Firstly, you must know that if you are not familiar with the truthmaker principle(s) and are looking to find out more about this theory of truth, then you cannot read this book straight through- the best thing to do would be to skip ahead to David Liggins "Truthmakers and Explanation". Even then, questions as to whether the truthmaker principle(s) was motivated by the correspondence theory and if so how, how does the truthmaker principle(s) differ from the correspondence theory (because it most certainly does), and what are the various principles in stronger and weaker formulations are not all answered in just one paper. As the title says, this book is a full on 'debate' and not an explication on truthmakers, and so, as a debate, it dives right into the thick of it all. Unfortunately, the debate tends to stray away from truthmakers to debates on other competing theories of truth with sometimes only oblique reference to truthmakers. Presumptions are also made (Michael Morris "Realism beyond Correspondence") about truthmakers as being just an aspect of a correspondence theory of truth. Also, besides the papers that are hostile to truthmakers, the papers that side with truthmakers tend to be deflationary and are reluctant to concede any strong ontological commitments that a truthmaker principle would entail (with Rodriguez-Pereyra's "Why Truthmakers" and David Liggins being exceptions, although not always attractive ones, viz. Pereyra).

I find it problematic that Julian Dodd was made an editor of this anthology, given that he is openly hostile to any truthmaker principle since he believes in the identity theory of truth. He is no friend to truthmakers, which is fine, but why make him one of the editors? And it also disturbs me that Jennifer Hornsby ("Truth without Truthmaking Entities") is included in the anthology; although it does not surprise me that she would be included given that her and Dodd are both identity theorists and are regularly cited together.

While all the papers are worth reading, it is the first two papers (Pereyra and Hornsby) that I found to be the most engrossing; not because they wrote the best papers in the anthology (far from it) but because they made me the most aggravated. They are clearly on different sides of the fence, Pereyra in favor of truthmakers and Hornsby not, but both offer unattractive theses on truth.

Hornsby is the worst for two reasons: firstly, she read Pereyra beforehand and so her paper is a "response" to Pereyra's arguments, which allows her to take pot shots across the fence at Pereyra, however, her attacks definitely misconstrue Pereyra's actual arguments in order for hers to even get off the ground, secondly, Hornsby is unable to provide a substantive alternative to Pereyra. In fact, the alternative theory she gives is a weak offering of identity theory, which is exceedingly unattractive for the following reasons: it is unintuitive and lacks any explanatory power. On my reading of Hornsby, her thesis can be boiled down to the following simple exposition:

Hornsby is uncomfortable with truthmakers, specifically, the way Pereyra formulates truthmakers, because she believes that it requires propositions to be overcommitted, that is, Pereyra has propositions committed to a jungle of entities and more in reckless overabundance. When Pereyra says that the proposition 'the rose is red' has truthmakers, Hornsby accuses Pereyra of an overactive imagination as to what 'the rose is red' actually commits us to. Though she never formulates the following, it is safe to say that for Hornsby:



(H) {p} is true because {p},



(where '{p}' symbolizes 'the proposition that p'. Notice that the proposition on the right hand side stays bracketed. However, Hornsby actually states the following:



(H') {p} is true because p



Nevertheless, her arguments force the position that H' would be overcommitting 'the rose is red' as well, hence, my assertion that Hornsby can really only say H, where the proposition 'the rose is red' stays bracketed. Two things immediately come to mind. The first is the question, what exactly, then, are the commitments of 'the rose is red'? Hornsby continuously dodges that bullet by saying opaque things like:



'Rodriguez-Pereyra speaks of the rose as the subject matter of 'the rose is red'; but we may not be confident that 'A rose is red' has any 'subject matter'.



'For the rose to be red, it isn't required that there should be anything meaningful to say or think... Thus when we say that the proposition that the rose is red is true, [..], we say more than what is required for the rose to be red. If we simply say the rose is red, by contrast, then we say no more than that which is required for the rose to be red.'



The last quote is a doozy. You may be asking yourself, what exactly does she mean, and my answer would be that I do not know. I am not so certain that she takes propositions to commit one to anything, except for the proposition itself.

Following up on that thought, the second thing is that H does not seem to give any explanation about the nature of truth and in fact it begs the question, that is, a proposition is true because it is true. The lack of explanatory power in Hornsby's theory is made more acute when she goes on to insinuate that language, at least propositionally, lacks any real depth. Although she claims that propositions can be "grounded", she undermines that idea by later saying:



'We recognize the denoting phrases which Rodriguez-Pereyra treats as names of truthmakers, but we resist the impulse to make the claim that their denotations exist.'

Therefore,

'To allow [the denotations] their existence is to admit very little, as one sees if one accepts that we have no grasp on their existence or non-existence independent of its being possible or impossible meaningfully to use sentences and make some syntactic transformations. They come cheap, I think, because their price is one that we have already paid in taking propositions to be the truth-bearers.'



If any "grounding" is occurring at all, it is propositions that are grounding propositions. And, at least for me, that is just not enough. Saying, essentially, that using sentences meaningfully gets the work done for truth is just ludicrous. I need a theory that gets more work done than that. However, as I said before, in contrast Pereyra's truthmaker principle is unattractive as well. Here is a quick explanation.

Pereyra wants to say that for propositions to be true they must have a relation to actual entities that make them true. That relation is an ontological grounding for the proposition. Now, this may be too strong of a formulation of the truthmaker principle for your taste, but it is actually a pretty normative one. The main problem that concerned me the most was that his continued insistence, not on the need for the existence of a relation, but on how strong of a dependence on that relation there is begins to push one in the direction of countenancing the relation as an entity in and of itself. Setting aside sufficient conditions, the necessary conditions, as Pereyra has them, create a slippery slope towards making the relation an entity proper. I am not so sure that a platonist would want, necessarily, to countenance a relation as an entity. A nominalist would certainly find such an idea odious.

This anthology is a bit flawed, and while I do not regret spending my time on it, I do think that it should have been much better than it is, that is, the papers in the anthology could have been much better. Take Joseph Melia's "Truthmaking without Truthmakers", for instance. Melia is a thorough philosopher and his book Modality (Central Problems of Philosophy) is indicative of the kind of serious work Melia does when he does philosophy. But in this paper, the things he says just do not make sense. Consider the following:



'(2): 'There is a colour which a and b have in common'...

Putting the point in terms of truthmaking, a is red and b is red makes it true that there is a colour that a and b have in common. If the nominalist can make sense of a and b both being red, then the truth of (2) simply follows. But of course, that a is red and b is red causes no ontological problems for the sensible nominalist. That a is red and b is red ontologically commits us to nothing more than the existence of two red things, and the sensible nominalist is happy with that. In particular, that a is red and b is red does not entail the existence of properties, universals, states of affairs, tropes, or truthmakers'



But pace Melia, the commitment to the existence of two red things is a commitment to truthmakers. The two red things are the truthmakers! That is what a truthmaker is! What exactly does Melia think a truthmaker is? He never gives a definition, nor can one ascertain what his truthmaker is by his use of the term in his paper. I find it hard to believe that Melia would make such an obvious error like what we read in the above passage; but I am unable to account for the error in any charitable way. This is what I mean by saying that the papers included in this anthology could have been a lot better.

Hence, my giving it three stars, which I believe even that many stars is very charitable.