Truthmakers, Entailment and Necessity

“Truthmakers, Entailment and Necessity,” Australian Journal of Philosophy, 74 (1996) 331–340.

A truthmaker for a proposition p is an object such that necessarily, if it exists, then p is true. In this paper, I show that the truthmaker thesis (that every truth has a truthmaker) and the disjunction thesis (that a truthmaker for a disjunction must be a truthmaker for one of the disjuncts) are jointly incompatible with the view that the if in the truthmaking clause is a merely material conditional. I then defend the disjunction thesis, and go on to argue that a relevant conditional will serve well in place of the material conditional in defining what it is to be a truthmaker. Conversely, I argue that a semantics involving truthmakers could shed some light on the interpretation of relevant implication.