ABSTRACT
The mission of the hour is to establish that this circumspection is warranted. (This is in turn a subgoal toward the larger project of defanging Wittgensteinian metaphilosophy.) Immediate headway is made by noting that ‘pseudo’ belongs to a coven of terms huddled around the caldron of negation. Numbered among this dark clan are proven mischief-makers such as ‘nothing’, ‘nonexistent’, ‘omission’, and ‘illusion’. The dangers posed by debunkers will be chron-icled by examining their sway over a wide range of philosophical issues. Some of these controversies (free will, paternalism, forgery, false consciousness) will be addressed in passing. Others (false belief, false pleasure, perversion, pseudo-science) merit their own sections. One of this chapter’s themes is that these apparently disparate issues are related, so the study of debunkers makes these topics mutually illuminating. Balancing the message of unity is another of diversity: debunkers are highly ambiguous and so entice the unwary into all manner of equivocation.
