In this chapter, I introduce the topic of negative action. I provide a rough account of the distinction between positive and negative actions, of the distinction between two commonly-discussed kinds of negative behaviour (omitting and refraining), and of what distinguishes negative actions from mere failures to do something. Then, drawing on this discussion and the discussion of Chapter 1, I articulate the problem of negative action: negative actions seem to be genuine actions; actions seem to be events; but (at least some) negative actions seem to be, not events, but absences thereof. I trace the widespread acceptance of the latter claim to Deflationism, the view – often held only implicitly – that negative action sentences express negative existentials.

In this chapter, I provide two positive arguments in favour of my sophisticated Neo-Davidsonian treatment of negative action sentences and against the Deflationist alternative. I argue that my view can accommodate a range of data about the behaviour of adverbs in negative action sentences and their interaction with perceptual locutions, which Deflationism can’t. Thus, we can solve the problem of negative action by rejecting Deflationism, and with it the thought that (at least some) negative actions aren’t events. Instead, we should claim that negative actions are simply events which play the ensuring role. I close by comparing my view to two recent alternatives.

In this chapter I introduce Neo-Davidsonian semantics as a general approach to the semantics of action sentences, and compare a simple Neo-Davidsonian treatment of negative action sentences to the Deflationist alternative sketched in Chapter 2. I then use this discussion to build a case on behalf of Deflationism, by showing that the simple Neo-Davidsonian treatment makes very bad predictions about the behaviour of adverbs, predictions which Deflationism avoids.

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.