"Magic isn't real" is a motte and bailey category error because when you start there, anything you successfully label as "magic" becomes "not real" and you can laugh at it and call it dumb with social approval

But if you start picking at this (as I have) you quickly realize that this label is very fuzzy and everyone throws different things into the "magic isn't real" bucket but is unsure about tangentially related other stuff

Precision of words helps us figure out what's real

Unfortunately, we don't have a cultural shorthand for all the weird things that "could" be placed in the weird paranormal bucket but most people associate many of those things with magic even if they insist that they really mean "just casting spells"--and even that's hella loose!

When you start pressing many people they'll realize they have no idea what they actually mean when they say "magic isn't real" and they'll make allowances on specific categories they haven't considered before and suddenly things get very murky

Furthermore, most of the people who insist this have done very little primary research to investigate which of the things they assumed are or aren't real and are in this weird, magic-adjacent bucket

They're going off gut-level heuristics of what feels right to them

But without trotting off a list of mutually-understood and predefined categories every time I want to talk about this space, I can't... and even then lots of people won't know what I mean without lots of definitions

Even if I call it psi most people have no idea what I mean

So unfortunately, we're stuck with "magic" for now

You may taunt me from your fuzzy position now