenes upon being is ultimately unconvincing.
2. Trivial and Substantive Dependence?
Throughout the book, Merricks invokes a distinction between the “trivial and innocuous
‘dependence’” of truth on being articulated by claims like ‘Fido is brown is true because Fido is
brown’, and the substantive dependence that he takes the believer in truthmaking to be after. Yet
he never tells us what this distinction comes to. What is it for a dependence relation to be trivial
or substantive? In particular, what is it for truth to substantively depend on being? Although
Merricks never says, it appears that he requires two features.
The first is that there be some being. This becomes clear in his discussion of the claim
that truth supervenes on being (§4, 80-85); he thinks it problematic that certain formulations of
that claim do not “offer any bit of being” (82) to explain the truth of negative existentials.
However, this demand is dialectically odd. Those who prefer a supervenience formulation to
Truthmaker—i.e., to the claim that “for each truth there is some entity x that stands in the making
true relation to that truth” (14)—do so precisely because it enables them to avoid postulating
negative facts or reified absences to serve as truthmakers for negative existentials (see Bigelow
1988, Lewis 2001). Thus if we are to avoid begging questions here, we should not understand
the ‘substantive dependence’ of truth on being so that it requires a “bit of being” for each truth.
The second requirement is fairer to his opponents. Merricks expects the substantive
dependence of truth on being to “catch cheaters” (3; from Sider 2001, 40)—to rule out truth’s
dependence on “suspicious properties” (35-38). He says that “those who think that truth depends
substantively on being… think that to violate that dependence is to cheat” (74; see also 5, 15),
and that “cheaters fail to respect truth’s dependence on being” (82). No such cheater-catching is
expected of the trivial dependence of truth on being. Merricks, I think, intends the
substantiveness of the dependence of truth on being to consist in its ability to catch cheaters. It is
the dependence of truth on honest, upstanding, nonsuspicious being.
An immediate consequence is that Merricks’ distinction between trivial and substantive
dependence isn’t a distinction between two kinds of dependence relation that can hold between
truths and being. It’s a distinction between two kinds of being on which the truths depend. Thus
when Merricks says that counterfactuals and truths about the past “simply fail to depend on
being in any substantive way at all” (xiv), he is not saying anything about what dependence
relation holds between them and the world. Instead, he is saying something about the nature of
the dependence base—about what the world is like.
So what, exactly, is he saying about what the world is like? He is saying that modality
and tense are primitive. Let me explain. If counterfactuals and truths entirely about the past fail
to substantively depend on being, they fail to depend on nonsuspicious being. So either they
depend on “suspicious” being, or they do not depend on being at all. But Merricks denies the
latter; all truths do trivially depend upon being. So he must think that counterfactuals and truths
entirely about the past depend upon “suspicious” being. Now, this sounds odd, because it forces
Merricks to coopt an epithet lobbed by his opponents. Really, Merricks’ claim is that
counterfactuals and truths entirely about the past depend on being that does not itself depend on
anything else.
I interpret his view in two stages. Stage 1: the truth of a proposition like Lincoln was
assassinated depends on Lincoln’s having been assassinated.1 That is the small, trivial way in
which truth does depend on being. Stage 2: There is nothing in virtue of which Lincoln was
assassinated. Nothing makes it the case; there are no eternalist facts existing outside the present
to ground it. It is brute, fundamental, primitive, basic.2
1
Like Merricks, I will not put much weight on the nominalization required by the grammatical
difference between ‘Lincoln was assassinated is true because Lincoln was assassinated’ and ‘the
truth of Lincoln was assassinated depends on Lincoln’s having been assassinated’.
2
Do not be confused by Merricks’ rejection of Lucretianism. He does not deny that there are
Lucretian properties; rather, he denies that they allow presentism to satisfy Truthmaker. “It is a
But only that first stage has anything to do with the dependence of truth on being, and it
is, by Merricks’ own lights, ‘trivial’. Stage two is instead about the dependence of being on
being—of less fundamental on more fundamental pieces of the world. It may be ‘substantive’,
but it is not the dependence of truth on being. Yet Merricks would agree that the interesting part
is the second stage, not the first. This entails that his central contention has nothing to do with
truthmaking at all. It instead has everything to do with what might be called case-making. The
question is not “what makes the proposition that Lincoln was assassinated true?”, but rather
“what makes it the case that Lincoln was assassinated? What is it in virtue of which Lincoln was
assassinated?”
This means that Merricks’ claims about tense and modality do not turn on any of his
discussion about the nature of truth or the proper formulation of the truthmaking principle. What
he needs—continuing to stick to the case of time and tense—are reasons to believe that Lincoln’s
having been assassinated cannot be reduced to anything nontensed. That is, what he needs are
reasons to think that presentism a) is correct, and b) requires brute facts about the past. He does
provide such reasons (125-142), and I will not challenge them here. My claim is simply that
they are portrayed as less central to the book than they in fact are.
Quite generally, we should take care to distinguish questions about truthmaking from
questions about casemaking. The former are about the relationship between truth-bearing
representations and the world. The latter are about what facts/properties/entities are plausibly
fundamental. Now, Merricks is hardly the only person to conflate the two, and he is responding
to a literature in which people do accuse presentism of falling victim to a “truthmaker objection”
(e.g. Bigelow 1996, Sider 2001, 35-42, Keller 2004). But both that accusation and Merricks’s
response share a false assumption—that it is the job of truthmaking principles to catch cheaters,
to settle which properties are ‘suspicious’. It is not. It is not the job of a truthmaking principle
to, say, deem irreducible Lucretian properties suspicious (contra Merricks 38). Such properties
obviously would satisfy the demand for truthmakers. The only real question is whether there are
any. Thus Merricks and his eternalist opponents should take their dispute elsewhere: to
questions about which states of the world are plausibly brute.
3. Substantively Dependent Truths
Merricks is primarily interested in the negative claim that certain truths do not
substantively depend on being. But recall that he also makes a positive claim that certain truths
do substantively depend on being: namely, truths ascribing actual properties to actually,
presently existing things (xvii, 166-169). In this section, I set aside my questions about what
substantive dependence is, and instead ask: what is the relevant class of truths supposed to be?
It will be harder than Merricks thinks to demarcate the truths that do substantively depend
on being from those that do not. Although he uses the phrase “truths about what properties are
actually had by actually existing things” (xvii, also 168), this cannot be what he means. Among
the properties that I actually have are dispositional properties, like being such that were I
dropped from a sufficient height, I would break. But Merricks explicitly denies that truths
ascribing such properties depend substantively on being (chapter 7). So he must mean that truths
about what nonmodal, nontemporal properties are actually had by actually existing things
cheat to rely” on them (135) for that, precisely because Lucretianism does not provide a
substantive answer to the stage 2 question. As will become clear, I prefer to say that
Lucretianism does meet Truthmaker, and that this shows that Truthmaker is not where the action
is.
depend substantively on being. That is better, but now he is left with the famously hard task of
weeding out the modal (hypothetical) properties from the nonmodal (categorical) ones. He is
also left with the task of denying that the world is fundamentally dispositional, as well as the task
of rejecting various dispositional theories about particular domains. In particular, since he
frequently uses that Fido is brown as an example of a truth that does substantively depend on
being, it turns out that he owes us an argument against dispositional theories of color.
4. The Supervenience of Truth on Being
Merricks distinguishes two versions of the thesis that truth supervenes on being (TSB).
The first is familiar:
Global TSB: “for any proposition p and any worlds w and v, if p is true in w but
not in v, then either something exists in one of the worlds but not the other, or else
some n-tuple stands in some fundamental relation in one of the worlds but not the
other” (71-72; from Lewis 2001, 612).
The second is new:
Worldwide local TSB: “necessarily, each true claim is such that, necessarily,
given all the entities that exist and the properties that each of those entities has,
then that claim is true” (72-73).
Looming large here is the question of whether any supervenience formulation can genuinely
capture the idea that truth depends on being. I will return to this below. For now, I want to focus
on Merricks’ main points about these two theses. Merricks claims a) that they are importantly
different, b) that global TSB cannot “serve as an alternative to Truthmaker for those who think
that truth substantively depends on being” (74), but c) that worldwide local TSB loses the
primary advantages of global TSB over Truthmaker—namely, advantages having to do with
negative existentials. So, Merricks claims, the doctrine that truth supervenes on being is not
much different from Truthmaker.
This is too quick. There are two differences between global TSB and worldwide local
TSB. One is responsible for the main problems that Merricks raises for global TSB, the other is
responsible for the lost advantages. But these differences are a) dissociable from each other, and
b) don’t run as deep as Merricks seems to think.
Here is one difference. Global TSB requires that actual truths be true in worlds with
exactly the same entities and property distribution, but worldwide local TSB requires that actual
truths be true in worlds with merely at least the same entities and property distribution (73).
This is the difference that makes worldwide local TSB lose global TSB’s nice treatment of
negative existentials. As Merricks points out, worldwide local TSB would falsely entail that
there aren’t any hobbits is true in a world just like ours except for the addition of a hobbit—
unless our world contains a reified hobbit-absence or a “‘nothing more’ property” (73).
Worldwide local TSB thus requires an entity (or entities3) to serve as truthmaker for there aren’t
any hobbits. For similar reasons, it also requires that the removal of an entity always involves its
replacement with a truthmaker for the claim that said entity does not exist. Global TSB requires
no such thing, and thus has an advantage over both worldwide local TSB and Truthmaker (70-71
and 93-94).4
3
Merricks argues that worldwide local TSB differs from Truthmaker in that it does not require
single entities like states of affairs to serve as truthmakers.
4
Merricks treats these both as lost advantages and as problems for global TSB. That is, in
The second difference is that global TSB explicitly invokes possible worlds, and
worldwide local does not. In one of the most interesting and original parts of the book, Merricks
argues that this gets global TSB into trouble twice over. That’s because Merricks thinks it
matters what possible worlds are taken to be. (Pretty much everyone else who invokes global
supervenience simply assumes that it doesn’t matter; e.g. Frank Jackson 1998, 10-11.) He offers
two arguments here, the first of which is directed against all ersatzists, and the second of which
is directed against ersatzists who are also presentists. First, then, ersatzists think that worlds are
abstract representations of some sort or other. But that turns global TSB into a claim about what
abstract representations represent or entail, and “the idea that truth depends on being is not the
idea that every truth is entailed by propositions of a certain sort” (86, italics his). So, says
Merricks, ersatzists cannot think that global TSB is sufficient for the dependence of truth on
being. Second, Merricks argues that presentist ersatzists also must deny that global TSB is even
necessary for the dependence of truth on being. He says that presentist ersatzists should take
possible worlds to be possibly true propositions that are maximal with respect to propositions
that never change their truth-value (76). Let m be the proposition that Merricks exists. Because
m changes its truth-value (alas), it is not entailed by the actual world. So it is not true in the
actual world. So it is not true in every world that is just like the actual world. But, says
Merricks, it is true. Thus the counterexample to global TSB: m is true and depends on being,
but m does not globally supervene on being.
I will not comment on either of those arguments here. (Do note, though, that the second
argument turns on the surprising claim that presentists must distinguish truth from actual truth.)
I simply want to emphasize that they constitute Merricks’ reasons for rejecting global TSB in
favor of worldwide local TSB,5 and that they stem from an entirely different source than his
reasons for thinking that worldwide local TSB fares poorly with respect to negative existentials.
That a version of TSB explicitly mentions worlds has nothing to do with whether it allows actual
truths to be true in worlds just like the actual world except for the addition of more entities.
Indeed, to avoid the latter issue, all we need to do is fix worldwide local TSB so that it
says ‘all and only’ where it currently merely says ‘all’:
Worldwide local TSB2: necessarily, each true claim is such that, necessarily,
given all and only the entities that exist and the properties that each of those
entities has, then that claim is true.
That was easy. Worldwide local TSB2 allows there aren’t any hobbits to be false in a world just
like ours but for the addition of a hobbit—we do not need to postulate the actual existence of a
reified hobbit-absence. Thus this version shares the advantages that global TSB has over
Truthmaker. And we haven’t added any explicit reference to worlds. Thus far, then, it looks like
worldwide local TSB2 is winning.
But of course it isn’t winning, at least not without an awful lot more modal metaphysics.
The fact that worldwide local TSB1 and TSB2 don’t explicitly mention worlds doesn’t mean that
they escape Merricks’ concerns. They do, after all, contain two occurrences of the modal
addition to saying that global TSB has a better treatment of negative existentials than worldwide
local TSB, he criticizes it for failing to require a “bit of being” for each truth (his chapter 4, §4;
see also my §2 above). I am perplexed by this; indeed, as I suggested above, I think it is
question-begging for him to treat it as a liability.
5
Merricks actually offers four arguments, not just two. But one of the other two is the
question-begging requirement that even negative existentials be made true by a “bit of being”,
and the other is—I think—really a reason against using any kind of supervenience claim.
operator ‘necessarily’. If that operator is to be understood as a universal quantifier over worlds,
we are back where we started; as far as I can tell, Merricks’ objections above would also apply to
worldwide local TSB2 (and TSB1). So perhaps Merricks denies that the modal operators can be
understood as quantifiers over worlds. Perhaps, that is, he endorses some form of modalism (e.g.
Graeme Forbes 1989). Yet this is a controversial issue that goes unmentioned in Merricks’ book.
In sum: it looks like Merricks needs to be a modalist in order for his arguments to tell
against global TSB but not worldwide local TSB. Further, it is possible to formulate a modaloperator version of TSB so that it retains global TSB’s advantage over Truthmaker. And, finally,
we are still left with the question of whether supervenience really offers the best means of
capturing the basic truthmaking intuition. Merricks does address this (87-92), but he is primarily
concerned with the fact that necessary truths trivially satisfy both versions of TSB: they
supervene on anything whatsoever. But there are other reasons to worry that no version of the
claim that truth supervenes on being can itself guarantee that truth depends on being. For
example, supervenience is reflexive and non-symmetric, while dependence is plausibly both
irreflexive and asymmetric. And if there are any property pairs that form a partition, they
supervene (but do not depend) on each other (see McLaughlin and Bennett 2005, §3.5). But
bracketing this large, looming issue, the doctrine that truth supervenes on being remains distinct
from Truthmaker, with its own set of advantages and disadvantages.
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