Although not easily argued for, I agree with many Australian-minded philosophers
that this is the optimal position in ontology. Like Martin and Armstrong I am a factualist
in that I believe in the existence of facts or states of affairs where these are understood
as things having properties and/or standing in relations. I also agree with
Martin that we should strive towards an ontology that is only committed to facts of
the first-order. Simply put, we should only commit ourselves to states of affairs that
do not have states of affairs as constituents. Armstrong, however, begs to differ. He
thinks that higher-order states of affairs are required in two rather different sorts of
cases. First of all, he says, they are needed in order to provide truthmakers for negative
and general truths. For what make such truths true, according to Armstrong, are totality
states of affairs: for example, the state of affairs that a certain mereological fusion
of first-order states of affairs are all the first-order states of affairs. Secondly, he thinks
that higher-order states of affairs are also needed to ground laws of nature, understood
as states of affairs contingently linking states-of-affairs-types (i.e. universals). An aim
of the present thesis is to argue that there is no need to appeal to higher-order states of
affairs. Three of my papers address this issue. In paper IV called "Against Truthmaker
Necessitarianism" (forthcoming in Logique et Analyse), I provide reasons for thinking
that we can make do without totality facts in accounting for general truths if we give
up the requirement that truthmakers necessitate the truth of the propositions they
make true. Paper III called "Causal Truthmaking" (2010) addresses the problem of
finding plausible truthmakers for negative truths. Here I develop a theory according
to which negative truths are grounded in causal facts of the first order. Once we allow
for such truthmakers, we can do without higher-order totality facts in providing
