29 - 31 July 2019, Truthmaker Semantics: Applications in Philosophy and Linguistics, Hamburg, Germany

Kit Fine and the Emmy Noether Project Relevance are delighted to announce a conference on truthmaker semantics and its applications in philosophy and linguistics.

Truthmaker semantics deviates from the familiar framework of possible world semantics, in that the notion of a possible world is replaced by a more general notion of a state that applies to any fragment of a world, and that a sentence is taken to be made true by a state only if every part of the state is involved in rendering the sentence true. A significant advantage of truthmaker semantics over the possible worlds approach is that it connects sentences with the worldly items that are directly relevant to their truth, thereby allowing important and intuitive hyperintensional distinctions to be drawn in a natural and formally elegant way. While the framework was originally developed as a semantics for relevant entailment by van Fraassen in the 1960s, recent developments have demonstrated its wide applicability in logic, metaphysics, philosophy and epistemology.