And I think I’m pretty good at not straw-manning people on these issues; I’m used to drawing pretty fine distinctions between pretty out-there ontological and epistemological views.
To have a conversation where you can draw fine distinctions both parties of the discussion need to be willing to have that conversation. You might have approached the issue as a mistake theorist while they were more in the conflict theorist mindset and didn’t want to yield any possible ground.
I remember in a book about applied ontology by a author who saw himself as a realist while the statement that “homo sapiens is a species” was seen as a statement about reality while “Alice sake” in the sense of “He did X for Alice’s sake” is not something that really exists. ( I think it was in Applied Ontology: An Introduction by Katherine Munn and Barry Smith)
In contrast to that non-realist ontologists consider the idea of a species to be constructed and not one about reality. What’s real about the statement “homo sapiens is a species” is not something that’s directly made up of atoms and physics but the realist position by applied ontologists like Barry Smith is still that it’s real.
To have a conversation where you can draw fine distinctions both parties of the discussion need to be willing to have that conversation. You might have approached the issue as a mistake theorist while they were more in the conflict theorist mindset and didn’t want to yield any possible ground.
I remember in a book about applied ontology by a author who saw himself as a realist while the statement that “homo sapiens is a species” was seen as a statement about reality while “Alice sake” in the sense of “He did X for Alice’s sake” is not something that really exists. ( I think it was in Applied Ontology: An Introduction by Katherine Munn and Barry Smith)
In contrast to that non-realist ontologists consider the idea of a species to be constructed and not one about reality. What’s real about the statement “homo sapiens is a species” is not something that’s directly made up of atoms and physics but the realist position by applied ontologists like Barry Smith is still that it’s real.