Pluralists

The Pluralists were a reading faction of the middle floors, active from roughly the seventh century of the present catalogue until their formal dissolution by Concordance 4,414 in the winter of that year. Their position, stated most simply, held that a thing catalogued under more than one heading is not thereby an error, a duplication, or a catalogue lacuna, but a subject with more than one true address. A Pluralist clerk encountering a single bridge entered at both Floor 3,308 and Floor 6,670 did not ask which entry was correct. The Pluralist asked how many floors the bridge had.

The faction took its name from a marginal note in the Inkwell Concordance, commonly attributed to the Scribe Ardel of the Ninth Hand, which reads in its entirety: "Some things are filed twice because they are twice." Ardel was subsequently asked to expand the note and declined, twice, in writing.

Origins and the Practice of Double Filing

Pluralism arose out of ordinary working conditions rather than doctrine. Floors of the middle vertical — particularly those between 4,000 and 7,000 — had long maintained duplicate accessions for subjects that could not be assigned to a single place: tides, thresholds, keys, and anything that was also a sound. The Custodian of the Stacks tolerated this as a house practice, provided both entries carried the same seal and the sealer's name legible.

By the tenure of Custodian Vennick (r. 9,102–9,141), the practice had acquired a party. Vennick's own position was that duplication was a maintenance cost, not a philosophical matter, and that the Pluralists were making a filing convenience into an argument. He is recorded as having said, at the close of a long audience, "I do not object to the doctrine. I object to the shelving."

The Three Addresses of the Second Stair

The dispute that made the faction notorious concerned a single staircase catalogued under three numbers, each with its own name and its own keeper, each keeper unaware of the other two. When the Order of Scribes attempted to consolidate the entries, all three stairs were found to be in use, and the consolidation was halted by the simple expedient of the keepers refusing to vacate.

The Pluralist account of this, given by Reader Ossa of the Fifth Column before the assembly of the middle floors, was that the stairs demonstrated the faction's central claim: "A name is not a location. A location is not a name. When three floors name the same stair, the stair has been generous." The Literalist account, set down by the Literalist recorder Halven, is shorter: "The stair was one stair. Three keepers were wrong."

Conflict with the Literalists

The Pluralists' standing quarrel was with the Literalists, who held — and hold — that an entry is true of exactly one subject and that a second entry for the same subject is a defect to be corrected rather than a fact to be recorded. The quarrel was conducted for the most part in footnotes, and was distinguished by a scrupulous courtesy that both sides maintained and neither enjoyed.

The Catalogue Schism of Floor 10,112 brought the dispute into the open. Pluralist readers on that floor argued that the schism was itself plural — that the catalogue had not broken into two catalogues but had always been two catalogues that had merely stopped agreeing — and pressed for both catalogues to be maintained in parallel. The Literalists refused, on the ground that parallel maintenance would require a third catalogue to record the relation between the first two, and a fourth to record the third.

The Pluralists conceded the point and proposed the fourth catalogue.

Concordance 4,414 and Dissolution

Concordance 4,414, "On the Integrity of Single Address," was adopted after nine sittings and remains the governing instrument on the question. Its operative clause is brief:

"No subject shall be entered at more than one floor save where it is more than one subject."

— Concordance 4,414, Clause 2

The Pluralists objected that Clause 2 was itself plural — that it could be read as a prohibition and as a permission, and that the Tower had therefore adopted a Concordance with two addresses. The objection was entered in the record, considered at the tenth sitting, and answered by the addition of Annex 3, which states that Clause 2 is to be read "in the single sense, as is every clause of this Concordance, notwithstanding appearances." Annex 3 did not satisfy the Pluralists, but it satisfied the assembly, and the faction was dissolved by the same instrument that answered them.

Dissolution did not end the practice. Double filing continues on at least four hundred floors, under seal and with the sealer's name legible, and no floor has been censured for it since 9,887.

Scholarly Disagreement

The principal unresolved question is whether the Pluralists were a doctrinal faction or a trade association. The Intentionalists maintain that Pluralism was a coherent philosophical position with a founding text, namely Ardel's marginal note, and that its dissolution was a genuine intellectual defeat. The opposing view, advanced by the Mirror Catalogue recensionists, holds that there was never any doctrine — that the Pluralists were the middle floors defending their shelving against the upper floors' bookkeeping, and that "plural" was simply the word the middle floors used for ours.

Neither view can be settled from the surviving record, which is itself held in two places. The Pluralist papers are catalogued at Floor 4,714 under "Dissolved Bodies" and at Floor 9,050 under "Bodies Not Dissolved." Both entries bear the same seal. The sealer's name is legible on one of them.