``ideas that are all quite well and good but what the fuck it has to do with anything such as, say, politics... or love... or how the sciences should proceed (e.g., what does this meaning for knowledge, knowing, how we know now that we know what we know....)''
The philosopher or the interpretations are supposed to explain what the theories have to do with `real' issues. My opinion is that I have to supply that application.
Sometimes the potential application is very subtle. In ontological studies, what I am looking for are ways to apply ideas to an over all theory of mind. Once I can fit something like a mathematical insight into such a theory, then I can sort of work on it more directly, or something like that. I got this general approach from reading Cantor, Dedekind and Frege.
They all have short little books that are worth looking at when you get in the mood.
Frege, The foundations of arithmetic, Dedekind Essays on the theory of numbers, Cantor, Contributions to the founding of the theory of numers. Reading these sets up a mind-set to start thinking in more philosophical terms, which then leads to trying to attempt to figure out how math relates to some theory of mind. It's a very abstract path. But it does get back to the whole linguistics and neuro-science stuff eventually. The guide to this path is Ernst Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms. But this latter work is big and long and tough.
The other book worth mentioning is Ouine, Ontological relativity and other essays.
All of the above are linked in my mind from an experience I had in plant biology. We failed to confirm a mathematical model of how growth hormones are channeled back to the growth region in plant primary roots. The model was wrong, and question was why was it wrong? My biophysics buddy didn't bother, because he just moved on to other grant projects. But the question stayed with me. I think we had the wrong concept of what was happening, which means our own phenomenological thoughts were wrong. It's a very difficult thing to wonder about.
But I noticed at the same time the Big Bang doctrine was also breaking down, with greater depth of field astronomy coming in with older and older galactic systems that seemed to be at the same evolutionary stage as our local galaxies. How can this be? I think we have a bad theory. It's wrong. The trick is to figure out why it's wrong. Instead the cosomologists are just inventing hypothesis. They should be doing some primary philosophy. My suspicion is there is something wrong with our most basic concepts of time and space.
So these apparently meaningless questions in ontology do have the potential to be useful, but at a very abstract level... The ontological or meta-mathematical level is where you find the connections between concepts and theory and then turn this into an approach in mathematical physics. This is what was done at the early stage of atomic theory and quantum.
(I gotta go. My windows system is badly corrupted by somekind of adware that I can't get rid of. Suggestions? Meanwhile, I installed Ubuntu and got it up and running, but can't get the internet connection to work. I did the usual info on IP address, Gateway, DNS. rebooted, and so forth. But I didn't set the box up as a network. Maybe there is something in the network system that needs to be installed---any suggestions are welcome)
CG