Do Truths Need Something to Make Them True?
What Makes a Statement True?
You look around your room. You say, “My socks are blue.” That’s true. Why? Because your socks are actually blue. The world — the socks themselves — seems to make your statement true. Not so mysterious.
Then you say, “There are no pink elephants in my room.” Also true. But what, exactly, makes that true? You can’t point to an absent elephant. You can’t grab a “nothing.” Yet the statement isn’t false; it’s perfectly correct.
Philosophers call this the problem of truthmakers. A truthmaker is something in the world — some chunk of reality — that makes a statement true. For “my socks are blue,” the truthmaker seems to be the socks (with their blueness). For “there are no pink elephants,” we start to squirm. If truths need truthmakers, what sort of thing could serve as the truthmaker for a truth about what doesn’t exist?
This puzzle has driven a century-long hunt. The question isn’t just about elephants and bedrooms. It’s about whether every true statement, from “2+2=4” to “grass is green,” is tethered to something real, and what that tether even means.
The Trouble with Entailment: Too Many Makers
One early attempt to define a truthmaker used entailment. The idea: something is a truthmaker for a statement if the very existence of that thing entails (logically forces) the statement to be true. If the thing exists, the statement can’t possibly be false.
At first, that sounds tidy. If a blue sock exists, it entails that “this sock is blue” is true. But a disaster lurks. Consider a necessary truth — something that could not have been false under any circumstances, like “2+2=4.” In standard logic, anything whatsoever entails a necessary truth. If you accept that, then any object — a leftover sandwich, a snowflake, a pebble — entails that 2+2=4. By the entailment definition, that leftover sandwich becomes a truthmaker for “2+2=4.” That feels ridiculous. The sandwich has nothing to do with arithmetic.
Worse, the logician Greg Restall showed this line of thinking leads to truthmaker monism: the idea that every single thing makes every truth true. Here’s the rough path. Take any necessary truth like “Either it is raining or it is not.” Every object makes that true. Now take a random truth, “grass is green.” A truthmaker for a disjunction (an “either-or” statement) usually makes it true by making one of the disjuncts true. If an Antarctic ice floe makes “either grass is green or grass is not green” true, and grass is green, then the ice floe must make “grass is green” true. So the ice floe, picked at random, ends up making any truth true. That can’t be right.
This mess shows that truthmakers need relevance. A truthmaker for a statement should be what that statement is about. Your sandwich isn’t about arithmetic, so it shouldn’t count. Relevance is hard to define precisely, but it’s an intuitive guardrail: a truthmaker for “the cat is purring” must involve the cat and its purring, not some distant volcano.
Necessity and the Ice Floe
The Australian philosopher David Armstrong (1926–2014) took a different path. He said we shouldn’t define truthmaking with entailment — a relation between sentences — because truthmakers are chunks of the world, not sentences. He instead used necessitation: a truthmaker is something whose existence necessitates (makes unavoidable) the truth of a statement. If T exists, the statement must be true; it couldn’t be otherwise.
Armstrong argued this makes sense. Suppose you claim T is a truthmaker for “the cat is on the mat,” but T could exist while the cat is not on the mat. Then T isn’t enough; you’d need to add something else. The real truthmaker must be something that necessitates the cat’s being on the mat. So far, intuitive.
But the necessitation idea has problems. First, Armstrong’s argument for it is circular: it assumes what it’s trying to prove. Second, necessitation still over-generates. If necessary truths like “2+2=4” are necessitated by every existing thing (because they are true no matter what), then the ice floe again manages to be a truthmaker for arithmetic. Armstrong needed to add something to block that, but it’s not clear what.
There’s also a famous counterexample from the philosopher Barry Smith. Suppose God wills that John kiss Mary right now. God’s will then necessitates the truth of “John is kissing Mary.” But God’s willing act doesn’t seem to be the truthmaker for that statement — we wouldn’t say that God’s will is what makes it true in the ordinary sense; we’d say John and Mary’s actions do. So necessitation isn’t sufficiently precise either.
Some philosophers, like Jamin Asay, bite the bullet: they say, yes, the ice floe really is a truthmaker for “2+2=4,” because “truthmaker” is just a technical term for a certain theoretical job. But this feels to many like changing the subject.
Negative Truths and the World’s Biggest Fact
However we define truthmaking, the hardest challenge is negative truths: statements about what doesn’t exist or isn’t the case. “There are no dragons.” “The liquid is odourless.” “There are only five coins in my pocket.” If every truth needs a truthmaker, what worldly chunk makes these true?
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) reluctantly admitted negative facts: real ingredients of the world that correspond to absences. He found this uncomfortable — “an almost unquenchable desire” to avoid them — because they feel like ghostly non-things. And if negative facts exist, there are infinitely many of them (all the ways you aren’t), which is a heavy metaphysical price.
Armstrong tried a more parsimonious trick. He introduced the totality fact: a single special fact that says “and that’s all there is.” Imagine a master list of every first-order state of affairs (cats on mats, socks being blue, etc.). The totality fact is that this list is exhaustive — there are no extra states of affairs beyond those listed. That one fact makes true both universal claims (“all ravens are black”) and negative existentials (“there are no dragons”): because if the list contains every real thing and no dragons, then dragons don’t exist.
Critics reply: isn’t a totality fact just a negative fact in disguise? Armstrong acknowledged it involves a kind of negation — it sets a limit — but he thought we couldn’t escape negation in describing the world. Another problem: the totality fact itself seems to generate an infinite ladder: once you list all first-order states, you’ve created a second-order totality fact, which then needs to be included in a third-order one, and so on. Armstrong said these extra layers were “no addition of being” — they were free lunches — but many find that puzzling.
Not everyone agrees we must find truthmakers for negative truths. Optimalists hold that only atomic truths (basic, positive ones) need truthmakers. A negative truth like “there are no dragons” is true simply because there is no truthmaker for the opposite claim “there is at least one dragon.” Its truth is settled by the absence of a truthmaker, not by a special truthmaker of its own. The philosopher John Bigelow proposed a weaker principle: Truth Supervenes on Being. Roughly, if something is true, it couldn’t become false unless some things existed that don’t, or some things didn’t that do. That captures the idea that truth depends on the world without demanding a separate object for every negative truth.
Why Does It Matter? Cheats and Dependence
Why care about all this? One powerful motivation is catching cheaters. Imagine a theory like phenomenalism, which says the physical world is just a construction out of sense-impressions — what you see, hear, touch. The theory says true statements about unobserved objects (like a tree falling in an empty forest) are made true by complicated counterfactuals about what you would experience. But, the truthmaker idea pushes back: counterfactuals don’t float in the void. They need grounding — something that makes them true. Phenomenalism can’t provide that, so it’s suspect.
The same tweak applies to behaviourism (which defines mental states purely in terms of behavior) and presentism (the view that only the present exists). If you say, “yesterday I was happy,” presentism needs something to make that past-tensed truth true, but there’s nothing in the present to do it. Truthmaker theory diagnoses a common flaw: theories that can’t supply truthmakers for their own claims are incomplete.
But the motivation goes deeper. Many philosophers feel a primal intuition: truth depends on being. Change the world, and some truths change. This dependence seems asymmetric — the world doesn’t depend on truths in the same way. A mere pattern of co-variation (the world changes, truths change) doesn’t explain why that happens or what does the grounding. The truthmaker program tries to capture that primitive thought: when you say something true, there’s a real anchor in reality.
There’s also a deflationary twist. As Bigelow and David Lewis (1941–2001) observed, you can state a truthmaker demand without using the word “truth” at all. Just say: “If the donkey is brown, then there must be something whose existence entails that the donkey is brown.” Truth is just a handy device for generalizing over all such conditionals. So truthmaking isn’t first and foremost a theory of truth; it’s a theory of what there must be in the world.
Lewis eventually retreated even further. To avoid violating his principle that any distinct things can exist independently (no necessary connections), he preferred the idea that truths have a subject matter, and their truth value supervenes on that subject matter without needing special truthmaker objects. Others think this gives up too much — we still want to know why the supervenience holds, and an asymmetric truthmaking relation seems to answer that.
Today, the fight continues. Some philosophers try to explain truthmaking in terms of grounding — a non-causal “in virtue of” relation. Others argue grounding itself is murky. The search for truthmakers is really the search for what’s fundamental: when you strip away everything that’s just a way of talking, what actually exists? The child’s question “what makes that true?” turns out to be a doorway into the deepest parts of reality.
Think about it
- Imagine your friend says, “There’s no such thing as a perfect circle in nature.” What, if anything, could make that statement true? Does it need a truthmaker?
- If a scientist could list every existing thing in the universe and still couldn’t find a truthmaker for “there are no unicorns,” would you conclude that the statement is meaningless, or that the demand for a truthmaker is mistaken?
- Consider the claim “everything has a cause.” Does that claim need a truthmaker? If so, what sort of thing could that be, and if not, what makes it special?
