Professor Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra

A truthmaker of a certain proposition is an entity in virtue of which that proposition is true. Truthmaker maximalism is the thesis that every truth has at least one truthmaker.

Mark Jago recently provided a beautiful, simple, and short argument for truthmaker maximalism (Jago 2020). The argument can be called ‘Fitchian’ since it mimics Fitch’s argument that all knowable truths are known. Jago’s argument has deservedly generated a considerable amount of discussion. That discussion has generated a few other Fitchian arguments, one for truthmaker maximalism or something very similar to it (Jago 2021), one that can be adapted as an argument for truthmaker maximalism (Loss 2021), and one for truthmaker non-maximalism (Trueman 2021). I shall show that those arguments fail to establish their intended conclusions.

Those arguments fail to establish their intended conclusions because they beg the question against the negations of their intended conclusions. Three of those arguments are also invalid. My take on Jago’s arguments will be original in that I shall concentrate on a premise that has been completely ignored in the discussion of those arguments. Indeed, all the discussion about Jago’s arguments, including Jago’s original paper, has concentrated on one particular premise, the controversial premise that, for every truth, it is logically possible that it has a truthmaker (Jago 2021, Trueman 2021, Nyseth 2022, Stigall 2023, Small 2024). I shall say nothing about this premise.