Abstract

At least for true judgments of many varieties, there are parts of reality in virtue of which such judgments are true. One important aspect of the semantics of judgments of the given sorts thus consists in the ontological investigation of these truthmaking parts of reality themselves, and of their relations to the corresponding judgments. Our starting point will be a thesis according to which an object is a truthmaker for a given judgment if the existence of the object necessitates that judgment's truth. It will be argued that the key to transforming this thesis into a serviceable definition of the truthmaker relation turns on the investigation of the special character of the truthmakers for everyday perceptual judgments. The tools which should be used in such an investigation are those of basic mereology and the theory of dependence. 1. Two Sides to Truthmaking There are two aspects of truthmaking, corresponding to the two directions of fit between judgment and reality. O...

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