Long time readers know that I’m generally OK with reification as long as we don’t take it too seriously. And we do that all the time. An “object” is really only an “object” in a human-sense. Reduced down to particle physics it is an altogether different entity. But on the human-scale asserting that a chair is indeed a chair, rather than cellulose, etc., (or now, polymers), and further down basic macromolecules, is a useful “fudge.” Similarly, I’m generally skeptical of the idea that we have a clear & distinct model for what a “species” is. The framework is very different when you’re talking about prokaryotes, as opposed to plants, as opposed to mammals. The question is not species, but what utility or instrumental value does the category or class species have?
For most of the stuff I’m concerned with, the messy shapes of reality which are the purview of biological science, we are all fundamentally nominalists in our metaphysic. We may accept that we’re idealists in the sense of cognitive or evolutionary psychology, but human intuition does not make it so. The categories and classes we construct are simply the semantic sugar which makes the reality go down …