A familiar view is that truthmaking is in tension with nominalism: to accept an ontology of truthmakers is to reject the austere metaphysical worldview of the nominalist. However, there is nothing inherently antinominalist in the idea of truthmaking. As has been argued, the notion of truthmaking is ontologically neutral, and so in principle compatible with any ontological worldview. Nevertheless, leading advocates of truthmaking (most notably Armstrong) have put their theories to the task of arguing against nominalism. This book is interested in exploring how strong a truthmaking-based defense the nominalist can wield. This chapter briefly presents an overview of the various theoretical options available when it comes to realism and nominalism in the context of truthmaking. In so doing, it introduces a particular distinction between hard road and easy road forms of nominalism. It aims to give the best possible defense of these different forms of nominalism, but raise its own own objections against them. Ultimately, it is suggested that truthmaker theory is best served by a realist commitment to properties, whether in terms of universals or tropes.

Do all truths have truthmakers, or just a proper subset? The chapter adopts the latter answer, and uses the ontological accounting paradigm to defend it. The primary goal in this chapter is to defend nonmaximalism, that is, to defend the existence of legitimate truthmaker gaps: truths without a truthmaker. The goal is not to offer a precise statement of which truths have, and which truths lack truthmakers. Doing so goes against this book’s preferred methodological approach to truthmaking, according to which truths must be treated on a case by case basis. The main ambition, then, is to defend the tenability of truthmaker gaps in general; where exactly they are found is a topic that will surface frequently in the rest of the book, as truthmaker theorists have reasonable disagreements about it. For now, a general defense of non-maximalism is undertaken. A large part of the defense is concerned with meeting the objections that maximalists have offered against their opponents. As it is argued, those objections frequently turn on presupposing an explanatory approach to truthmaking, or on conflating truthmaker gaps with supervenience gaps: truths whose truth does not supervene on being.