This kind of response really grinds my gears about these discussions of philosophy (more often than not related to metaphysics). You're referencing the mostly unobjectionable features of the field to defend the objectionable features, when there is very little similarity between the two. You can't defend ontology language games by appealing to the truth of logic or mathematics, as they share nothing of relevance in common. If you want to give an actual defense of the things people find objectionable about metaphysics, you have to defend the features being attacked, not tangentially related things that happen to be categorized under the same broad label.

>Logic is metaphysics:

Maybe this is true, but doing logic isn't doing metaphysics. One does not need to take a stance on the metaphysics of logic to study and create formal systems.

>The working programmer is an ontologist and a taxonomist, but this fact isn't well-understood.

Not in any substantive sense. There is a surface-level connection between what a programmer does and a metaphysician does, but this is the extent of the connection. The ontologies studied in metaphysics attempt to make true substantive statements about what exists in the actual world. The programmer is merely stipulating the basic objects and relationships in a fully contingent domain of inquiry. The programmer is doing metaphysics only if you remove anything of substance from what we take the metaphysician to be doing.

And this kind of response really grinds my gears; I am relatively certain, given the time scales involved and the nature of your response, that you didn't read my links, and you haven't provided any of your own. Nonetheless!

Doing logic is doing metaphysics. Suppose 1+1=2 for addable numbers, that you have oranges and can add more oranges, and also that the number of oranges you have is an addable number. Now you know, as a matter of plain old philosophical handwavey logic, that if you have 1 orange, and you add 1 more orange, then you'll have 2 oranges. Easy, right? This generalizes to any topos and it's known as "internal logic". The slogan we have is, "a topos is a place for doing logic".

Doing metaphysics is doing logic. Want to know what's impossible? If it can be characterized purely by mathematical structures, and those structures' existence leads to contradiction, then it's impossible. Thus, "models" in the first sense of the original article, free unconstrained unicorn metaphysics models, are actually logically (and thus mathematically) constrained by "models" in the second sense, in the mathematical sense. A powerful example of this is M-theory, borne from string theory; right now, the "swampland" cleanup is sweeping through string theory and helping refine our sense of which particle physics are possible.

An ontologist in today's postmodern world surely knows that the (inherently mathematical!) structures that they are building and studying are created, not discovered; subjective, not objective; narratives, not truths. Mathematicians know this formally, via Tarski's Undefinability. Just like an ontologist tries to find models, a programmer tries to find models, searching for the database schemata and the class hierarchy that will match their problem.

(Indeed, what is "anything of substance"? Is it physical?)

>I am relatively certain, given the time scales involved and the nature of your response, that you didn't read my links, and you haven't provided any of your own

The content of the links didn't seem relevant to the objection I offered. Perhaps that's incorrect, but you didn't make the case.

>Doing logic is doing metaphysics. Suppose 1+1=2 for addable numbers... that if you have 1 orange, and you add 1 more orange, then you'll have 2 oranges.

I could object to doing math being an instance of metaphysics, but setting that aside, the issue is that the connection between logic and metaphysics is the "mostly unobjectionable" subset of metaphysics that I mentioned previously. So again, you can't substantiate the objectionable parts with arguments that only apply to the unobjectionable parts.

>An ontologist in today's postmodern world surely knows that the (inherently mathematical!) structures that they are building and studying are created, not discovered; subjective, not objective; narratives, not truths.

Here you seem to be admitting that metaphysics is unsubstantive! Metaphysics purports to discover what exists, not subjective notions of preferred taxonomies. But it is precisely the charge that nothing objective is being discovered that underpins the argument against metaphysics.

Now I understand why you see a close connection between what a programmer does and what the metaphysician does: they're both theorizing about contingent domains of inquiry, with no external objective facts at stake. But now I don't get why you object to saying metaphysics is unsubstantive.

I'd like to draw a distinction between non-physical and metaphysical. The opposite of a thing is not the same thing as the meta of that same thing. The meta attempts to unify the topic and it's reverse. Metaphysics wants to kill the distinction between physical reality and non-physical reality. Non-physical disciplines such as mathematics wants to distill the non-physical essence of things

This is a really nifty insight. Mathematical objects aren't physical, but that doesn't mean that there aren't objects that are neither physical nor mathematical. I wonder what those objects might be like!