The central aim of The Crane's Walk is to show that we can conceive and live with a pluralism of standpoints that have conflicting standards for truth, while the truth of each is at the same time entirely unaffected by the truth of the others. The book tries to show that Plato's work expresses this kind of pluralism. It also argues that the central claims about truth and pluralism are justified and important in their own right, whether or not we ultimately agree about what Plato's standpoint is.Our local and global communities are currently torn apart by conflicts within and between a host of different pluralist (for example, multiculturalism) and absolutist commitments. The author argues for the possibility of a coordination of absolute and relative truth that allows an understanding of both (some) relativist and (some) absolutist positions as fully legitimate, and as able to exist in a coherently paradoxical relation to their opposites. On the basis of this understanding, these conflicts of perspectives and of moral commitments may often be resolved or alleviated in ways that all sides can recognize as reasonable and fair.The book also argues that this coordination of logically incompatible conceptions of truth gives helpful insight into a variety of problems basic to traditional metaphysics and epistemology.The longest tradition of Plato scholarship rightly identifies crucial faults in Plato's Theory of Ideas. The author argues that Plato deliberately displayed those faults, because he aimed to demonstrate the indispensable truth-giving dimensions of basic kinds of error or illogic. These dimensions of error, crucial to the establishment of truth, are what both require and legitimatethe paradoxical coordination of logically incompatible conceptions of truth. Connecting this idea with some growing currents of Plato scholarship, the author emphasizes, in addition to the dialogues' arguments, the importance of their various non-argumentative features, including their drama, myths, fictions, anecdotes, and humor. From a purely logical standpoint, these are argumentative errors. Unlike the newer scholarship, however, the author emphasizes the importance of these features as they are left unanalyzed, left as trivial or logically mistaken (rather than, say, as ironically pointing the attentive reader toward the valid version). He argues that these unanalyzed non-argumentative features function rigorously, as a lever with which to question and justify the enterprise of rational argument itself, without circularly presupposing its standards.In particular, this allows conflicting ideas of rationality and truth to be examined and justified in a common area that is also sufficiently outside the criteria of rationality of each to avoid circularity, and to avoid illegitimately assimilating any position to the standards of another.

Sometimes Always True aims to resolve three connected problems. First, we need an undogmatic pluralist standpoint in political theory, metaphysics, and epistemology. But genuine pluralism suffers from the contradiction that making room for fundamental differences in outlook means making room for outlooks that exclude pluralism.
Second, philosophy involves reflecting on the world and meaning as a whole, yet this means adopting a vantage point in some way outside of meaning.
Third, our lived experience of the sense of our lives similarly undermines its own sense, as it involves having a vantage point in some way wholly outside ourselves.
In detailed engagement with, among others, Davidson, Rorty, Heidegger, Foucault, Wilde, and gender and sexuality theory, the book argues that these contradictions are so thoroughgoing that, like the liar's paradox, they cancel the bases of their own meaning. Consequently, it argues, they resolve themselves and do so in a way that produces a vantage point on these issues that is not dogmatically circular because it is, workably, both within and outside these issues' sense. The solution to a genuinely undogmatic pluralism, then, is to enter into these contradictions and the process of their self-resolution.