Why truthmaking is not grounding

Abstract

It is a commonplace practice among philosophers nowadays to assimilate truthmaking into grounding. In this paper, I argue that such attempts of assimilation are not going to work. First, I will start by considering the motivations behind such attempts—(1) truthmaking and grounding are very similar relations, especially in their respective structural features, (2) both relations cannot be adequately formulated in terms of modal notions, and (3) the purported epistemic access to them is almost the same. Despite these reasonable motivations, truthmaking cannot be assimilated into a unitary notion of grounding, as grounding is open to the reduction of the grounded into the ground (but truths cannot be reduced to truthmakers), and it does not impose sufficient discriminations among the grounds of a truth so as to single out the truthmaker. Moreover, while truthmaking can be identified as a specific kind of grounding among others, such an identification does not shed light on what the truthmaking relation should be. Given the different theoretical aims of grounding and truthmaking—one is to articulate ontological dependences and the other how the non-representational makes the representational true—we should not assimilate one relation to another as a matter of principle. Finally, I will bring up the problem of what grounds grounding relations themselves as an example of how truthmaking as a distinct notion can plausibly help grounding theorists to solve their theoretical problems.