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I think I understand your position a little better now. I still think it is at least expressed in a way which is more skeptical than necessary.
In my theory, the teleological aspects of things are pretty directly derived from metaphysics. Galileo somewhere says that inertia is the "laziness" of a body, or in other words the answer to "Why does this continue to move?" is "Because it continues to remain what it is." Once you have this sort of thing, it is easy enough to see why you get the origin of life, which seems to have purpose, and then the evolution of complex life, which seems to have complex purposes. In this way, ultimately all questions of final cause, "for what purpose," reduce to this answer: because things tend to remain what they are. Now maybe we can't explain the metaphysics behind things remaining what they are, but it is surely something metaphysical.
I think I mostly agree with that, actually, but I don't think we should conclude that there aren't true statements. I'll say more about this in the context of money vs ethics below.
Dan Dennett is always arguing against "essentialism," and I find myself agreeing mostly with his arguments while disagreeing with the anti-essentialist conclusion. Basically his main point, in almost every case, is that things have vague boundaries, not permanent white and black once and for all boundaries. He takes this as an argument against essentialism because he takes essentialism to mean a description of the world where you reduce everything to a complex of "A, B, C, etc." and A is there or not, B is there or not, C is there or not. Everything is black or white. I agree that the world is not like that, but I disagree with his conclusion about how it is, or rather it seems that he has no alternative -- "the world is not like that," but he cannot say in any sense how it is instead.
I agree that boundaries are vague; in fact, I would assert that all verbal boundaries are vague, including the boundaries of words that we use to define mathematical and logical ideas. If this is so, it follows that these kinds of vague boundaries will come up in everything we talk about, not only in things like whether a person is "tall" or "short." For example, we may or may not be able to find something which is "kinda sorta" a carbon atom, rather than definitely being one or definitely not being one. But even if we can't, this is like the fact that we don't find all of the evolutionary intermediate forms between living things: the fact that we don't find them in practice does not mean they are impossible. Or at any rate, if there are some boundaries that cannot be vague, we have no way of proving that they cannot be, but we can simply say, "We haven't found any examples yet where such and such a boundary is vague."
I'm discussing this in relation to the question, "perhaps this is a definitional dispute?" I don't think there is or can be a rigid line between definitional disputes and disputes about the world. In some cases, we can clearly say that people are arguing about words. In other cases, we can clearly say they are arguing about facts. But this is no different from the fact that we can say that some particular person is definitely bald and some other is not: the boundary between being bald and not being bald remains a vague one, and likewise the boundary between arguing about facts and arguing about words is a vague one.
And unfortunately your question may be very near that boundary. Looking at this verbally, I would say that "it is useful to say this," and "it is true to say this," are very close, although not identical. We could put it this way: a statement is true if it is useful because it points at reality. This is to exclude, of course, the usefulness of lying and self deceiving. These things may be useful, but they get their utility from pointing away from reality. If a statement is useful because it points at reality, I would say that to that extent it is true (to that extent, because it might also have some falsehood insofar as it might have some disutility in addition to its utility.)
The statement about money (and about ethics), in my opinion, is useful because it points at reality. Your argument is that it points more directly to our interpretations of reality. Fine: but those interpretations themselves point at reality as well. It isn't easy to see how you could redescribe this as those interpretations pointing away from reality, which is what would be needed to say that the statement is false.