From Truth Pluralism to Ontological Pluralism and Back (original) (raw)

Ontological pluralism holds that there are different ways of being. Truth pluralism holds that there are different ways of being true. Both views have received a growing amount of attention in recent literature, but, at present, there has been very little discussion of the connections between the views, or how work on one might inform work on the other. In this paper we aim to undertake some in- vestigations in this direction. We begin by suggesting that interesting motivations for ontological pluralism can be developed by noting the similarities between the ways that debates about truth and debates about existence have developed, and that the motivations typically given for truth pluralism plausibly have analogues to provide motivations for ontological pluralism. We then go on to consider in more detail the precise relations between truth pluralism and ontological pluralism. We argue that, whilst there are no entailments from truth pluralism to ontological pluralism, nor vice versa, those who hold one view and wish to hold the other will find routes by which to do so. In the final part of the paper we identify some disanalogies between the views, by considering whether certain ‘mixed’ problems commonly pressed against truth pluralism — namely the problems of mixed inferences and mixed compounds — have analogues for ontological pluralism. We argue that, while there are many similarities in the literatures, there are also some surprising dissimilarities between the views, and some of the most pressing mixing problems for truth pluralism turn out to not to be problems for ontological pluralism.