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The development of software systems inevitably involves the detection and handling of inconsistencies. These inconsistencies can arise in system requirements, design specifications and, quite often, in the descriptions that form the final implemented software product. A large proportion of software engineering research has been devoted to consistency maintenance, or geared towards eradicating inconsistencies as soon as they are detected. Software practitioners, on the other hand, live with inconsistency as a matter of course. Depending on the nature of an inconsistency, its causes and its impact, they sometimes choose to tolerate its presence, rather than resolve it immediately, if at all. This paper argues for “making inconsistency respectable” [A phrase first used by D. Gabbay and A. Hunter (in: Proceedings of Fundamentals of Artificial Intelligence Research'91, Springer, Berlin, p. 19; in: Symbolic and …