Truthmaker Semantics, Disjunction, and Fundamentals

Abstract

There are two dimensions to Fine’s truthmaker semantics. One involves a claim about the nature of propositions: propositions are not structural and nothing but sets of their possible truthmakers, and the other talks about the relation between truthmaking and Boolean operations. In this paper, I show that a claim by Fine in the latter dimension—that truthmaking is distributed over “or”—faces a counterexample. I will then go on to argue that one possible way to do away with the counterexample is to restrict truthmakers to fundamentals, namely entities that are not grounded in anything else. This would, nevertheless, pose a problem for the first dimension of truthmaker semantics: certain distinct propositions would fail to be distinct.