Fates of Au Pairs: Party Duelers Instantiating Unicycles

This summer I will be reading Truth and Truthmakers with a friend, and in preparation I'm giving a quick read to A World of States of Affairs. Armstrong is developing a sustained account of states of affairs, and a defense of the thesis that they are the building blocks of what is.

A state of affairs is a particular instantiating a universal. A universal is something that can be wholly present in multiple instances. For instance, consider son-ness. I instantiate the property of being a son. There is nothing incomplete about the instantiation; son-ness is fully present in me. But it is also fully present (and, indeed, the exact same universal is fully present) in every other son. Contrastingly, a particular cannot be multiply instantiated. For instance, it seems like I, Raleigh, can only be instantiated once (modulo instantiations at different times). Anything that resembles me will be (in Armstrong's term) partially identical to me, and will be so in virtue of instantiating some of the same universals that I instantiate. But I cannot be fully present in more than one place. So there is a particular, Raleigh, and there is a universal, son-ness. Raleigh instantiates son-ness, because Raleigh is a son. That Raleigh is a son is a state of affairs. And these, Armstrong would have it, are the basic metaphysical units of all that there is. There are conjunctive states of affairs, but they supervene upon atomic states of affairs and are nothing ontologically additional to those atomic states of affairs. There are not negative or disjunctive states of affairs.

Of particular interest are Armstrong's discussions of truthmakers. A truth maker is something that makes a truth true. For instance, that I am right-handed is a truthmaker for the truth that there exists at least one right-handed person (there are many such truthmakers). Necessarily, if l is a truthmaker for t, then any world on which t exists is one on which l is true. I have been very interested in truthmaker ontology, because a lot of the metaphysical questions I'm interested in seem to take truthmakers for granted. For instance, the fact that there can be truths that quantify over past times (there were dinosaurs) or over merely possible worlds (she could have caught that ball) has served to motivate views that grant some ontological status to times that are not present and worlds that are not actual. In developing a state-of-affairs ontology, Armstrong wants to make sure that his view is actualistic (only the actual world exists, possible worlds do not exist) so he needs actual truthmakers for modal truths:

All states of affairs are contingent. Their constituents, both particulars and universals, are likewise contingent existents. Since the world is a world of states of affairs, there are no other truthmakers for any truths except these contingent states of affairs and their contingently existing constituents. Modal truths, therefore, while not contingent truths, have nothing but these contingent beings as truthmakers.

This is a deflationist account of modality. I have found myself having knee-jerk reactions to such deflation in a number of domains. Attempts to give actualistic accounts of the truthmakers for modal truths always feels incomplete to me, as if something about modality is being left out of these dry accounts. I'm also curious what Armstrong would say about his apparent eternalism, which seems to be implied by his endorsement of temporal parts. However, I don't want to be so quick or try to say too much about Armstrong, truthmakers, or other such considerations. This is all fairly new to me. I'll have another chance to read Armstrong when we begin Truthmakers, and I'll have more chances to go over the hairy issues concerning particulars and universals as I read more over the summer.