Two of the most important outcomes of The Contradictory Christ include: identifying Christ as an unproblematically contradictory being as well as laying the foundations of an investigation of the logical consequences of the existence of Christ, qua contradictory, within a particular 'theory'. In light of the enormous reluevance of Beall’s The contradictory Christ for the study of inconsistency, my main concern here is to explore the effect of some methodological choices behind Beall’s proposal -this in order to recognize in more (...) detail the scope of Beall’s contribution. To do so, I will focus on three main questions: 1. What is required for the identification of a contradiction? 2. How can we recognize a true contradiction from either an apparent or a temporal contradiction? 3. If we identify a true contradiction within a theory, where can we actually go from there? (shrink)

Inconsistency toleration is the phenomenon of working with inconsistent information without threatening one’s rationality. Here I address the role that ignorance plays for the tolerance of contradictions in the empirical sciences. In particular, I contend that there are two types of ignorance that, when present, can make epistemic agents to be rationally inclined to tolerate a contradiction. The first is factual ignorance, understood as temporary undecidability of the truth values of the conflicting propositions. The second is what I call “ignorance (...) of theoretical structure”, which is lack of knowledge of relevant inference patterns within a specific theory. I argue that these two types of ignorance can be explanatory of the scientists’ rational disposition to be tolerant towards contradictions, and I illustrate this with a case study from neutrino physics. (shrink)