Austere Truth Pluralism

Moderate pluralism is the dominant view in the pluralism debate. We will show that austere pluralism—a form of strong truth pluralism—should be taken seriously as a contender in the pluralist landscape. We will do three kinds of work to level the playing field. First, we will argue that moderate pluralists conveniently take advantage of the dual nature of their view, switching back and forth between their distinctively monist and distinctively pluralist commitments depending on the issue or task at hand (section 2). Crucially—and perhaps somewhat ironically—the plurality of truth-grounding properties plays an ineliminable role in explaining the metaphysical unity of truth, a key feature of moderate pluralism—and a monist one at that (section 3). Second, we will introduce and articulated austere pluralism, a novel form of strong pluralism (section 4), and we will show that it is entirely adequate for capturing the core idea of truth pluralism (section 6.1) and can deal with the problem of mixed compounds and the problem of mixed inferences, two challenges usually regarded as stumbling blocks for strong pluralism (section 5). Third, we will argue that austere pluralism fares better than moderate pluralism with respect to ontological parsimony, an important theoretical virtue (section 6.2).