ABSTRACT
Reducers feel that there is still something unofficial about everyday language, because it speaks of entities such as human beings and homes and prisons that are not in the repertoire of physics, entities that cannot, therefore, be quite real. But to question their reality is to invoke not physics but metaphysics. What does ‘real’ mean here? What deeper reality are we talking about? Why (first) is there this profound faith in extending the mechanical explanatory system indefinitely, and why (next) is that faith expressed in this violently ontological language of appearance, or illusion, and reality?
