I agree with the summary statement that "things exist prior to knowing about them, and the only way we know about them is through experience," but I probably understand that differently from the way that you do.

I agree that we only know through experience, but your reference to how this cashes out in physical terms suggests that we might mean something different by knowing through experience. That is, I do not disagree that in fact this is how it cashed out. But the fact that it does, is a fact that we learned by experience, and from the point of view that we had before those experiences, it could have cashed out quite differently. From the point of view after learning about this, it is easy to suppose that "it had to be something like this," but in fact we have no way to exclude scenarios where things would have been radically different. I don't know for a fact that this means that our position differs: but I would not have mentioned such a physical account, and it seems to me that bringing in that physical account into an account of epistemology will tend to lead people astray, i.e. by judging not from their experience but from other things instead, or to put this in another way, misusing experience, since in one way it is impossible to judge from anything except from experience, even by mistake, since you have no access to anything but experience.

It is obvious that the world exists before we know it. But here I more clearly disagree with you because it seems to me that what you are calling essentialism is simply straightforwardly true. I don't see the connection with existing before we know it, though, because essentialism does not mean (even as you have described it) that we know the world before it exists, but that the world has a structure that precedes existence, not in time, but logically. You say that you do not accept such a structure because there is no strong evidence for this.

I think there is conclusive proof of such a structure: some things are not other things (take any example you like: my desk is not my chair), and this is a fact that does not in any way depend on me. If it depended on me, then we could say this is my way of knowing, not the structure of the world, and essentialism might turn out to be false. But as it is, it does not depend on me, and this proves that the world has a structure on which its existence logically depends.

In fact, overall you seem to me to be asserting a position like that of Parmenides: being exists, and all apparent distinction is illusion. I very much doubt you will agree that you are in agreement with him, but I don't know how to otherwise understand what you have said above.

I agree about realism, but I pretty much fully disagree with what you conclude about truth: that is, I accept the prima facie argument that it is absurd to say that there are no true statements, because "there are no true statements" would in this way be a true statement. I also would be surprised if you can find any reasonable number of academic philosophers who would call a position "realist" if it says that there are no true statements. But also your argument does not seem even intended to establish this: it seems at most to establish that we cannot have ultimate and conclusive knowledge, once and for all, that a particular statement is true. I agree, but that is hardly the same as showing that there are not in fact true statements.

As I just said, I agree about not having any ultimate knowledge, and this points to a partial agreement about truth as well: I think the concept of truth, and all human concepts, are intrinsically imperfect ways of knowing the world. Supporting this, I think that e.g. the liar paradox, or even the paradox of the heap, do not and cannot have valid and satisfying solutions. All solutions are artificial, and this is because the paradoxes in fact follow logically from our idea of truth, which only imperfectly points to something in the world.

I don't think it would be fair to say that your ethical view is non-realist because of your idea about truth except to the degree that someone concludes that your view of the world is non-realist as a whole (and your view does seem suggestive of this but you at least denied it). The question would be about how ethical statements compare to other statements: if there are no true statements about morals in exactly the same way that there are no true statements about cows and trees, then it would not be fair to count that as morally non-realist.

I can't draw a conclusion about this myself from what you have said: perhaps you could compare yourself e.g. statements about ethics and statements about money, which are clearly intersubjective. I find it hard to imagine someone who is really and truly non-realist about money: that is, who believes that when he says, "I have 50 dollars in my wallet," the statement is strictly speaking false, because he actually has just a few pieces of paper in his wallet, and much less than 50. But perhaps this is no different from the fact that it is hard to accept that people who claim to be moral non-realists, actually are so.