Against placement problems

A big chunk of metaphysics/ontology is directly or indirectly permeated by “placement problems”.

Take these radically different discourses: physical discourse, mental discourse, moral discourse, modal discourse, aesthetic discourse, mathematical discourse, etc.

A “placement problem” emerges when a philosopher, faced with radically different discourses, seeks to “unite” them in some way. Typically, he worships a particular discourse, such as the physical discourse, and, faced with a radically different discourse such as the moral discourse, becomes frustrated; he asks himself “but how can we account for the moral discourse in our physical world?”, “how can we place moral entities in our physical world?”, “how can moral entities fit into our physical world?”.

The philosopher then embarks on a grand enterprise to account for the “strange” discourse within the discourse he worships. He'll start using notions like emergence, supervenience, grounding, he'll start making “reductions”, he'll make big, complex analyses of the strange discourse in terms of the worshipped discourse, and so on.

At the end of his enterprise, he may end up with several views. Maybe he's become an eliminativist/anti-realist of the strange discourse, maybe he's found a way to analyze the strange discourse in terms of the worshipped discourse, maybe he's talking about “fiction”, maybe he now worships the strange discourse as much as the other, maybe he's modified the strange discourse a little to better fit it into the other, maybe he's created a third discourse to fit both in, etc.

All this, I think, is the most ridiculous and dangerous activity in all of philosophy, and no one explains it better than Rorty:

I think that philosophers should give up on the question “What is the place of mental representations, or meanings, or values, in a world of physical particles?” They should think of talk about particles, talk about beliefs, and talk about what ought to be done, as cultural activities that fulfill distinct purposes. These activities do not need to be fitted together in a systematic way, any more than basketball and cricket need to be fitted together with bridge and chess. As I was saying last week, the many purposes that are served by our various discourses should not be viewed as subordinate to the overarching project of putting all the pieces of the puzzle together. If we have a plausible narrative of how we became what we are, and why we use the words we do as we do, we have all we need in the way of self-understanding.

Philosophers who embark on solving a placement problem tend to reify discourses, to see them not as social activities serving various social purposes, but as things that enable us to touch or reflect some kind of world beyond (typical of representationalism).

When we realize that discourses are merely social activities serving various social purposes, we understand that there's no problem with having various radically different discourses. After all, we have various radically different goals. And there's no reason to seek to unify the different discourses; if each discourse performs its goals well, what's the problem?

In fact, trying to unify different discourses can be very dangerous. It's easy to come to the conclusion that they can't be unified, and so some need to be eliminated. Or we can modify certain discourses to make them fit into the one we venerate, but these modifications can often make the discourses less effective in achieving their purposes.

Philosophers who work on placement problems are people who don't understand what a discourse is, and who consequently hijack, perversify, mutilate and murder perfectly respectable discourses.

And placement problems aren't just a small branch of metaphysics/ontology, they're almost everywhere. Sometimes they're explicit, but often they're implicit. Asking whether numbers really exist, what the relationship is between the mental and the physical, etc., are all hidden placement problems.

We don't have to unify the various discourses, which are merely social activities serving various social purposes, nor do we have to look for great deep relationships between the various discourses: there are no great deep relationships between entities of different discourses precisely because they are entities of different discourses, just as there are no great deep relationships to look for between a ball of basketball and a chess piece.
All the talk of “grounding”, “supervenience”, “realization”, “emergence”, “reduction”, etc., is directly related to the business of placement problems, and it should be mocked.

I'm not “anti-metaphysics”, I'm rather “anti-placement-problems”. As the neo-Carnapians à la Thomasson with her easy ontology would say, I think you can do good metaphysics when you work inside languages rather than outside or between languages (except for questioning the usefulness of a language).
For example, I have no problem with someone who defends panagentialism with a teleological argument. In such a context, we're not twisting one language around to unite it with another deemed superior, disregarding its social goals; we're working within languages.