the business of dismantling various aspects of Cartesian dualism--the identification of some things like understanding or meaning or sensation of pain as mental processes, the supposition that we learn our internal states purely by introspection. Another is our tendency to opt for Platonist explanations in the face of problems about universals and existence of categories.
Percy Shelley remarked that "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world," forgetting that the main bits of legislation he and his fellow Romantics were interested in were all cribbed from the German philosophers (and William Godwin channeling them into English) whom they sat around and read to each other. He should have said philosophers. Suppose we should be successful at doing the work revealed in those three themes remarked on above. What would that do? That is, suppose we should be more subtle and careful before we should think general explanations are required, that we should be successful at dismantling dualism, that we should understand names and categories without being Platonists. These are hardly imaginable, but suppose.
Platonism first, and most cursorily: one effect of Platonism is to shift our attention from here and now, from the thing in front of us, to something apprehended, as Plato suggests in the talk of the divided line, through the intellect. I'm not saying this is bad, unless it leads us to diminish unfairly the importance of what is front of us, what is specific and individual, in favor of an unfairly inflated abstract category. I'm passing over, of course, whether we need to answer any of those questions (what makes a thing the thing it is? why do we call a thing by its name? how are we able ...