Consistentism: A Groundless Ground

This paper develops the metaphysical and semantic foundations of Consistentism as a unified philosophical system, proceeding from the epistemological conclusions of the companion paper Necessity, Ouroboros, and Fallibilism (NOF): that no framework-external anchor is available or required, that necessity survives only as an intra-framework constitutive condition, that fallibilism is the appropriate default epistemic stance, and that the justificatory structures available to inquiry take the Ouroboric rather than the foundationalist form. On this basis, we argue that consistency functions as the single stable principle across epistemology, truth theory, ontology, and the philosophy of language and logic — consistency understood not as the satisfaction of any single logical system's explosion-avoidance condition, but as the functional requirement that a framework not undermine its own discriminatory capacity from within. The paper opens with logical pluralism as the logical-theoretic counterpart of the epistemological framework-dependence NOF establishes. A key result of this opening: the law of non-contradiction's apparent unconditional authority is the historical projection of classical logic's practical dominance, not a framework-external metaphysical constraint; what is genuinely cross-framework is the functional consistency requirement, which different frameworks may satisfy differently. This condition receives a compact formal statement (§1.3): a framework retains functional consistency exactly when at least one sentence in its own language remains underived — a condition stated without reference to any particular negation operator, and shown to coincide with classical non-contradiction only given the further, non-mandatory assumption of explosion. §1.4 examines whether this negation-neutrality secures immunity from the wider revenge problem facing any sufficiently expressive self-referential language; it does not, and a survey of independent proposals for avoiding triviality finds a uniform, so-far-uncompensated cost to naive expressive power, which we register as a stated defeater condition on functional consistency's own scope rather than resolve. We develop the three-layer framework in its truth-theoretic and semantic dimensions, grounding a stratified analytic-synthetic distinction that survives Quinean critique. We diagnose the dominant failure mode of analytic metaphysics — most clearly exemplified by Kripkean modal realism — as presenting normative constructions as descriptive discoveries. We set out a nominalist ontology, adopted for its parsimony rather than argued as metaphysically settled, and extend a four-part comparative discipline — functional consistency, functional relevance, cross-traditional convergence, and the Benacerraf pairing of semantics and epistemology — across the wider field of metaphysical posits generally, testing naturalism's own preferred entities by the identical standard. The same four-part discipline is then turned reflexively on the inflationism/deflationism dispute itself, including the naturalized defenses each side offers for its own reliability, and the test converges on a Pyrrhonist suspension of judgment rather than a verdict for either side.