I hadn’t read Wo’s Weblog for a while. Bad mistake! There’s
several nice posts about fine points of Lewis scholarship, a few David Chalmers
sightings, an interesting comparison between Armstrong and Prior, and
five distinct
objections to Laurie Paul’s logical parts view!

But one post I thought misfired. (Why focus
on the negative when there’s all this good stuff? Because I’m an academic, it’s
what we do.) Wo thinks that truthmakers are too easy to find, we can always use
the world as a truthmaker for anything. That’s possibly right, but I think what
happens next isn’t obviously right.

Want a complete
description of fundamental reality upon which everything else supervenes? Here
you are: ‘w exists’. Note that this time, unlike in the trick mentioned in ‘New
work for a theory of universals’, where the complete description was ‘everything
is F’, no exceedingly gruesome property is involved. The fundamental fact
doesn’t even contain a (non-logical) predicate. So what’s wrong this time?

I don’t see the important distinction here.
Surely objects can be just as gruesome as properties. If all objects were
created equal, then there’d be an unsolvable Kripkenstein problem for names.
But there isn’t. To summarise the world by saying ‘Everything is F’ you might
have to use a recherché predicate; to summarise it by saying ‘w exists’
you might have to use a recherché name.