Presentism, causation and truthmakers for the past

I’m working on both causation and the truthmaker objection to presentism, and it seems to me that it might be possible to kill two birds with one stone. What follows is the basic idea, and I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Suppose that presentism is true. What is the nature of causation? It’s the relation between what and what? Or, more relevantly, between when and when? Since, according to presentism, the past does not exist, either causation is a relation between nothing and something in the present, or causation is simultaneous, or causation is not a relation at all. The first option seems dubius. A two place relation (I’m ignoring contrastivism, for the moment) has two relata, after all, not one.

What, then, about the second option? C. B. Martin defends this view in The Mind in Nature—or, at any rate, that’s my understanding of what Martin defends. But it’s not clear how to make sense of causal processes on this view. (Persistence intuitively has causal constraints; how are we to make sense of these constraints if all causation is simultaneous?)

The third option seems to me the route to go. Here’s an initial proposal: Causation is a fact about presently existing (Armstrongian) states of affairs, or tropes if you have them. It is a fact about e, say, that c brought it about. Suppose, however, that existentialism is true, so that if x does not exist, there are no singular propositions about x. If c is a state of affairs and the particular that is a non-merelogical constitutent of c no longer exists, then the fact that c caused e is the fact about e that something c-like brought it about. If c is a trope no longer instantiated and the instantiation condition is true, so that uninstantiated properties do not exist, then too causation is the fact that something c-like brought about e.

How are we to understand “something c-like”? Here’s one proposal: Properties are or of necessity confer causal powers, so we can understand “something c-like” as “something with the following causal powers profile...” (Of course the Neo-Humeans can’t really accept this view, but how many Neo-Humeans are presentists?)

What should we say about the fact in question, that e was brought about by something c-like? It might be a property of the world, as in Bigelow’s “Presentism and Properties.” It might be a property of e. Or it might not be a property, but a fact grounded in something else. Or a primitive fact about e.

Whatever answer one gives here seems also to be an answer to the objection to presentism from truthmakers about the past. Hence the presentist, so long as they can offer a theory about the nature of the fact that e was brought about by something c-like, can kill two birds with one stone, a theory of causation and a response to the truthmaker objection.

Here’s an initial proposal. Take property instances to be tropes. Then, with certain other assumptions about tropes, events can be understood as tropes. So trope c caused trope e. That turns out to be a fact about e: that it was brought about by c. Since I’m inclined to accept both existentialism and the instantiation condition, this will turn out to be the fact, about e, that it was brought about by something c-like. The fact is a basic truth, and e alone is its truthmaker. This is analagous to e’s also being, in virtue of either being or of necessity conferring causal powers, (part of) the truthmaker for counterfactuals describing what objects with e would do in various circumstances. It is a truthmaker for future truths and for the past truth about c.

One further claim, and we have a theory of truthmakers for the past. These basic causal facts about tropes are cumulative. So the fact that e was brought about by c is the fact that e was brought about by something c-like which was brought about by something...., which was brought about by something..., and so on. As long as there is a causal chain from some present state of affairs to every past state of affairs, there is a present truthmaker for every past state of affairs.

Tropes carry with them their entire causal history and their entire power profile, and so are truthmakers for past and future truths. Present property instances do a lot of work on this view, but that’s about what we should have expected given presentism.

Truthmaker Maximalism Without Remorses?

Let truthmaker maximalism be the view that every true truthbearer has a truthmaker and let me put aside questions about the nature of both truthmakers and truthbearers and assume, for the purposes of this post, that truthbearers are propositions and that truthmakers are ordinarily facts. Now, according to naive truthmaker maximalism (NTM), the proposition that p is true if and only if it is a fact that p. For all its naivete, NTM seems to be a nice, simple view of truthmaking. However, most truthmaker maximalists seem to be unwilling to embrace it, mostly because they seem to feel uneasy about admitting in their ontology certain kinds of facts as the truthmakers for certain uncontroversially true propositions. Two standard examples of facts truthmaker maximalists seem to be queasy about are negative and general facts and quite a bit of ink has been spilled in an effort to explain how (some) negative and general propositions can be true in the absence of negative and general facts.

The problem is that all these attempts sacrifice much of the simple charm of NTM to a worry I can't really understand because I still don't get what's so wrong with, say, negative and general facts. Yes, unlike Quine, I don't have a love for desert landscapes but not many metaphysicians seem to love them these days and, of course, I would have problems with someone thinking that negative or general facts are fundamental facts, but I don't see any problem with the view that such facts supervene on more fundamental, more respectable facts. In fact, as far as I can see, if you think that something makes true the propositon , that something better be the fact that Socrates is not a fool. So, if you and I are both remorseless truthmaker maximalists and we both agree on which propositions are true and which are false, we should also agree on what facts are there even though we might disagree as to which of those facts are fundamental and which are not. In general, if you accept that a propositions <p> is capable of being true or false, you should also accept that there is a fact of the matter as to whether it is true or false and that this is the existence or non-existence of the fact that <p> not whether or not its fundamentality.

Maybe I'm wrong in assuming that NMT has become a minority view among truthmaker maximalist (please let me know if you think my perception of state of the play is somehow distorted), but, if I'm not, can someone please explain me what's so wrong about superveneint negative and general facts that makes it preferrable to abandon a view of truthmaking as nice and simple as NMT rather than admitting them in one's ontology?