To start with, most non-philosophers assume that some things are obviously made of peas (such as piles of peas on a plate) and some things less obviously (such as mushy peas). There are some publicly disputed cases (guacamole) and some hard cases (split peas, which are really nuts). But the folk metaphysics of peas seems calm.
Then some bright spark philosopher offers an argument to the effect that everything is made of peas. His/her argument starts with the obvious cases (peas), gives a method of construing some other cases as made of peas under a slightly wider understanding of ‘pea’ and shows that Wittgensteinian arguments from the 1970s that nothing other than peas are made of peas were themselves question-begging. A new pea-metaphysics prevails in which the bright spark’s PhD students expand the pea ontology to some further interesting cases using S5 modal logic that few others can grasp but nod anyway.
There are jobs to be had in peas.
But then other somewhat envious technically minded philosophers show that some of pea constructions are implausible under better understandings of the key concepts on which they depend. Others suggest non-pea alternative constructions. And then a John McDowell highlights to everyone’s surprise that the very motive to assume that peas must be at the heart of things depends on a blindingly obvious but somehow missed merely optional assumption driven by a misreading of the C17 scientific revolution. There’s much embarrassment all round and everyone drops peas from the tripos. And strangely, the 1970s Wittgensteinian pea-eschewing arguments make a comeback.
This usually takes about 20 years.
