An empty joust of mangled words

I consider certain forms of moral realism unintelligible, rather than false. In particular, I have in mind various appeals to "reasons," though there are other concepts I suspect aren't meaningful. With respect to reasons, much of the talk I suspect isn't meaningful centers on normative reasons and an associated family of terms, including "categorical reasons," "decisive reasons," "external reasons," and so on. Much of my concerns stem from the notion that there are "irreducibly normative" concepts, i.e., concepts that are normative, and cannot be reduced or explained in non-normative terms, such as a reduction to a descriptive claim. A description of how these terms are discussed in the literature, and why I think they aren't meaningful, are topics for another time. For now, I want to comment on how my concerns are received. In the past, I'd often say things like:

"I don't know what you mean by a 'normative reason'"

"I don't think I understand what you mean by a 'stance-independent moral fact'"

While I was and remain open to someone communicating the content of these terms to me in a way I can understand, I found that people would often make several assumptions about what I was saying. One of the most common assumptions was that I was saying something like:

"I accept that the concept is meaningful, but I don't understand what it means."

or

"I don't know what this concept means. Therefore, the concept is not meaningful"

Often the latter would be accompanied by some assumptions about my inferential path. e.g. something like: "A concept is unintelligible if informed people cannot explain it to me. Informed people cannot explain the concept of moral realism to me. Therefore, the concept of moral realism is unintelligible.

I began to change the way I framed what I was saying. Rather than saying I don't understand the claim, which gave the impression that I was claiming that I, personally, didn't get it, but granted it meant something (or was at least agnostic on this), I have started to say that I don't think the concepts in question are intelligible or meaningful. So I may say something like

"I don't think the notion of a 'categorical reason' is intelligible."

Yet in spite of reframing my claims to directly express doubt about the meaningfulness of the terms/concepts in question, people still respond by either assuming I am intending to claim that I personally don't understand the concepts, or they infer that this is what's going on, and assure me that the concepts in question are communicable.

Unfortunately, in the latter case, requests for them to communicate the meaning of these concepts result in the same interminable loop of meaningless phrases, like a reason is something that "counts in favor," which is about as helpful as saying God is the "ground of being" without elaboration, or I am treated, yet again, to the insistence that the claims are primitive, basic, or unanalyzable, the philosopher's equivalent of "it's a mystery." Well, maybe it is, but that still means the concept hasn't been communicated to me, and I still suspect this is probably because there isn't any content to communicate.

Another puzzling feature of the suggestion that I personally lack the concepts in question is that people seem not to appreciate that I am not presenting any novel claim about the concepts analytic philosophers employ; the 20th century was replete with pragmatists, positivists, ordinary language philosophers, and of course Wittgenstein all raising concerns about the substantiveness of the terms and concepts employed by analytic philosophers. There's nothing new about suggesting much of these debates are an empty joust of mangled words.