Truthmaking, metaethics, and creeping minimalism

Truthmaking, metaethics, and creeping minimalism

Jamin Asay

Published online: 11 September 2011

� Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

Abstract Creeping minimalism threatens to cloud the distinction between realist

and anti-realist metaethical views. When anti-realist views equip themselves with

minimalist theories of truth and other semantic notions, they are able to take on

more and more of the doctrines of realism (such as the existence of moral truths,

facts, and beliefs). But then they start to look suspiciously like realist views. I

suggest that creeping minimalism is a problem only if moral realism is understood

primarily as a semantic doctrine. I argue that moral realism is better understood

instead as a metaphysical doctrine. As a result, we can usefully regiment the

metaethical debate into one about moral truthmakers: In virtue of what are moral

judgments true? I show how the notion of truthmaking has been simmering just

below the surface of the metaethical debate, and how it reveals one metaethical

view (quasi-realism) to be a stronger contender than the others.

Keywords Deflationism � Truth � Truthmaking � Moral realism � Quasi-realism

1 Introduction

Creeping minimalism is a problem for metaethics. The threat it poses is that we may

have no tenable grasp on what is at stake between moral realists and their

opponents. The problem comes to the fore especially when we recognize the

strength of the quasi-realist program, and just how peculiar its standard is for

success. Quasi-realists seek to mimic the intellectual practices and views of their

realist opponents (Blackburn 1980). The more successful the quasi-realist pro-

gram is the more quasi-realism resembles realism. So the stronger the case is for

J. Asay (&)

Department of Philosophy, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,

Campus Box 3125, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3125, USA

e-mail: [email protected]

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Philos Stud (2013) 163:213–232

DOI 10.1007/s11098-011-9808-0

quasi-realism, the more difficult the case is for distinguishing it from realism. The

problem of creeping minimalism appears when views like the deflationary theory of

truth enter the scene (e.g., Horwich 1990). Once we acknowledge the merits of

deflationary or minimalist views on truth, we are led to acknowledge the merits

of minimalist approaches to related things like propositions, reference, belief, and

facts. In so doing, we begin to embrace everything that the realist originally

embraced, and lose any grasp on just what is supposed to be at issue.

My view is that the problem of creeping minimalism can be solved, but that we

must do so by framing the debate over moral realism as a distinctly metaphysical

one: since moral realism is a metaphysical thesis, it should not be understood in

either psychological or semantic terms. Semantic minimalism is a problem for

moral realism only if moral realism turns on semantic issues. Fortunately, it does

not. Accordingly, I propose that we understand the question of moral realism in

terms of moral truthmakers and truthmaking—what is it that makes moral

judgments true, and how do they do it? Truthmaker theory provides the needed

metaphysical approach required by moral realism. The goal of this paper is to

defend the idea that the debate over moral realism is a debate about the truthmakers

for moral judgments—about the ontological grounds that underlie the truths about

morality—and in so doing show how we can avoid the problem of creeping

minimalism.

To begin, I present the problem of creeping minimalism and canvass some of

the existing solutions to it. To set up my own solution, I turn to a distinctly

metaphysical conception of the moral realism debate, and show how it successfully

captures the metaethical terrain. I then offer my positive solution to the problem of

creeping minimalism, which depends on viewing the question of moral realism in

terms of moral truthmakers and truthmaking. To conclude, I show how truthmaker

theory not only reclaims the debate from the clutch of creeping minimalism, but

advances it as well, by showing how quasi-realism best answers our questions about

moral truthmakers.

2 Dreier on creeping minimalism

James Dreier is responsible for much of the attention that creeping minimalism has

received,1 and describes it as follows:

Minimalism sucks the substance out of heavy-duty metaphysical concepts. If

successful, it can help expressivism recapture the ordinary realist language of

ethics. But in so doing it also threatens to make irrealism indistinguishable

from realism. That is the problem of Creeping Minimalism. (Dreier 2004,

p. 26).

If truth is not a substantive property of propositions, then all it is for the proposition,

say, that torture is wrong to be true is just for torture to be wrong. So much for the

question of whether truth consists in conformity with reality, useful belief, or

1 Though it is anticipated by Zangwill (1992).

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systematic coherence. But what is a proposition? The minimalist about propositions

says that just as ‘is true’ is a handy appendage we can add to sentences, so too may

I tack ‘the proposition that’ onto some sentence, thereby creating a singular term

useful for other purposes. Since I can meaningfully discuss whether torture is

wrong, I can just as easily meaningfully discuss whether the proposition that torture

is wrong is true. But (it is claimed), I do not here engage in any extra ontological

commitment to entities called ‘‘propositions’’. A minimalist about facts just says

that it’s a fact that torture is wrong just in case torture is wrong. Torture is wrong,

and so there are ethical facts. Next, am I willing to assert sincerely that torture is

wrong? Yes, and so I believe that torture is wrong (so says the minimalist about

belief).2 We can even do the same for properties, if we conceive of properties as

being little more than predicates. If torture is wrong, then there is a moral property:

wrongness.

Very quickly, we see that ethical propositions, truths, facts, properties, and

beliefs are very easily earned by the minimalist. But such things, during what Dreier

calls the ‘‘Good old days’’, were the cruces that kept realists and anti-realists

separate. Emotivists denied that there were ethical propositions (and hence none of

the rest, either). Error theorists admitted ethical propositions, but denied that there

were ethical properties, and so denied the existence of any truths or facts that

required them. Some contemporary ethical expressivists allow ethical truths, but

deny that our assertions of them express beliefs. Once we open the minimalist

floodgate, we appear to lose sight of what distinguishes realists from anti-realists.

For minimalists are entitled to say that there are moral truths, moral facts, moral

propositions, and moral beliefs (at least provided that they have some moral

commitments, such as to torture’s being wrong). Given that deflationism is now a

solid plank in the quasi-realist platform,3 one wonders if quasi-realism has become

too successful: in attempting to mimic realism, it has just become realism.

In deference both to ordinary ethical practice—which the parties to the debate

seem to agree manifests the surface trappings of realism—and to objections in the

wake of the writings of P.T. Geach (1960, 1965), contemporary ethical anti-realists

have sought to maintain that they too may earn the appearances of realist-sounding

ethical discourse. The key to doing so seems to be embracing minimalism about the

central notions. To save the ethical phenomena, then, anti-realists turn to

minimalism.4 But in so doing, they appear to turn into realists. (For realists are

equally entitled to semantic minimalism, as it can be motivated for independent

reasons.) The more the quasi-realism program is successful (such that it better and

better reclaims the hallmarks of realism), the less it remains a distinctive view. The

problem of creeping minimalism threatens to undermine a distinction at the very

center of metaethical thought. As Dreier puts it: ‘‘those of us who feel confident that

2 Gibbard explicitly endorses such a view of beliefs at his 2003, pp. 182–183, as do Horgan and

Timmons (2006, p. 93) and Ridge (2009).3 See, e.g., Blackburn (1998) and (2006a, p. 160). Cf. Schroeder (2008, p. 161) and (2010, p. 155).4 But see Dunaway (2010) for an argument to the effect that expressivists cannot help themselves to a

global minimalist semantics.

Truthmaking, metaethics, and creeping minimalism 215

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there is some difference between the two meta-ethical camps should be concerned

that we don’t know how to say what that difference is’’ (2004, p. 31).

There is one option, albeit it an unattractive one, that a theorist might take for

drawing the difference. That option is to bifurcate each of the various notions.5

Truth is one thing; TRUTH is another. Some sentences express propositions; others

express PROPOSITIONS. We have lots of beliefs; only some of these are BELIEFS. The

lowercase words denote the minimalist versions, whereas, the uppercase words

denote the non-minimalist versions. The distinction between the quasi-realist and

the realist might now be understood as follows: The quasi-realist thinks that we can

have moral beliefs that, when true, express true moral propositions. By contrast, the

realist thinks that we can have moral BELIEFS that, when TRUE, express TRUE moral

PROPOSITIONS. The bifurcation strategy is a fairly heroic one, requiring metaethicists,

realist or not, to accept the prima facie implausible claim that terms like ‘truth’,

‘belief’, and the others are ambiguous, and then in turn to give both minimalist and

non-minimalist theories for each of the notions in question. But, more fundamen-

tally, the strategy does not even fit the spirit of minimalism, and so no minimalist

should adopt it in order to draw the realism/anti-realism distinction. Take a

minimalist about truth. Minimalists think that there is very little to say about truth;

all that needs to be said is exhausted by the Tarskian truth schema (i.e., ‘p’ is true if

and only if p). Accordingly, minimalists think that there is very little to do in giving

an account of truth, let alone giving accounts of two separate notions of truth.

Minimalists do not develop a new notion of truth to rest alongside another, separate

non-minimalist notion. Minimalists seeks to deflate truth altogether, not make room

for two distinct kinds of truth. The bifurcation strategy does not fit the minimalist’s

ambitions, and so cannot be used by minimalists to reclaim the differences between

realists and anti-realists.

So what is the difference between realism and anti-realism? Dreier considers

three answers (drawing from O’Leary-Hawthorne and Price 1996, Fine 2001, and

Gibbard 2003) and adopts a hybridization of the proffered accounts that he calls

‘‘the ‘‘explanation’’ explanation’’ (2004, p. 39). The idea is that what distinguishes

realists from anti-realists is how they go about explaining the existence of our moral

beliefs. Suppose that Obama believes that torture is wrong. Then the following is

true:

(A) Obama believes that torture is wrong.

Realists and anti-realists can agree that ‘Torture is wrong’ expresses a true moral

proposition and that Obama really does believe it. The difference comes in how they

explain the truth of A. The realist must explain A by demonstrating there to be some

relationship between Obama, torture, and wrongness. The anti-realist does so

without resorting to wrongness. Gibbard, for example, would say that the truth of

A is explained by the planning state that Obama is in that has resulted in Obama’s

thinking that the thing to do is not to torture. Wrongness itself gets left out of the

anti-realists’ explanation, even though their minimalism about properties leads them

to agree with realists that there is a property of wrongness.

5 Timmons (1999) comes closest to such a view.

216 J. Asay

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Here is how Dreier summarizes his response to the problem:

Crucial to maintaining the distinction, in meta-ethics, in the twenty-first

century, between realism and irrealism is the possibility that concepts (and

meanings) can differ in ways other than by their content. Or, if the difference

between normative (or evaluative, or ‘‘planning’’) concepts and descriptive

(naturalistic) ones can also be stated as a difference in content, then at least it

must be a comprehensible, substantive question whether the difference in

concept is explained by (or if you prefer amounts to no more than) a difference

in content, on the one hand, or rather it is explained by (amounts to) something

else entirely, which in turn explains the difference in content. The divide

between realism and irrealism, at least in meta-ethics, rests on the substance of

questions about metaphysical explanation. (2004, p. 42).

According to Dreier, the realist and anti-realist need not disagree as to the content of

A. When they both maintain its truth, they are agreeing on the exact same claim. If

they do disagree as to the content of such claims, then that difference must admit of

some realism-relevant metaphysical explanation. I agree wholeheartedly, in some

sense or other, with Dreier’s claim that the divide between realism and anti-realism

is a question about metaphysical explanation. The solution I will be defending might

plausibly be described as a (certain kind of) explanatory solution.

Still, I worry that the ‘‘explanation’’ explanation does not cut it. We first need to

notice what should long ago have been accepted as plain Moorean fact, namely, that

requests for explanations are deeply sensitive to context and pragmatic interests. For

any given datum—such as the truth of A—there are several explanatory demands

that may be asked of it.6 It is too simple to think that there is some single, privileged

explanation. Because of the plurality of explanatory requests that may be raised by

A, it is difficult to see why wrongness could not figure into any of them. Given that

our contemporary expressivist is happy to say that there is a property of wrongness,

it will be perfectly acceptable to use it in explaining things that involve it. There are

other explanations on hand, for sure. But that is true of any explanatory project.

Hence I doubt that relying on a model of explanation is the key to saving the

differences between moral realism and anti-realism. It seems likely that explanatory

resources involving moral properties are just one more thing that minimalism will

make available to both sides of the chasm.7

6 It is simply evident that there is no single explanatory request for some simple truth, say, that Adam ate

the apple. Why did Adam eat the apple? Why did Adam eat the apple? Why did Adam eat the apple? For

a single truth, we have several explanations, depending on the contrast class generated by the request.

Which explanation is appropriate is a matter that must be settled (at least in part) by context. See chapter

5 of van Fraassen (1980) for a canonical presentation of this sort of approach to explanation.7 See Chrisman (2008) for more criticism of Dreier’s proposal. He thinks Dreier’s suggestion ultimately

falls prey to creeping minimalism after all. Chrisman goes on to offer an inferentialist option for drawing

the debate between realism and anti-realism (see also Chrisman 2009). I fear that his proposal, which

relies on a distinction between theoretical and practical commitments, will likewise fall prey to the

creeping minimalist. Why can’t ethical commitments be theoretical? Can we not have a theory of ethics,

in the relevant sense? Given my commitment to moral realism being a metaphysical thesis, my view

predicts that any psychological or semantic basis for the distinction, including Chrisman’s, will fail to be

sufficient for properly grounding the debate.


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Blackburn himself has given some hint as to how he might draw the distinction

between realists and quasi-realists. After acknowledging the usefulness of

minimalism for quasi-realism, Blackburn concedes that, in order to stop the threat

of creeping minimalism, ‘‘the expressivist has to deny that minimalism applies

across the board’’ (Blackburn 2006a, p. 160). Specifically, quasi-realists should not

be minimalists about representation, such that where realists think that moral

judgments represent, quasi-realists do not (though quasi-realists might think that

non-moral judgments do represent).8 Blackburn, in effect, wants minimalism to start

creeping, but stop before it gets to representation. But it’s not obvious that the quasi-

realist can draw the line here without being ad hoc, nor that the quasi-realist should

even want to draw that line in the first place. If the point of quasi-realism is to mimic

realism, then quasi-realists should want to accept, alongside the realist, that ‘Torture

is wrong’ represents the wrongness of torture (or the fact that torture is wrong) just

as much as ‘Snow is white’ represents the whiteness of snow (or the fact that snow

is white). After all, quasi-realists have in their toolkits moral facts and properties,

and so it’s no giant step for them to allow that our moral judgments represent those

things. If there were a way for quasi-realists to distinguish themselves from realists

without compromising their minimalism, then they should seek it out. In what

follows, I offer them precisely that option.

3 Truthmakers for moral truths

My alternative suggestion is that we employ truthmaker theory in order to

appreciate what is at stake in the metaethical debate. My view is not simply that

realists believe that moral judgments have truthmakers, whereas anti-realists believe

that they do not. To the contrary, both realists and anti-realists may make use of

truthmaker theory. In order to understand why a view should be thought of as realist

or anti-realist, we need to attend to the kinds of truthmakers that the view employs,

and how it understands the relationship that obtains between those truthmakers and

the moral judgments they make true.

Before getting to my positive view, I suggest that we consider some preliminary

and uncontroversial thoughts about metaethics in general. Metaethics is the branch

of philosophy that asks philosophical questions about the domain of ethical thought

and practice. There are a variety of kinds of philosophical questions, and so there

are a variety of kinds of metaethical questions. We might ask about the metaphysics

underlying ethical thought, or the epistemology behind it. We might ask questions

about how ethical language works, or about what it is to have ethical beliefs. We

might ask about the psychology of moral judgment, or even about the neurobiology

behind it. There is, in other words, a multiplicity of metaethical projects. Some of

those projects have already been adequately isolated—take moral epistemology, for

instance. But although there is a plurality of various metaethical projects, this

plurality disappears from sight when the traditional metaethical views are

adumbrated. We speak of the error theorist, the realist, the expressivist. But with

8 See also Blackburn (1998, pp. 77–83; 2002).

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which of the various metaethical projects are these theories engaged? All of them?

Certainly not. Just some of them? If so, then which ones?

My suspicion is that the traditional metaethical views have simultaneously been

giving accounts of the metaphysics and the philosophy of language behind ethical

thought, but without attending too carefully to the distinction. There is a perfectly

natural explanation for this fusion. Expressivism was born from positivism and

verificationism, views that sought to eradicate metaphysical inquiry and replace it

with the analysis of language. Dummett’s influential verificationism was an attempt

to redefine debates about realism in semantic terms. Nowadays, we are more

inclined to keep our metaphysical and semantic ducks in their respective rows

(which is not to deny that they inform one another).9 Now, if creeping minimalism

poses a problem for understanding the debate in metaethics, we need first to ask:

which debate? The one over the metaphysics of ethical thought, or the one about the

nature of ethical language? If we hope to solve the problem of creeping minimalism,

we need to keep those two metaethical projects separate.

I believe that we should understand moral realism as a distinctively metaphysical

thesis. Moral realism is about moral reality, and reality is the domain of

metaphysics. Whatever divides realists from anti-realists should have something to

do with reality, something that can cut metaphysical ice. What the problem of

creeping minimalism shows is that semantic or psychological notions like belief and

truth cannot do the job. My suggestion is that the way to study metaphysics and

ontology is to be engaged in the search for truthmakers for the truths we accept.

Hence, the way to understand what is at stake between various metaethical views (in

the metaphysical subdomain of metaethics) is to understand how they give differing

accounts of what makes moral judgments true, and how they do so.

Truthmaker theory is the branch of metaphysics that pursues ontological

questions by asking: what is it in virtue of which some truth is true?10 Truthmaker

theorists accept that truth is not a brute feature of reality; when some truth bearer is

true, it owes its truth to something in the world. Had the truth bearer been false, then

the world must have been different in some way. For example, the true proposition

that there are penguins is made true by each and every existing penguin. Had the

proposition been false, then the world would have to have been different: there

would have to have been no penguins around. Truthmaker theorists approach

metaphysical inquiry by offering truthmakers for the truths that we accept. A fully

developed theory of truthmakers will include an account of just what the

truthmaking relation is, which truths have truthmakers, and what sorts of objects

in fact play the truthmaking role. Each of these aspects of truthmaker theory is

9 For example, Mark Schroeder’s recent work (Schroeder 2008, 2010) on expressivism is first and

foremost engaged with the semantic possibilities open to expressivists. (Schroeder himself is explicit

about this at his 2010, p. 3). My interests, by contrast, are fundamentally metaphysical. Though

traditionally expressivist theories of ethical language have gone hand in hand with anti-realist

metaphysical theories of ethics, they are now sometimes paired with realist theories. See, e.g., Copp’s

realist expressivism (2007) and Ridge’s ecumenical expressivism (2009). As a result, the distinction

between realists and quasi-realists can no longer be drawn in terms of the latter’s expressivist philosophy

of moral language. A distinctly metaphysical way of drawing the distinction is needed.10 Armstrong (2004) is a locus classicus.


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controversial, and we may set aside those internal disputes for our purposes. Suffice

it to say that a truth’s truthmaker is something in virtue of which it is true. The truth

in some sense depends upon the existence of its truthmaker. I shall argue that we

may constructively view the metaethical debate through the lens of truthmaker

theory.11 Let us see how truthmakers can be put to work in understanding the main

positions in metaethics.

Realists (of either naturalistic or non-naturalistic stripe) can be understood as

offering moral facts and/or properties (of either naturalistic or non-naturalistic

origin) to serve as the ontological basis for moral truths.12 For a non-naturalistic

realist like Moore (1903) or Shafer-Landau (2003), moral truths depend on the

existence of an independent realm of moral facts and properties. For naturalists like

Railton (1986) and Boyd (1988), moral truths depend on the existence of wholly

natural facts and properties. Moral relativists offer something along the lines of

moral frameworks, or sets of sociological facts to serve as truthmakers for moral

judgments. Subjectivists and egoists point to certain psychological facts about

themselves that make moral judgments true. On such views, what makes it true that

torture is wrong is whatever makes it true that I don’t like torture, or whatever

makes it true that torturing is not in my best interest. Other moral anti-realists avoid

having to posit moral truthmakers at all because they reject the existence of any

moral truth, due either to their non-cognitivism (Ayer 1952) or error theory (Mackie

1977).13

11 The language of truthmaking does surface here and there in metaethics, though in a way that is clearly

disengaged from the ‘‘truthmaking industry’’ alive and well in contemporary metaphysics. See Blackburn

(1986), Milo (1995), Bloomfield (2003, p. 513), Shafer-Landau (2003, pp. 15 and 48), and Horgan and

Timmons (2006) for some instances.12 We must be extremely careful about how we wield ‘fact’, given that facts are the sort of thing that get

swept up by creeping minimalism. Everyone can admit that there is a sense of the word ‘fact’ that is

synonymous with ‘truth’, such that ‘It’s a truth that snow is white’ and ‘It’s a fact that snow is white’ are

synonymous. This is the ‘‘minimal’’ or ‘‘linguistic’’ conception of facthood that all can admit. Granting

that there is this sense, however, in no way erases the debate over whether there are such things as (the

other kind of) facts posited by realists. Here we have a metaphysical conception of facts, such that facts

are things that exist in the world. Armstrong (1997) calls them ‘states of affairs’, Mellor (1995) calls them

‘facta’, and Russell (1985) just calls them ‘facts’. On Armstrong’s picture, for example, facts are

compound objects composed non-mereologically of universals and particulars. They are entities that exist

or don’t (not truth bearers that are true or false). The semantic minimalist has earned the right to there

being moral facts in the first sense, just as anyone else has who has earned the right to speak of moral

truth. But the minimalist has in no way earned any moral facts in the metaphysical sense of Russell,

Mellor, or Armstrong. It is misleading to say, without disambiguation, that anti-realists can agree with

moral realists that there are moral facts. There is no more agreement here (if the realist adopts moral facts

as entities) than there is when you and I ‘‘agree’’ that there are banks, while you’re thinking of the Danube

and I’m thinking of Wall Street. In essence, we have two conceptions of facts. There is the linguistic

conception of facts as truths, and the metaphysical conception of facts as truthmakers. These are just

different kinds of beasts, and we should not conflate them. Realists and (cognitivist, non-error-theoretic)

anti-realists are agreed that there is the first kind of moral fact. What they disagree about is whether we

need the second kind to make true the first kind.13 Some metaethical views do not fare so well when answering truthmaking questions. Here I have in

mind various forms of constructivism (e.g., Milo 1995) and superassertibilism (Wright 1992, 1995) that

account for moral truth in terms of counterfactuals (about what an ideal observer would judge, or about

what would be warranted in a state of full information). These views push our question back a step: in

virtue of what are those counterfactuals true? That’s the question that needs to be answered if we are to

understand whether the views are realist or not.

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4 Truthmakers, realism, and the new solution

We have now seen how various metaethical views, realist and anti-realist alike, can

answer our question of what makes moral judgments true. Now, it is one thing to say

what a certain metaethical view takes to be the truthmakers for moral judgments. It

is another thing to say why that view counts as being on one side or the other of the

realism/anti-realism divide. I do not pretend to be able to offer a precise analysis of

what exactly the difference is between realism and anti-realism for every realism

debate in philosophy. I suspect, at the end of the day, that the various forms of

realism across philosophy admit of family resemblance at best, though I do think we

can profitably understand much about realism (and our inclinations to put views on

one side of the divide rather than the other) by thinking in terms of truthmakers. So

why do we consider the standard moral realist theories to be realist, and the other

theories to be anti-realist? What is it about their attitudes toward truthmaking that

explains the distinction?

We consider the two species of moral realism to be realist theories because of the

nature of the truthmakers they offer. The kinds of facts and properties posited by

realists are classic examples of mind-independent facts and properties. These are

things that do not depend on us in any relevant way for their existence. By contrast,

the facts pointed to by relativists and subjectivists are mind-dependent in the

relevant way. If, say, kicking dogs is wrong simply because I or my cohorts believe

it is wrong, then the truth of this moral proposition depends crucially on facts about

us and our desires. Hence, we tend to separate such views from their realist

competitors. What we’re tracking when we track the realism/anti-realism divide

often has something to do with mind-independence (see Devitt 1984). Realists think

that the truths of a domain are true in virtue of a mind-independent reality. Anti-

realists think that the truths of a domain (if there even are any) are true in virtue of

some mind-dependent reality, or perhaps in virtue of nothing at all. Now, whether

we can offer a tenable, precise notion of mind-independence is an important

question.14 But this is a general worry for realism debates (and one not having

anything to do with creeping minimalism). If we do suppose that the debates are

meaningful, then they are profitably understood in terms of truthmakers, in terms of

the ontological grounds on which moral truth depends. If a view stumbles on our

truthmaking question, it has yet to answer what it is in the world on which moral

truths depend. As a result, the views have not yet said anything about the reality (if

any) that is needed to support moral truth. Until we are given such an account, we

are free to chasten such views for not yet taking a stand on moral realism: they

haven’t yet said what the metaphysical implications are for moral truths.15

Now, notice that the story I have told about the truthmakers for moral truths is

free of any semantic notions. I made no mention of correspondence or deflationary

views of truth, or about the nature of beliefs and propositions. My investigation was

14 See Rosen (1994) for worries.15 Another important question is whether or not mind-independence is a realism-relevant notion for everydomain of thought. Mind-independence seems prima facie problematic for realism about beliefs, for

instance.


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wholly metaphysical, and explored the competing answers metaethicists can give to

the question of what in reality grounds moral truth. What has happened, then, to

creeping minimalism? Well, the problem has essentially dissolved, given that our

approach has done away with one of its key presuppositions, namely, that the

question of moral realism must be understood in semantic terms. Semantic

minimalism is no threat to undermining realism debates because realism debates are

metaphysical debates, not semantic ones. They are realism debates, after all, and

metaphysics is the study of reality.

We now have the resources to solve the problem of creeping minimalism. The

first stage of the solution is to distinguish the plurality of metaethical projects and

questions. Once we see that metaethical views may take a stand on one set of

questions while setting another set aside, we can urge the extant metaethical

positions to keep clear on the distinction between questions of moral metaphysics

and questions of moral language. Questions of moral metaphysics, and hence moral

realism, are to be understood in terms of truthmaking, and regimenting the debate in

this fashion shows that there is still real debate. Within the realist camp, we see

naturalists and non-naturalists offer competing sets of truthmakers. We see certain

metaethical anti-realists get out of the game of offering truthmakers altogether (by

way of getting out of the game of moral truth), or offer mind-dependent truthmakers

that justify their anti-realism. None of this metaphysical debate turns on whether we

should adopt a deflationary account of truth, reference, or belief.16

Now, the true test of any solution to the problem of creeping minimalism

involves how it accounts for quasi-realism, discussion of which I have postponed so

far. Can truthmaker theory adequately distinguish quasi-realism from realism?

Indeed it can. Not only does truthmaker theory reveal what is distinctive about

quasi-realism, it also reveals its superiority over its competing views.

5 Truthmakers for quasi-realists

By adopting the truthmaking approach to moral realism, we can solve the problem

of creeping minimalism. What distinguishes views regarding moral realism involves

what those views posit as the truthmakers for moral judgments; what sort of

semantic theory or theory of truth metaethical theorists happen to hold is beside the

point. We have also set out a fruitful way for understanding the metaethical terrain,

at least with respect to questions of moral metaphysics. However, we can do more

16 One might object here that truthmaker theory is itself a substantive theory of truth, and so not available

to the minimalist. Indeed, it’s common to think that truthmaker theory just is a correspondence theory of

truth (e.g., Oliver 1996), but this is mistaken. It’s possible that some truths may not have truthmakers

(consider negative existentials like ‘There are no Arctic penguins’), and so truthmaker theory may not be

sufficiently general to serve as a theory of truth. Furthermore, all extant accounts of the truthmaking

relation are defined in terms of truth (see Armstrong 2004; Rodriguez-Pereyra 2005; Lowe 2007;

Merricks 2007 and Schaffer 2010), and so a truthmaker based theory of truth would be viciously circular.

Truthmaker theory presupposes an antecedent notion of truth; it is not itself a theory of truth. (In fact,

I think it presupposes a kind of deflationary theory of truth, but that is a matter for a separate occasion.)

Truthmaker theory is about the ontological grounds for truths, not about truth itself. I defend this view at

length in my 2011.

222 J. Asay

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than merely pour old wine into new bottles. The truthmaker approach to moral

realism not only usefully sets up the debate, but also advances it. Not all metaethical

views fare equally well when it comes to answering questions about moral

truthmakers. In fact, I think that the clear winners are, on the realist side, the

naturalist, and, on the anti-realist side, the quasi-realist.

My reason for thinking that the naturalistic realist trumps the non-naturalist is

nothing new. It is simply Blackburn’s original supervenience argument against

realism, which aims to show that the realist can maintain the supervenience of the

moral on the non-moral only at the cost of admitting it as ‘‘an opaque, isolated,

logical fact, for which no explanation can be proffered’’ (Blackburn 1971, p. 111;

see also his 1985b). If moral judgments are true in virtue of an independently

existing, non-natural realm of moral fact, then it becomes mysterious why the moral

truths should supervene on the non-moral features of the world. In other words, non-

naturalistic realists face a puzzle as to why moral truths should supervene on the

natural world when the natural world doesn’t make them true. What we would have

to posit are loads of necessary connections between distinct existences—here

represented by the moral and natural facts. For naturalistic realists, the moral facts

and the natural facts are not distinct existences, and so there is no trouble on their

view for accounting for the needed supervenience of the former on the latter.

On the anti-realist side, we see many views that have to deny the existence of

absolute moral truths, for want—it’s worth saying—of the relevant kind of

truthmakers. Mackie’s queer entities just aren’t around to make moral judgments

true. Classical non-cognitivists denied the existence of moral truth, and relativists

deny the existence of non-relative moral truth. These views all suffer the inability to

capture the realist-looking surface phenomena of ethical thought.

Two positions that try to maintain absolute moral truth while not giving into

realism are constructivism (e.g., Milo 1995) and Crispin Wright’s superassertibilist

view (1992, 1995). But these views face a dilemma. They account for moral truth by

pointing to certain counterfactuals. Those counterfactuals must then either be taken

as brute (not true in virtue of anything), or given some further ontological

accounting. The latter option has not been taken, so the views are incomplete if they

seize that horn.17 If the counterfactuals are taken as brute, then the views end up

with an objection exactly parallel to the one above facing non-naturalistic realists.

If some contingently true counterfactual p is metaphysically brute, then its truth is in

no way traceable to anything in or about the world; that’s why it’s brute. Hence,

p could have been false, even if the world had been different in no respect. In more

colorful language, if p is brute, then there is a possible world metaphysically

indiscernible from the actual world—all the same stuff exists, and instantiates all the

same properties and relations—in which p is false. Here we also have a violation of

supervenience, but of a broader kind. What we have is a violation of the

supervenience of truth upon being, which many have taken to be the heart of

17 If they do try to give such an accounting, then they will face the Euthyphro challenge, namely, to show

how the counterfactuals can be grounded in a way that does not end up appealing to moral notions, lest

they give up the game of constructivism. But if they cannot appeal to any antecedent moral notions, it will

be worrisome how the views can ensure that they end up constructing the right moral views. See Shafer-

Landau (2003, p. 41.)


123

truthmaker theory.18 The truth of p does not supervene on anything at all, and afortiori does not supervene on the natural facts. Hence, taking the needed

counterfactuals as brute precludes one from accepting the supervenience of the

moral on the non-moral. Interestingly, then, the arch anti-realist position of taking

moral truths to depend in no way whatsoever on reality faces the exact same

problem as the arch realist position of taking moral truths to depend upon a sui

generis moral reality. Positing truths of either kind bestows a level of metaphysical

autonomy on the moral that it does not possess.

The lesson to draw from the previous paragraph concerns how not to be an

ethical anti-realist. The correct path for securing one’s ethical anti-realism is not to

accept that there are moral truths, but then turn around and say that they are not true

in virtue of anything. Doing so violates an important dimension of ethical thinking,

namely, that moral judgments require grounds. Hence, a crucial feature of ethical

thought is that moral judgments, when true, are true in virtue of something in the

world. In other words, moral truths have truthmakers. Consider this passage from

Blackburn:

Ethical avowals, like decisions and verdicts, require grounds. If I grade one

paper higher than another, I must be prepared to indicate some relevant

difference between them. We acknowledge the need to point to something that

grounds our judgement, in virtue of which one is better than the other (1998,

p. 69).

When trying to account for why kicking dogs is wrong, we are obligated to offer

grounds that justify the ethical judgment. Hence we appeal to the fact that kicking

dogs causes them pain, or leads to greater unhappiness, or something similar. These

appeals are not epistemological; if the wrongness of kicking dogs is metaphysically

isolated from the fact that it causes them pain, then it would be completely arbitrary

as to why that natural fact was epistemologically relevant to detecting the

wrongness of the act instead of some other natural fact (such as that kicking dogs

releases energy). For the stated natural facts to be grounds for the ethical claims,

they have to stand in the proper relationship to them. When ethical judgments

bottom out too quickly—into a pool of brute counterfactuals, say—we give up on

that obligation. It just becomes a brute fact that the world is one way ethically, and

not some other way. But this is out of sync with what it is to be an ethical thinker.

Ethical thinkers offer an account of what makes things have the moral properties

that they do. The lesson is that ethical judgments (or the counterfactuals supporting

them) are not good candidates for being brute truths, truths that are not made true in

any way by reality. Positing them as such would relieve us of the duty of offering

grounds for our ethical claims.

The challenge for the anti-realist who wishes to embrace the existence of moral

truth is to give a satisfying account of what makes moral judgments true, since

something has to. Quasi-realists, perhaps to their own surprise, fare better on this

score than do their fellow anti-realists. Now, what is especially clear on the quasi-

realist view is what moral truthmakers are not. First, they are not sui generis

18 See Lewis (1992, pp. 218–219) for a canonical presentation of this view.

224 J. Asay

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non-naturalistic moral facts (in the metaphysical sense), for they believe that there

are no such things (Blackburn 1986, p. 124). Second, it is of paramount importance

to notice that the moral truthmakers cannot be the attitudes themselves that are

expressed by moral judgments, crucial though they are to understanding the overall

quasi-realist view. Suppose I deeply value philanthropy. Then when I utter

(B) Philanthropy is good

I do so sincerely. But it does not follow that I thereby judge truly. It does follow that

if I were to utter

(C) It is true that philanthropy is good

I would thereby do so sincerely. But it would not follow that my utterance of

C would be true. The truth of B and C stand and fall together, as does their sincerity.

But my valuing of philanthropy guarantees only that my utterances to that effect are

sincere, not that they are true. To think that the attitudes and values are themselves

the moral truthmakers would be to endorse a kind of subjectivism: what makes it

true that philanthropy is good is just that I value it.19 For suppose that I also dearly

value kicking dogs. Then my utterance of

(D) Kicking dogs is good

is sincere, but hardly true (even though I would sincerely (and incorrectly) judge

that it’s true that kicking dogs is good). Blackburn is explicit in his acknowledge-

ment of this point: ‘‘Like anyone else [the projectivist] thinks that what makes it

wrong to kick dogs is that it causes them pain’’ (Blackburn 1981, p. 179).20 It is not

the attitudes themselves that make things right or wrong, even though it is the

attitudes that are expressed when we judge of things that they are right or wrong

(according to expressivists). The quasi-realist stresses that when we make a moral

judgment, we commit ourselves rather than describe ourselves. Were I to utter

19 See Blackburn (2006b). Blackburn is fond of complaining that commentators often interpret his view,

against his repeated protestations, as being committed to such subjectivism. I think such commentators

are best interpreted as not understanding what else it could be that grounds the truth of moral judgments,

given that they are in fact true on the quasi-realist’s view (see Bloomfield 2003). Those who charge quasi-

realists with subjectivism, then, should pay particular attention to the truthmaking account I am now

offering to quasi-realists.20 Cf. Blackburn (1985a): ‘‘if everyone comes to think of it as permissible to maltreat animals, this does

nothing at all to make it permissible: it just means that everybody has deteriorated’’ (14). See also

Blackburn (1988): ‘‘It is because of our responses that we say that cruelty is wrong, but it is not because

of them that it is so. […O]ur actual responses are inappropriate for the wrongness of cruelty to depend

upon. What makes cruelty abhorrent is not that it offends us, but all those hideous things that make it do

so’’ (367). Interestingly, in a later reprint the middle sentence here gets changed to ‘‘[O]ur actual

responses are inappropriate anchors for the wrongness of cruelty’’ (1993, p. 172). The talk of ‘‘anchoring’’

here (and the original talk of dependence, as well as the repeated reference to ‘‘making’’) strongly

suggests that Blackburn (despite his own efforts, perhaps) is thinking in terms of truthmaking and

ontological grounding, and that our attitudes are not playing that role when it comes to the truth of moral

judgments.


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(E) I value philanthropy

I would do so truly and sincerely. But E does not express what B expresses, even

though B is sincere if and only if E is true. The biconditional we are lacking is the

one between B and E. In other words, the biconditional.

(F) Philanthropy is good if and only if I value philanthropy

is not necessarily true (and indicatively false). Philanthropy would still be good

even if I did not value it. As a result, the quasi-realist avoids a distasteful

subjectivism (where philanthropy’s being good is solely dependent upon my valuing

it), but at the cost of making our truthmaker question all the more difficult to

answer. If B and E were equivalent, then we could transfer the (easily enough

attained) truthmaker for E over to B. But the truth of B is independent from the truth

of E. The sincerity of B, again, is dependent upon the truth of E. The truth of B,

alas, is another matter.

We know how quasi-realists should not answer our truthmaker query. How

should they answer it? Well, I think that Blackburn has inadvertently been making

claims about what the truthmakers are for moral judgments for years, despite what

may be his official dismissal of the question.21 Here are some examples: ‘‘what

makes it wrong to kick dogs is that it causes them pain’’ (1981, p. 179). This just is

the question of what makes ‘It is wrong to kick dogs’ true. Or consider this passage:

‘‘What makes cruelty abhorrent is not that it offends us, but all those hideous things

that make it do so’’ (Blackburn 1993, p. 172). Moments later he talks about what

‘‘anchors’’ moral judgments, and elsewhere he discusses the need for positing

‘‘grounds’’ for moral truths (1998, p. 69). These are claims about the truthmakers for

moral truths. Blackburn is admirably clear about what he takes moral truthmakers

not to be: they are not our moral attitudes and sentiments, even though it is these

that get expressed by our moral utterances. But when it comes to what it is that doesmake moral judgments true, Blackburn starts to sound suspiciously like a

naturalistic realist. He posits natural facts—facts, say, about what causes what—

as providing the needed grounds. This should come as no surprise, because not only

is Blackburn on the whole a metaphysical naturalist, he also thinks that the moral

supervenes upon the natural, and supervenience is not far from dependence.

The suggestion we are moving toward is that Blackburn may well be in a position

to agree with the naturalistic realist as to what it is in the world that makes moral

judgments true. The quasi-realist and the naturalist, then, could in principle agree on

21 See the opening pages of Blackburn (1986), where he contrasts his favored metaethical approach (the

‘‘quasi-realist alternative’’) with the ‘‘truth-conditions’’ approach that he rejects. As it turns out, part of

the truth-conditions approach involves asking the question ‘‘of what it is that makes [moral judgments]

true’’ (119). Here, I think, we can see a conflation between linguistic issues (truth-conditions) and

metaphysical issues (truthmakers). [A similar conflation occurs at Blackburn (1998, pp. 87–88)]. See also

Blackburn (2009, p. 207), the tone of which suggests that Blackburn would be unsympathetic to our

investigations here. But note that Blackburn suggests that we may still ‘‘ruminate over what it is in virtueof which happiness is good, and deploy our standards and values to pursue this ethical question’’ (ibid.).

But asking in virtue of what it is that happiness is good just is asking what it is in virtue of which

‘Happiness is good’ is true, which just is asking what the truthmaker is for ‘Happiness is good’. That

Blackburn can sweep away metaphysical questions with one hand only to draw them back with the other

suggests that he is reading too much inflationary metaphysics into truthmaker theory.

226 J. Asay

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the metaphysical foundations of moral truth, and thus agree on the question of moral

realism, as I have suggested we understand it. But if we go this route, have we not

fallen back into the original problem we set out to avoid? Wasn’t the problem of

creeping minimalism one that threatened to undermine the supposed distinction

between realists and their opposition, and aren’t we now conceding just that point?

Perhaps the truthmaker approach cannot after all fully save the debate.

There are two responses that can be made. First, we may recall the plurality of

metaethical projects. That two views agree on the metaphysics of morals is no

guarantee that they agree on the language, point, or practice of morals. There is

plenty for naturalists and quasi-realists to disagree about, even though they may

have no qualms with each other’s metaphysical views. When critiquing naturalistic

realism, Blackburn writes that ‘‘no complete theory of ethics can simply point to the

grounding properties, and suppose that evaluations are given their meaning by their

relationship to them. We need first to understand the evaluative stance’’ (1998,

p. 69). Here we see Blackburn attacking naturalism for offering an insufficient

account of moral language and practice—it leaves out the ‘‘evaluative stance’’ that

is central to Blackburn’s projectivism. But as we have already acknowledged, there

is more to understanding metaethics than understanding what it is that makes moral

judgments true. Giving the ontological grounds for moral judgments is not yet to

give an account of the semantic and psychological roles they play in our language

and our lives. According to this response, then, there may well be no metaphysical

difference between naturalism and quasi-realism, and so no worry about classifying

them together when it comes to the metaphysical thesis of moral realism.

Nevertheless, the views remain starkly opposed metaethical positions; the

opposition comes not by way of their metaphysics, but by way of their philosophy

of language and views about the psychology of ethics.

This first response is quite concessive to the thought that there is no important

metaphysical difference between naturalism and quasi-realism, but a stronger reply

is available, one that can put the two camps on different sides of the realism/anti-

realism divide. For the two camps might disagree about how we are to explain the

connection between moral truths and the natural facts that underlie them. In other

words, even if naturalists and quasi-realists can agree on what makes moral

judgments true, they may disagree as to why those objects and the truths they make

true stand in the truthmaking relation. In other words, they may disagree as to how

those objects get to be truthmakers for moral truths. Hence, what the quasi-realist

and naturalist really disagree about is the nature not of ethical truthmakers, but of

ethical truthmaking.

How does something ‘‘get to be’’ a truthmaker for some truth? The standard

answer in truthmaker theory involves de re essential properties (see Fox 1987,

p. 189; Merricks 2007, pp. 11–14). An object is a truthmaker for a truth only if the

existence of the object guarantees that the truth is true. For example, Socrates makes

it true that Socrates exists, and makes it true that there are humans because it’s

necessary that, if Socrates exists, then those claims are true. Socrates is essentiallySocrates, and essentially human, and so his existence guarantees the truth of the

claims in question. But Socrates by himself does not make it true that there are

philosophers, for Socrates is only contingently a philosopher. Socrates’s existence


123

does not by itself guarantee the truth of there being philosophers for he, and

everyone else, might not have been philosophers. Hence, truthmaker theorists adopt

entities such as states of affairs, tropes, or objects under counterpart relations in

order to provide truthmakers for contingent predications.22 As a result, the set of

truths that an object makes true depends upon its essential properties.

Naturalistic moral realists can be understood as adhering to this standard view of

the relationship between natural facts and the moral judgments they make true.

Moral properties just are natural properties, just as the property of being made of

water just is the property of being made of H2O. The necessity here is something

discovered only a posteriori, but is no less necessary for that. It is a part of the

essence of water that it be composed of H2O molecules, and it is part of the essence

of the natural world that certain things are right or wrong. The naturalistic project

attempts to give the naturalistic grounds for moral properties. Regardless of how the

details are worked out,23 the naturalistic view holds that there is a relation of

metaphysical necessity that obtains between, say, facts about what causes dogs pain

and the claim that kicking dogs is wrong. It is the same sort of necessity that holds

between facts about whether a certain liquid is composed of H2O molecules and

claims that the liquid is composed of water. For naturalists, what explains the

truthmaking relationship that obtains between the natural world and moral

judgments are the de re essential features of the natural world. Giving an account

of the naturalistic essence of moral properties is the key distinguishing aim of

naturalistic moral realists.

For naturalists, the natural world makes moral judgments true by way of its

essential features. The natural world settles what’s true with respect to ethics just as

it settles what’s true with respect to water. Uncovering these relationships of

necessity is a matter of discovery. Quasi-realists, by contrast, hold that what

accounts for the truthmaking relationship between the natural world and moral

judgments is not any kind of metaphysical necessity, but rather our practices of

projection. Moral properties are projected onto the natural world, for they are not

antecedently ‘‘out there’’ awaiting our discovery. As a result, the reason why certain

natural facts stand in the truthmaking relation to moral facts is due to our

projections, and not to any a posteriori identity or reduction between moral and

natural properties. The truthmakers for moral claims remain the objects of the

natural world, but any account that leaves us, we who go about making moral

evaluations of the natural world, out of the picture of why those objects make moral

judgments true is missing a crucial feature of ethical thought. Hence, quasi-realists

and naturalistic realists disagree about the nature of the truthmaking relation that

exists with respect to ethical thought.

It seems, then, that the theory of truthmaking can and should be extended into the

domain of projectivism (albeit by allowing there to be a different kind of

truthmaking relation that diverges from the standard relation requiring metaphysical

necessitation). When quasi-realists claim that some moral judgment p is true, they

22 See, respectively, Armstrong (2004); Lowe (2007) and Lewis (2003).23 See Jackson (1998) and Copp (2007) for competing accounts of how to develop naturalistic moral

realism.

228 J. Asay

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are able to point to a set of natural facts and/or properties N about the world that

provide the grounds for p’s truth. N is the truthmaker for p. But now consider

someone who agrees that p is true, but thinks that p is true in virtue of some different

set of natural facts and/or properties, M. How are we to settle the dispute? The

naturalistic realist seems to have an answer: we need to examine p and its

constituent concepts, and determine whether they can be naturalistically analyzed

into the members of either N or M. Such accounts, presumably, will not rely on the

sentiments and attitudes of those who judge that p; such accounts will leave us out

of it, and herein we may see why such accounts are best thought of as realist: in

giving an account of what makes moral judgments true, naturalists show how the

relationship between moral truths and their truthmakers is a matter independent of

us and our practices.

The quasi-realist, by contrast, thinks that we cannot understand why N (or M)

makes p true in isolation of understanding how we gild and stain the world with

moral features. We still have natural facts making moral judgments true, but crucial

to understanding why the truthmaking relation obtains here is quasi-realism’s

projectivism. There can be no understanding of the relation between the natural

world and the ethical realm in the absence of a full appreciation of the mediating

role played by moral agents. In order to account for why certain natural facts make

ethical judgments true, we need an account of how ethical properties are projected

(by us) onto the world. Herein lie quasi-realists’ anti-realist credentials. They can

agree with naturalists as to what makes moral judgments true, but disagree as to whythose natural facts make moral judgments true.

An important advantage of the quasi-realist’s projectivist account of moral

truthmakers—which leads me to my conclusion that quasi-realism fares best when it

comes to the question of moral truthmakers—is that it preserves a metaphysical

version of Moore’s open question argument (1903).24 Moore argues that any

identification of the property good with some natural property n would leave open the

question: But is n good? It is always an open question whether any naturalistic

identification of goodness means the same thing as goodness. On the metaphysical

side of things, we can put the point this way: ‘‘it is always an open question,

something that can be discussed and denied, whether some given feature of things is

the thing that determines whether they are good’’ (Blackburn 1998, p. 15; emphasis

added). If we read this passage in the spirit of truthmaker theory, taking ‘determines’

in a metaphysical light, we can see that the punch line of the open question argument

for truthmaker theory is that it’s always an open question what it is in the natural

world that makes ethical judgments true. To offer competing accounts of moral

truthmakers just is to engage in ethical thought and practice; the issue can not be

resolved, once and for all, by semantics or a posteriori investigation alone. Quasi-

realism enjoys an important advantage over naturalism by being able to respect the

phenomenon of openness that lies at the heart of the open question argument.25

24 This should not come as too great a surprise, since the original open question argument takes any sort

of naturalism about morality as its target.25 This argument, of course, will not hold sway against those who deny that there is any such openness.

For my part, I believe it’s fair to say that this openness is a pre-theoretically familiar phenomenon that,

ceteris paribus, metaethical theories ought to capture if they can.


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6 Conclusion

A three-pronged account of moral realism can be gleaned from our above

discussion. Moral realists are those who (i) admit that there are moral truths, (ii)

accept that those truths are made true by a realism-relevant (i.e., mind-independent)

reality, and (iii) hold that the nature of the truthmaking relation that obtains between

those truths and that reality is itself of a mind-independent variety (involving de reessential properties rather than projections). Emotivists and error theorists reject (i),

relativists, subjectivists, and constructivists reject (ii), and quasi-realists reject (iii).

By locating their disagreement with realists solely with respect to (iii), quasi-realists

are indeed able to capture much of the trappings of realism: they can hold that there

are moral truths, and that they are made true by a mind-independent reality. They

cannot, of course, agree with everything that realists believe; my account properly

locates the disagreement, and avoids saddling quasi-realism with the kind of

subjectivism often attributed to it. Quasi-realists who accept my proposal can

maintain their minimalism about truth, and not worry that this compromises their

quasi-realism.

For much of the twentieth century, metaethical debates over moral realism

were couched in semantic terms. The same is true for realism debates in other

domains. The subsequent advance of deflationary theories of truth (and, in their

wake, other semantic notions) have been thought by many to undermine these

realism debates. But there is an irony here. Central to the deflationary position is

that we can get by just as before when we abandon substantive theories of truth.

Truth isn’t needed to perform a lot of theoretical work—it’s a lightweight, thin

notion after all—and so is not needed to perform the work of sustaining a realism

debate. It’s ironic, then, that proponents of deflationary theories of truth should

think that truth is such a thin notion, and in turn think that it’s needed nonetheless

to perform substantive theoretical work in the realism debates. The right response

to deflationism is to think that realism debates do not, after all, turn on the theory

of truth. Truth is not substantive enough a notion to do that. Realism debates

should instead be understood in terms of truthmakers, the objects in the world that

make truths true. Truthmaker theory is available to all who are interested in

ontology, and does not presuppose a substantive theory of truth. Creeping

minimalism becomes a problem only when we half-heartedly embrace deflationary

theories of truth and their philosophical implications. If truth truly is deflationary,

then it is a mistake to think that debates about realism depend upon the nature of

truth. Only a substantive account of truth has the capacity to serve such a role.

Fortunately, deflationism about truth is no obstacle to substantive metaphysical

debate.

Acknowledgments The author would like to thank the anonymous referees for Philosophical Studies,

as well as Dorit Bar-On, Simon Blackburn, Matthew Hammerton, Ben Herscovitch, Bill Lycan, Huw

Price, John Roberts, Geoff Sayre-McCord, and especially Keith Simmons for their valuable comments on

this paper and the ideas within it. Versions of this paper were presented at the University of Sydney and

the 2010 Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress; the author’s thanks goes to the members of those audiences

for their questions and comments.

230 J. Asay

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Truthmaking, metaethics, and creeping minimalism