Truthmakers and explanation

Although truthmaker theory promises to do useful philosophical work, it has proved hard to formulate a truthmaker theory that is both useful and believable. I argue that a neglected approach to truthmakers – that of Ian McFetridge – can surmount some of the problems that make other theories of truthmaking unattractive. On this approach, the demand for truthmakers is understood as the demand for explanations of why true sentences are true. I show that this is plausible, powerful enough to argue against versions of behaviourism and phenomenalism, and immune to some difficulties faced by the theories of Armstrong, Bigelow, and Lewis.