Speaker: Tianyi Chu (ILLC, University of Amsterdam)
Date and Time: Thursday, May 28th 2026, 16:30-18:00
Venue: ILLC Seminar Room F1.15, Science Park 107 and online.
Title: Evidential Support in Truthmaker Semantics
Abstract. In this work, we develop a novel approach to model the notion of evidential support within truthmaker semantics. The guiding idea is that evidence for a proposition should be weaker than truthmaking, but stronger than mere consistency with the proposition.
We propose a two-part definition of evidential support. First, a supporting state must be ‘appropriately connected’ to the proposition’s truthmaking structure, understood in terms of overlap with the conjunctive parts of the proposition. Second, it must exclude every exact falsemaker of the proposition. This yields a notion of evidence that is sensitive to the internal structure of propositions. In particular, evidence for a disjunction need not support either disjunct individually, and not every state counts as evidence for necessary truths or classical tautologies. Thus, our account of evidential support is itself hyperintensional, and provides a basis for modelling hyperintensional belief in terms of the evidential states available to an agent.