Truth is grounded in facts

It is often said that truth is grounded in facts. This claim, which we will call The Slogan, plays a central role in the philosophical debate about truth, but it is also used outside of academia (e.g. in an ad by the New York Times, Feb 2017). Our project examines how the slogan can be interpreted and defended, employing the framework of the ongoing debate about metaphysical grounding. In a nutshell, metaphysical grounding is the non-causal explanatory relation which relates one truth to another if the latter obtains because or in virtue of the former. Examples would include Elisa broke the law because she jaywalked, Napoleons coat is coloured because it is blue, Leo is happy because serotonin was released in his brain, and so on. This approach will be contrasted with previous accounts of the Slogan in terms of other theoretical concepts: First, the notion of truthmakingthe idea being that a truthe.g. the truth that Belmondo is charmingmust be made true by the existence of some entity in the worlde.g. Belmondos charm. Second, the notion of correspondencethe idea being that a truth must somehow resemble or correspond to a fact or state in the world that it depicts or represents. Our central research question reads: Can the concept of grounding be used to illuminate and substantiate the slogan that truth is grounded in facts? We will develop a positive answer. More specifically, we will discuss different possible readings of the slogan within the framework of grounding, differing most prominently in their theoretical commitments, e.g. as to whether they accept facts as a category of entities in its own right. We will also perform case studies of select problem cases for the different versions of the Slogan we explore, e.g. statements of taste, statements about what must be and what could have been the case.