* Whatever your solution demands, there's a way of doing it. What the solution doesn't need - nor even cares about - is the philosophical argument.*
I think the disagreement here is that you seem to believe that philosophy is engaged in some different activity from the kind of "how should X type relate to Y supertype and Z characteristic" is the meat of object oriented design.
But really, what is being here is ontology. Ontology isn't really fancier than this and the here isn't more clear cut that what philosophers try to muddle out.
Ordinary philosophy has been kind of society-wide clarification of definitions, just a design is an organization-wide clarification of definitions. Take a look at the actual text of The Critique Of Pure Reason at some point. While might have been written with various arguments in mind, most of the actual text is a long, long discussion of what objects belong in what category - ie, nothing more "airy-fairy" than most design discussions.
Ordinary philosophy gets less attention than the elaborate debates around the "edges" of definitions. But this also happens with design discussions.
I agree with what you say, oddly enough. Perhaps my beef is actually with all the amateur philosophers who insist on a unique, canonical ontology, rather than the fact of the matter, that there are always multiple ontologies to choose from. So they argue about things like square and rectangle re subtyping, but there is more than one way to validly slice the pie, so the argument is pointless.
I think the disagreement here is that you seem to believe that philosophy is engaged in some different activity from the kind of "how should X type relate to Y supertype and Z characteristic" is the meat of object oriented design.
But really, what is being here is ontology. Ontology isn't really fancier than this and the here isn't more clear cut that what philosophers try to muddle out.
Ordinary philosophy has been kind of society-wide clarification of definitions, just a design is an organization-wide clarification of definitions. Take a look at the actual text of The Critique Of Pure Reason at some point. While might have been written with various arguments in mind, most of the actual text is a long, long discussion of what objects belong in what category - ie, nothing more "airy-fairy" than most design discussions.
Ordinary philosophy gets less attention than the elaborate debates around the "edges" of definitions. But this also happens with design discussions.