I’m not trying to sneak in positivism or anything, it seems entirely natural that if someone says “what is an object” that the reply would be do you mean in the actual world, or what people mean when they say object? I mean it is a strictly more ambiguous question than “what is a boat?”

- is it a watercraft as defined by various legal codes
- is it what people intuitively think of when you say the word
- is there some perfect logical definition of boatness

The first thing you would say is “why are you asking?” because the reason you ask determines what kind of answer is appropriate, and the question by itself is incomplete.