Abstract

Realist dialetheism is the view that there are contradictions in reality. One argument against this idea says that it is impossible because it has to make room for the possibility of a trivial reality, which is metaphysically impossible. Another argument against it says that the metaphysical structure of reality is such that it is impossible to have contradictions in it. I argue here that both arguments fail to establish the impossibility of realist dialetheism because they are based on a misconception about the notions of negation and contradiction, which leads them, in the first case, to wrongly hold that dialetheism has to be compatible with trivialism, and, in the second case, to assume that the validity of the Aristotelian principle of non-contradiction prevents the existence of dialetheias