Do Chairs Exist?

[vulcanlogician]

Fair enough.

Plato's shapes?    That should be a thing.

It actually is a thing.

It's the reification error that's the eye-roller... that there is a 'realm' where these forms exist.  Not Plato's fault but those who followed.  It's what led to all that nonsense about souls and, in my neck of the woods: it's where djinns live.

I hadn't thought about it but I suppose I should credit Plato for my own teaching style... not to convince/persuade but to upload thinking tools into their neck-tops.

I think I prefer 'metadata' rather than 'metaphysical' for e.g. accuracy.  If you are interested in the latest synthesis for Information Quality Criteria ... https://www.isaca.org/-/media/images/isa...2016-2.jpg

Although Plato fails when stood next to contemporary knowledge, he was actually trying to "demystify" things. And yes, the Neoplatonists added a few layers of mysticism back on. But that's what makes them "neo." Otherwise, we'd simply call them Platonists. (They considered themselves "Platonists" btw, we added the "neo" in posterity.

In Plato's time, a new idea had begun to take hold of the Greek mind: relativism. That is, that "truth is relative"... "man is the measure of all things" (Protagoras).

Plato rejected this idea. He thought there was one truth and that (using reason and logic) we could figure out what that truth is. Here we are, 2,400 years later, and "relativism" is still the cutting edge technology.

Because relativism has begun to re-emerge in post-modern debates, I like to take Plato's side... namely that there is one truth... one reality... and we can figure that out objectively. And people's opinions (accurate ones, accurate ones) are merely approximations of this one truth. Once you go down the road "objective reality exists," then you can ask, "Are there any immutable features of that reality that we can come to understand?" If you are able to come up with any answer (Plato offered math as an example) boom... you are talking about Platonic forms. No djinn required.

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I gave your chart a looking over, and found it interesting. I'd like to give it an analysis or maybe even say what Plato might think of it. But I'll do that in a different post. I think some of it assumes there is an objective truth. And once you make that assumption, you're speaking Plato's language.