Arguments from Illusion

This paper lays out in detail various versions of an argument from illusion in areas of philosophy other than the familiar one in the theory of perception. Those are the philosophy of action (doing vs. trying), the theory of motivation, the theory of knowledge, the theory of justification, and, in the philosophy of action, the distinction between act and agent. The suggestion is that we learn something about the force of such arguments, and about the best way to resist them, by seeing how they function in different contexts. There is also a suggestion (but no more than that) that if you are tempted by one instance, you should be equally tempted by the others. The paper also examines the much less familiar distinction between disjunctivism and non-conjunctivism.