Abstract

Many advocates of grounding believe that a proposition’s truthmaker grounds its truth—what I call the Alethic Grounding Principle. The principle was attacked by (Griffith, Inquiry 57(2):196-21, 2014), (Saenz Synthese, 2018), and (Audi, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 1-24, 2019). According to Griffith, truthmaking is a species of grounding: however, something might be a proposition’s truthmaker, although its ground is not that proposition’s truthmaker. Saenz suggests that the ground of a proposition’s truth includes its truthmaker, but it includes a lot more. In Audi’s view, what counts as the relation between truths and truthmakers lacks certain logical properties of the grounding relation; therefore, it does not count as grounding. I will suggest that Griffith’s and Saenz’s views imply an unnecessary inflation in ontology, as they rule out one motivation for the truthmaker theory. Furthermore, Audi’s conception of grounding is very similar to emergence. Taking some of these objections into account, I provide a revised version of the Alethic Grounding Principle, according to which the truth of a proposition is grounded in both the proposition and its truthmaker.