1 Forthcoming in Synthese How Negative Truths are Made True Aaron M. Griffith Identifying plausible truthmakers for negative truths has been a serious and perennial problem for truthmaker theory. I argue here that negative truths (in particular contingent negative existential truths) are indeed made true but not in the way that positive truths are. I rely on a distinction between “existence-independence” and “variation-independence” drawn by Hofmann and Horvath (2008) to characterize the unique form of dependence negative truths exhibit on reality. The notion of variation-independence is then used to motivate a principle of truthmaking for contingent negative truths. 1. Introduction Negative truths have likely posed the greatest challenge to truthmaker theorists who think that all (or at least all contingent) truths have truthmakers. The challenge is that, prima facie, it is hard to see how a negative truth, e.g., <there are no unicorns> 1 that is concerned with the non-existence of something could be (or even needs to be) made true by the existence of some entity. To complicate matters, most truthmaker theorists accept Truthmaker Necessitarianism, the view that if an entity x makes a proposition p true, then necessarily, if x exists, then p is true. 2 This exacerbates the problem for it is quite difficult to identify some entity whose existence is sufficient for the truth of a proposition like <there are no unicorns>. Indeed, it appears on first reflection that every entity in the actual world, 1 I will abbreviate “the proposition that…” with angle brackets < , >. 2 Armstrong (2004: 6), Smith (1999: 276), Fox (1987: 189), Rodriguez-Pereyra (2005: 18), Lowe (2009: 209), Molnar (2000: 83), and Cameron (2008: 413) accept Necessitarianism. Not everyone agrees that truthmaking is or involves necessitation, e.g., Cameron (2005), Schaffer (2010b: 311), Parsons (1999: section 2.1), and Heil (2000: 233). Briggs (2012) develops a sophisticated view of truthmaking without necessitation.