Fine - guide to ground.pdf - Ted Sider

11
will the fact that Socrates exists be a truth-maker for the proposition that singleton Socrates exists, the
fact that singleton Socrates exists will be a truth-maker for the proposition that Socrates exists. Thus
whereas the form of the relata makes truth-making too restrictive, the nature of the relation makes it too
liberal.
It is conceivable that the restrictions on the relata were a way for compensating for the
deficiencies in the relation. For if P were taken to be a truth-maker for Q whenever P necessitated Q,
then every truth would trivially be a truth-maker for itself. By insisting that the grounds should take the
form of something that exists and that what is grounded should take the form of something that is true,
we avoid trivializations of this sort; and we can even ensure that the relation be irreflexive and anti-
symmetric, since the objects to the right and left of the relation will be of different type.
But we have here a mere chimera of substantiality. Indeed, on certain quite plausible
metaphysical views, there will still exist wholesale trivializations of the truth-making project. One
might well think, for example, that for any truth p, the fact that p will exist and will require the truth of
p for its existence. The fact that p will then be a truth-maker for any true proposition p. Or one might
think that the world exists and could not exist without being the way it is. The world would then be a
truth-maker for any true proposition. But such innocuous metaphysical views cannot legitimately be
regarded as enabling us to find a truth-maker for every truth.
The notion of truth-making is thoroughly ill-suited to the task for which it was intended: it
arbitrarily restricts the relata between which the relation should be capable of holding; it does not allow
truth-making connections to be chained; and it trivializes the project of finding truth-makers. Perhaps
the best that can be said in its favor is that it provides a necessary condition for the intended relation: if
P genuinely grounds Q then the fact that P will be a truth-maker for the proposition that Q. It is
therefore possible that, by looking for truth-makers and guided by a sense of what is really in question,