  While this might account for why (43) is a felicitous utterance it is not clear that it helps the pluralist: if the negation in (43) isn’t standard, then the premise isn’t sufficient to show that the statue and lump genuinely have conflicting properties, and are thus distinct. Almotahari (2014) pushes this line even further, arguing that the sequence ‘The lump is not Romanesque, but the statue is’ indeed involves meta-linguistic negation, but also that a necessary condition on the occurrence of meta-linguistic negation in such contexts is precisely that, if read with ordinary negation, the first clause (‘I am not happy’/‘The lump is not Romanesque’) is semantically incompatible with the second clause (‘I am elated’/’The statue is Romanesque’).  This conclusion, claims Almotahari, is detrimental for the pluralist: in order to involve meta-linguistic negation the two clauses must be (when taken literally) incompatible, but they can only be incompatible if the statue is identical to the lump, which is precisely the monist’s contention. Interestingly, the claim that category mistakes are truth-valueless offers the pluralist a rejoinder to Almotahari’s argument: if we assume that two statements are semantically incompatible just in case they cannot be simultaneously true, then the two clauses might be incompatible not because the statue is identical to the lump, but simply because one of the two claims is a  truth-valueless category mistake and hence in itself never  true.[35]