Truth and Truthmaking in 17Th-Century Scholasticism
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Truth and Truthmaking in 17th-Century Scholasticism by Brian Embry A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Philosophy University of Toronto © Copyright by Brian Embry 2015 Truth and Truthmaking in 17th-Century Scholasticism Brian Embry Doctor of Philosophy Department of Philosophy University of Toronto 2015 Abstract Some propositions are true and others are false. What explains this difference? Some philosophers have recently defended the view that a proposition is true because there is an entity, its truthmaker, that makes it true. Call this the ‘truthmaker principle’. The truthmaker principle is controversial, occasioning the rise of a large contemporary debate about the nature of truthmaking and truthmakers. What has gone largely unnoticed is that scholastics of the early modern period also had the notion of a truthmaker [verificativum], and this notion is at the center of early modern scholastic disputes about the ontological status of negative entities, the past and future, and uninstantiated essences. My project is to explain how early modern scholastics conceive of truthmaking and to show how they use the notion of a truthmaker to regiment ontological enquiry. I argue that the notion of a truthmaker is born of a certain conception of truth according to which truth is a mereological sum of a true mental sentence and its intentional object. This view entails the truthmaker principle and is responsible for some surprising metaphysical views. For example, it leads many early modern scholastics to posit irreducible negative entities as truthmakers for negative truths, giving rise to an extensive literature on the nature of negative entities. In order to find truthmakers for the so-called eternal truths, such as ‘A human being is an animal’, some philosophers claim that individual essences distinct from and independent of God necessarily have being from eternity. ii Other early modern scholastics reject these extravagant views; they argue that only positive, present tense truths are made true by existing things. This view is motivated jointly by (i) a distinctive theory of truth bearers, (ii) a common sense view of the truth conditions for negative, tensed, and modal truths, and (iii) the idea that truths are about their truthmakers. I argue that this view has significant philosophical consequences and should be attractive to those who think both that truth is grounded in being and that not every truth has a truthmaker. iii Acknowledgments This dissertation has benefited tremendously from the feedback of many patient readers, including Martin Pickavé, Marleen Rozemond, Jessica Wilson, Peter King, Adam Murray, Elena Derksen, Daniel Rabinoff, James Davies, Sydney Penner, Stephan Schmid, Megan Embry, audience members at the 2014 Toronto Colloquium in Mediaeval Philosophy, and audience members at the 2012 Toronto-Berlin Workshop in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy. I owe special thanks to Megan Embry, not only a patient reader but also a patient spouse who provided much more than feedback. Material from chapter five also appears in Brian Embry, “An Early Modern Scholastic Theory of Negative Entities: Thomas Compton Carleton on Lacks, Negations, and Privations,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 23, no. 1 (2014): 22-45. Material from chapters three and four will also appear in Brian Embry, “Truth and Truthmakers in Early Modern Scholasticism,” Journal of the American Philosophical Association, forthcoming. iv Table of Contents Abbreviations ix Note on Translations xi Introduction 1 Part I 1 Truthmaking 13 1.1 Motivation 13 1.2 A “Cross-Categorial” Relation 21 1.3 Necessitation 22 1.3.1 Alleged Problems With Necessitation 24 1.4 Many-Many 27 1.5 Relevance 30 1.6 Summing Up 33 2 Medieval Background 34 2.1 Correspondence and Aquinas 35 2.2 The Sophisma, ‘Omnis homo de necessitate est animal’ 41 2.3 Verificare and Verificatio 45 2.4 Complexe Significabile 49 2.5 Chatton’s Principle 58 3 Truth in 17th-Century Scholasticism 66 3.1 The Monadic Property View and the Real Relation View 72 3.2 Suárez’s Legacy: The Semi-Extrinsic Denomination View and the Connotation View 77 v 3.2.1 The Semi-Extrinsic Denomination View 79 3.2.2 Denominations 80 3.2.3 The Composite View and Truthmaking 89 3.3 The Connotation View 91 3.4 Conclusion: Truth and Conformity 97 4 The Standard Account of Truthmaking 103 4.1 The Standard Account 103 4.2 Departures from the Standard Account 113 Part II 5 Negative Truths 115 5.1 Carentism 116 5.1.1 “How can any existent really be negative?” 122 5.1.2 Individuating Lacks 126 5.1.3 “What, though, is a non-hippopotamus, and where exactly in the room is it?” 130 5.1.4 Lacks, Privations, and Their Subjects 134 5.1.5 Theological Objections 138 5.1.6 A Difficulty for the Hypothesis of Negative Entities 143 5.2 Incompatibilism 151 Excursus: Contemporary Objections 155 5.3 Nihilism 161 5.3.1 Peinado’s Theory of Truth: A First Pass 162 5.3.2 Peinado on Negative Truths 164 vi 5.3.3 Motivating Peinado’s Truthmaker Principle: The Intentional Mode View of Affirmation and Negation 170 5.3.4 Motivating the Aboutness Constraint and the Intentional Mode View of Negation 176 Excursus on Mauro 179 5.3.5 Peinado’s Theory of Truth 179 5.4 Conclusion 187 6 Future Contingents 189 6.1 Denying Future? 191 6.2 Denying Presentism 194 6.3 Denying Independence 204 6.4 Modifying Truthmaker 213 6.4.1 Peinado’s Motivation for the Wide-Base Truthmaker Principle 216 Excursus on Oaklander’s Theory of Tense 223 6.4.2 Wide-Base Truthmaking and Peinado’s Theory of Truth 224 6.5 Conclusion 228 7 Eternal Truths 230 7.1 Realist Essentialism 231 7.1.1 Essentialism and Truthmaking 233 7.1.2 Essential Being 239 7.1.3 Theological Objections 248 7.2 Conceptualist Essentialism 252 7.3 Truthmaker Theism 259 7.4 Francisco Peinado on Merely Possible Truthmakers 275 vii 7.4.1 Super Wide-Base Truthmaking and Peinado’s Theory of Truth 285 7.5 Conclusion 288 Excursus: Peinado’s Account of Truthmaking 290 8 Conclusion 298 Works Cited: Primary Sources 304 Works Cited: Contemporary Sources 310 viii Abbreviations Used in Citations ch. Chapter concl. Conclusion contr. Controversy cst. Consectarium cv. Controversy d. Disputation diss. Dissertation div. Division dub. Dubium fn. Footnote lib. Book n. Number p. Page princ. Principle prop. Proposition pt. Point s. Section subs. Subsection t. Tractatus ix Abbreviations for Aquinas’s Works QDV Questiones disputatae de veritate SCG Summa contra gentiles ST Summa theologiae In I Sent. Scriptum super libros sententiarum, in primum librum De ente De ente et essentia In meta. In duodecim libros Metaphysicorum Aristotelis expositio Abbreviations for Ockham’s Works Expos. Praedicam. Expositio in librum Praedicamentorum Aristotelis Quodl. Quodlibeta OP Opera philosophica Abbreviations for Suárez’s Works DM Disputationes Metaphysicae, vols. 25-26 in Opera omnia x A Note on Translations All translations are my own except in a few cases where a translation is cited. I provide the Latin in the footnotes. In reproducing the Latin, I sometimes alter the original punctuation to make the sentence structure more perspicuous. xi INTRODUCTION The notion of a truthmaker has recently gained such prominence in metaphysics that Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra has called truthmaker theory “one of the most important metaphysical topics of the late 20th-century and early 21st-century philosophy.”1 At a first approximation, a truthmaker is something that makes a proposition true. As D. M. Armstrong and Ross Cameron explain: The idea of a truthmaker for a particular truth, then, is just some existent, some portion of reality, in virtue of which that truth is true.2 When there is truth, there must be some thing (or things) to account for that truth: some thing(s) that couldn’t exist and the true proposition fail to be true. That is the truthmaker principle. True propositions are made true by entities in the mind- independently existing external world.3 For example, Obama is the portion of reality in virtue of which it is true that Obama exists, so Obama is the truthmaker for that proposition. There are also non-trivial examples of truthmakers. The fact that Obama is tall, for example, might be the truthmaker for the proposition that Obama is tall.4 Advocates tout truthmaker theory as a good way to regiment ontological inquiry—to find out what our ontological commitments are by way of what we take to be truthmakers for various sorts of truths. There are many questions we might raise about truthmaker theory, and I raise them in subsequent chapters, but for now I want to focus on the history of the notion of a truthmaker. 1 “Truthmakers,” 186. For more on truthmaking, see Armstrong, Truth and Truthmakers; Merricks, Truth and Ontology; Beebee and Dodd, Truthmakers: The Contemporary Debate; Lowe and Rami, eds., Truth and Truth-Making; Mulligan, Simons, and Smith, “Truth-Makers.” 2 Armstrong, Truth and Truthmakers, 5. 3 Cameron, “How To Be a Truthmaker Maximalist,” 410. 4 In the contemporary literature one may sometimes find it said that the claim that the fact that p makes it true that p is a trivial claim. In my view, no claim is trivial if it entails something controversial, and “the fact that p makes it true that p” entails the controversial claim that there are facts. At any rate, I am prepared to grant that “the fact that p makes it true that p” is trivial if you are prepared to grant that it is true. For the triviality objection, see Peter Forrest and Drew Khlentzos, “Introduction: Truth Maker and Its Varieties,” 8.