Danish Yearbook of Philosophy

Abstract

The problem of truthmakers for negative propositions was introduced by Bertrand Russell in 1918. Since then the debate has mostly been concerned with whether to accept or reject their existence, and little has been said about what it is that makes a negative proposition negative. This is a problem as it is obvious that you cannot just read it off from the grammar of a sentence. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that propositions may be negative or positive in many ways: it offers a typology, and shows how the question of the existence of negative facts will receive a different answer depending on its relationship to that typology.