谦之论坛预告 | 蒋运鹏：Defending the Incompatibility Theory of Truthmaking

Abstract

From a realistic point of view, every true proposition is made true by a piece of reality. Those who hold this view are expected to provide truthmakers for contingent negative truths. We have seen a plethora of responses to this challenge since the beginning of the 20th century. The incompatibilistic approach is one of them. Its core idea is that a truthmaker for a contingent true negative proposition <non-p> is a piece of reality that is, in a certain sense, incompatible with <p>. Traditionally, incompatibilists also hold that a truthmaker for <non-p> is a positive fact. 

This paper aims to defend the core conception of the incompatibilistic approach against two objections. First, I argue against the view according to which the incompatibility theory is defective because the theory itself makes use of the negative concept of incompatibility in accounting for the truthmaking of negative propositions. Indeed, there is no reason to believe that the incompatibility theory has to contain negative concepts. Secondly, philosophers often claim that it is difficult for the incompatibilists to provide truthmakers for contingent negative existential propositions like <There is no unicorn>. 

I argue that this objection is less threatening for the core conception of the incompatibilistic approach than it is for the traditional incompatibilists. The task of finding truthmakers for negative existential truths will become much easier for incompatibilists as soon as they disconnect their core idea from the over-intellectualized debate concerning positive and negative facts.