Why Should the Truthmaker Principle Be Restricted?

Abstract

According to the “truthmaker maximalism”, every true contingent proposition is made true by something in the world, called its truthmaker. Although at first sight the maximalism seems to be a natural position, it has serious difficulties, especially concerning negative truths. In view of this, many truthmaker theorists adopt some non-maximalist position. It is not clear, however, whether these non-maximalists are justified, since existing reasons to justify the non-maximalism are not good enough. In this paper, then, I shall propose a new reason for the non-maximalism, which consists in the observation that the maximalism cannot acknowledge the widely accepted view that certain inferences involving logical constants are valid in the properly logical sense.