Metaphysical Trivialism

Metaphysical Trivialism is the view that every metaphysical question of whether a putative ontological kind belongs in our ontology has a (trivial) positive answer: Are chairs real? Yes! Are tropes real? Yes! Are ghosts real? Yes! Yes! Yes! Everything is real! Even what is not is also real! (His is a dialetheist proposal)

Vacek confronts us with a new (to me, at least), arresting puzzle at the heart of thinking about non-being as separate from being: remember that among the most compelling — perhaps the most compelling — motivations for ontological monism is precisely the desire to circumvent the notorious problem of inter-categorial interaction: how do mind and body communicate? How do abstract entities bear on concrete ones? As Plato understood with characteristic acuity, the monist who admits a distinction between being and non-being inherits a problem no less vexing than any of these: she must now explain how what is relates to what is not — a relation every bit as intractable as those she set out to avoid. And here lies the deeper irony: if a satisfying account of that relation were available, it is difficult to see why it could not be extended to account for other inter-categorial relations — at which point the principled case for monism quietly collapses into pluralism. Vacek's proposed resolution is, characteristically, a radical one: rather than navigating between the horns of this dilemma, he advocates for trivialism — the rejection, wholesale, of the very distinction between being and non-being.