Dichotomy-removing arguments along the lines of ‘there’s no such thing as X’ or ‘everything is X’ tend to be clever (and illuminating if properly understood) but wrong. What they show is that the thing isn’t what you thought it was, or is commonly thought to be.
Cf free will and determinism—suppose the world were deterministic, then all your decisions were pre-determined, so you don’t have free will. But then we’d have to treat all previous uses of the phrase ‘free will’ as meaningless or false, which is highly inconvenient and not in practice what happens. (Cf you’re saying it’s not useful to say that.) It shows instead that free will means something separate from pre-determination—e.g. the ability to get what you want, or want to want the things you want, or whatever.
There are examples where ‘there’s no such thing as X’ can be found to be true even though X was widely believed to exist—e.g. rain-gods, phlogiston. But it’s more normal to say that X does exist but meant something else all along. E.g. atoms do exist, but can be split (ancient Greek philosophers said they were indivisible by definition.)
Dichotomy-removing arguments along the lines of ‘there’s no such thing as X’ or ‘everything is X’ tend to be clever (and illuminating if properly understood) but wrong. What they show is that the thing isn’t what you thought it was, or is commonly thought to be.
Cf free will and determinism—suppose the world were deterministic, then all your decisions were pre-determined, so you don’t have free will. But then we’d have to treat all previous uses of the phrase ‘free will’ as meaningless or false, which is highly inconvenient and not in practice what happens. (Cf you’re saying it’s not useful to say that.) It shows instead that free will means something separate from pre-determination—e.g. the ability to get what you want, or want to want the things you want, or whatever.
There are examples where ‘there’s no such thing as X’ can be found to be true even though X was widely believed to exist—e.g. rain-gods, phlogiston. But it’s more normal to say that X does exist but meant something else all along. E.g. atoms do exist, but can be split (ancient Greek philosophers said they were indivisible by definition.)