Timo Meier

The most serious objection to Beall and Restall’s case-based logical pluralism is the so-called collapse argument. According to the collapse argument, logical pluralism is not genuinely pluralistic and collapses into a single privileged relation of logical consequence. In response, Caret offered an account of logical contextualism that supposedly maintains the merits of Beall and Restall’s case-based logical pluralism while circumventing the collapse argument. In this paper, I first point out a gap in the collapse argument in that it does not affect pluralists who assume that there is no uniquely strongest admissible consequence relation. This gap, then, is closed by an improved version of the collapse argument, which makes use of Eklund’s classification of types of pluralism. Finally, I discuss how Caret’s logical contextualism cannot hold up against this new formulation of the collapse argument unless implausible assumptions about the contents of normative operators are made. Moreover, by reformulating the collapse argument, I determine the extent to which logical monism and pluralism oppose each other, paving the way for fruitful future discussion.

Fictional ersatz realism is the metaphysical stance that abstract fictional entities exist and are dependent on fiction and literary practices. Everett tackled the position of ersatz realism by claiming that the ersatz realist cannot provide an identity criterion for fictional entities that does not imply a contradiction. Although Woodward proposed a defense to Everett's argument, I will argue that ersatz realism is no tenable position, as it still cannot provide an adequate identity criterion. To establish this result, I will provide a base frame for identity criteria available to the ersatz realist. Afterwards, I will show that to any identity criterion the ersatz realist may propose there is a story such that a fictional entity corresponding to this story is not self-identical, imposing a contradiction to the metaphysical account of ersatz realism.