 Philosophers have had much trouble vindicating any of these intuitions. They still try to preserve as much of the positivity as they can. For instance, Stephen Mumford (2021) characterizes himself as a “soft Parmenidean”. His 21st century willingness to tolerate some negativity is informed by Bertrand Russell’s 20th century failure to reduce negative truths to positive truths. Russell (1985) tried paraphrasing ‘The cat is not on the mat’ as ‘There is a state of affairs incompatible with the cat being on the mat’. But this paraphrase is covertly negative; it uses ‘incompatible’ which means not compatible. He tried modeling ‘Not p’ as an expression of disbelief that p. But ‘disbelief’ means believing that something is not the case. Is it even clear that absences are causally inert? Trapped miners are killed by the absence of oxygen. In the end Russell surrendered his intuition that reality is positive. In a famous lecture at Harvard, Russell concluded that irreducibly negative facts exist. He reports this nearly caused a riot.