Truth and Ontology

Trenton Merricks's Truth and Ontology presents a systematic defense of deflationism about truth while simultaneously advancing a substantive metaphysical position regarding truthmakers. The monograph enters longstanding debates about the nature of truth and its relationship to reality, with implications that extend to theological discourse about God's existence and nature.

Merricks argues that truth lacks a substantive nature—it is not correspondence, coherence, or any other traditional candidate. Instead, he defends a deflationist account where the concept of truth is exhausted by instances of the equivalence schema: the proposition that p is true if and only if p. This view challenges correspondence theories that posit a metaphysically robust relation between true propositions and reality. Despite his deflationism about truth, Merricks maintains that some truths require truthmakers—entities whose existence necessitates certain truths. His selective approach to truthmakers distinguishes between truths that demand ontological grounding and those that do not.

The work's philosophical method combines careful conceptual analysis with engagement across multiple philosophical traditions. Merricks addresses objections from correspondence theorists, truthmaker maximalists who claim all truths require truthmakers, and philosophers who connect truth's nature to broader metaphysical commitments. His arguments proceed through examining paradigm cases, testing intuitions, and demonstrating how his dual position—deflationism about truth coupled with selective truthmaker requirements—resolves puzzles that plague competing accounts.

The monograph's relevance to philosophy of religion emerges through its treatment of necessary truths and abstract objects. Merricks's framework provides resources for analyzing claims about God's existence and attributes without requiring correspondence relations or universal truthmaker commitments. His position allows that "God exists" could be true without presupposing particular metaphysical structures beyond God's existence itself. This approach offers a middle path between heavyweight metaphysical theories that might constrain theological claims and lightweight theories that seem unable to capture the substantive nature of religious assertions.

Truth and Ontology advances debates about truth and reality through its innovative combination of semantic deflationism and selective metaphysical realism. The work demonstrates how questions about truth's nature intersect with fundamental issues in metaphysics, with implications for how philosophers approach existence claims generally and theological propositions specifically. Merricks's contribution lies in showing how one can maintain both deflationism about truth and robust commitments about what exists, including potentially divine beings.