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"Although not easily argued for, I agree with many Australian-minded philosophers that this is the optimal position in ontology. Like Martin and Armstrong I am a factualist in that I believe in the existence of facts or states of affairs where these are understood as things having properties and/or standing in relations. I also agree with Martin that we should strive towards an ontology that is only committed to facts of the first-order. Simply put, we should only commit ourselves to states of affairs that do not have states of affairs as constituents. Armstrong, however, begs to differ. He thinks that higher-order states of affairs are required in two rather different sorts of cases. First of all, he says, they are needed in order to provide truthmakers for negative and general truths. For what make such truths true, according to Armstrong, are totality states of affairs: for example, the state of affairs that a certain mereological fusion of first-order states of affairs are all the first-order states of affairs. Secondly, he thinks that higher-order states of affairs are also needed to ground laws of nature, understood as states of affairs contingently linking states-of-affairs-types (i.e. universals). An aim of the present thesis is to argue that there is no need to appeal to higher-order states of affairs. Three of my papers address this issue. In paper IV called ""Against Truthmaker Necessitarianism"" (forthcoming in Logique et Analyse), I provide reasons for thinking that we can make do without totality facts in accounting for general truths if we give up the requirement that truthmakers necessitate the truth of the propositions they make true. Paper III called ""Causal Truthmaking"" (2010) addresses the problem of finding plausible truthmakers for negative truths. Here I develop a theory according to which negative truths are grounded in causal facts of the first order. Once we allow for such truthmakers, we can do without higher-order totality facts in providing"

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