This is a familiar dialectic in philosophical debates about whether some domain X can be reduced to Y (meta-ethics is a salient comparison to me). The anti-reductionist (A) will argue that our core intuitions/concepts/practices related to X make clear that it cannot be reduced to Y, and that since X must exist (as we intuitively think it does), we should expand our metaphysics to include more than Y. The reductionist (R) will argue that X can in fact be reduced to Y, and that this is compatible with our intuitions/concepts/everyday practices with respect to X, and hence that X exists but it’s nothing over and above Y. The nihilist (N), by contrast, agrees with A that it follows from our intuitions/concepts/practices related to X that it cannot be reduced to Y, but agrees with D that there is in fact nothing over and above Y, and so concludes that there is no X, and that our intuitions/concepts/practices related to X are correspondingly misguided. Here, the disagreement between A vs. R/N is about whether more than Y exists; the disagreement between R vs. A/N is about whether a world of only Y “counts” as a world with X. This latter often begins to seem a matter of terminology; the substantive questions have already been settled.
Is this a well-known phenomenon? I think I’ve observed this dynamic before and found it very frustrating. It seems like philosophers keep executing the following procedure:
Take a sensible, but perhaps vague, everyday concept (e.g. consciousness, or free will), and give it a precise philosophical definition, but bake in some dubious, anti-reductionist assumptions into the definition.
Discuss the concept in ways that conflate the everyday concept and the precise philosophical one. (Failing to make clear that the philosophical concept may or may not be the best formalization of the folk concept.)
Realize that the anti-reductionist assumptions were false.
Claim that the everyday concept is an illusion.
Generate confusion (along with full employment for philosophers?).
If you’d just said that the precisely defined philosophical concept was a provisional formalization of the everyday concept in the first place, then you wouldn’t have to claim that the everyday concept was an illusion once you realize that your formalization was wrong!
Is this a well-known phenomenon? I think I’ve observed this dynamic before and found it very frustrating. It seems like philosophers keep executing the following procedure:
Take a sensible, but perhaps vague, everyday concept (e.g. consciousness, or free will), and give it a precise philosophical definition, but bake in some dubious, anti-reductionist assumptions into the definition.
Discuss the concept in ways that conflate the everyday concept and the precise philosophical one. (Failing to make clear that the philosophical concept may or may not be the best formalization of the folk concept.)
Realize that the anti-reductionist assumptions were false.
Claim that the everyday concept is an illusion.
Generate confusion (along with full employment for philosophers?).
If you’d just said that the precisely defined philosophical concept was a provisional formalization of the everyday concept in the first place, then you wouldn’t have to claim that the everyday concept was an illusion once you realize that your formalization was wrong!
My sense is that the possibility of dynamics of this kind would be on people’s radar in the philosophy community, at least.