Morning Ontology

It's always important in conceptual discussion to determine how each of the participants are viewing the language they're using. Are their words describing models of hard realities, in a way a person might say that a thing is purple or hard, or are they using words to describe abstractions drawn from their own mind? While generally a non-issue because of the close approximations between the two, I can conceive of situations where a debate can turn into a matter of talking past eachother, just because two different conceptions of basic metaphysics are taking place.

I'm struggling with which I tend to gravitate towards, but the difference between the two explains a lot about my attitude towards Plato's Theory of Forms and Ideas. When concepts become descriptions of things, it's not hard to believe that the perfect form of that thing exists and is a part of reality, while the abstraction-viewpoint would be content to use that perfection as a tool originating via reason and used for perceiving qualities of the abstraction on a day to day basis. When perfection exists on an observable level, it's easy to begin to see deviation from that norm as something to be avoided (given that the norm is something "good") which leads to all sorts of murky nonsense. At the same time, the whole discussion still makes me feel Plato was working off of innate bias rather than good faith, considering it's not too much of a leap to consider that there could be a perfect representation of something bad and undesirable.