A Study Of Kit Fine's Truthmaker Semantics

Since the 20 th century,metaphysicians have been focusing on the truthmaker and truthmaking.In truthmaker metaphysics,the truthmaking is considered to be a crosscategory relationship,an internal relationship and a necessary relationship,and each proposition has at least truthmaker.For the study of semantics,different semantic theories emerged in different historical periods,and the most influential is the truth-conditional semantics.According to truth-conditional semantics,the meaning of a statement is its truth condition.In recent years,under the framework of truth-conditional semantics,Kit Fine proposed a truthmaker semantics.He attempts to portray the meaning of a statement by truemaker and truthmaking.According to the truthmaker semantics,the truthmaker of a statement is a state,and any individual,fact,or event with the relevant mereological structure can be regarded as a state.By defining the state,Fine constructs a state space in which a state may be part of another state,and different states may also constitute a new state.Fine even believes that there is an impossible state,the impossible state is composed of possible states,and the difference between them is the difference between possible states.The meaning of a statement is usually regarded as a certain proposition corresponding to it,and according to the truthmaker semantics,the proposition expressed by a statement does contain the corresponding trhthmakers.In addition,Fine believes that it is impossible to determine a truthmaker of the negative statement through the positive statement,so it is necessary to introduce the concept of the falsemaker,and the falsemaker of a negative statement is the truthmaker of the corresponding positive statement.Therefore,the proposition expressed by a statement is not only the set of the corresponding truthmakers,but the order pair that containing the set of the truemakers and the set of the falsemaker.For complex sentences constructed by conjunctions such as conjunctions and disjunctions,Fine calculates the corresponding the set of truemakers and the set of falsemakers by the combination principle.Fine believes that it is possible to explain some important relationships or problems in semantics and pragmatics by the truthmaker semantics,such as partial content,scalar implicature,and the substitution failure in counterfactual conditional statement.Specifically,the merelogical relationship between the statements on the content is defined by their truthmaking relationship;in the process of using the language,someone often presuppose that the statement is not only merely true,but also exactly true.This leads to the occurrence of scalar implicature phenomena;the logic functions of the statements that are logically equivalent under possible world semantics are not completely equivalent,because their set of transition states corresponding to the truth set is not the same,which solves the substitution failure problem in counterfactual conditionals.