I would say this is relatively typical. (Background: I did a masters in philosophy at Pitt).

Edit: I would also say that it's unfortunate that parts of philosophy are this hand-wavy. For instance, at one point in the paper, the author describes hallucinating that you see a letter in your mailbox as being phenomenologically just like actually seeing one. Daniel Dennett has a well known discussion in the first chapter of Consciousness Explained arguing that hallucinations are phenomenologically quite different from normal perception. Perhaps the author would say it doesn't matter, that's just a contingent fact that doesn't undermine the specific point being made, but 1) I'm not confident that argument works, and 2) either way, it should be stated explicitly.