What is this thing called dialetheism?

This paper has two parts. In the first I discuss two claims made by Priest in Some Comments and Replies (DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-25365-3 27, 2019): (i) that the idea of ‘contradictions in reality’ lacks textual support in his work, and (ii) that such contradictions would require a theory of truth as correspondence with entities such as facts or states of affairs. With respect to (i), I will recognize that, after a closer reading of his texts, in particular In Contradiction (2nd edition, OUP, 2006), I have not been able to find clear examples of dialetheias related to real contradictions. As far as I could see, for Priest, dialetheism is mainly a thesis about our conceptual framework and mental processes. As for (ii), in opposition to him, I will argue that all we need to make sense of the idea of contradictions in reality is the apparatus provided by Tarski’s definition of truth, and an object a and a predicate P such that a satisfies both P and ¬P. In the second part, I discuss what one must accept to be a dialetheist and what is required for dialetheism to be a plausible and interesting thesis. My conclusion is that dialetheism ends up being either a strong but implausible thesis about contradictions in extra-mental and extra-linguistic phenomena, or a weaker but interesting claim about contradictions produced by thought and language.