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Notes -
There are a lot of ways that things can be "real," for some value of real. The Statue of Liberty is a real thing, as it is a actual object in the physical world--reality in the most trivial and literal sense. But there are other legitimate senses of "real"--the US national debt, the number 2, Frodo Baggins, and Alexander Hamilton are all real on various different levels. As you say, the value of a dollar has a legitimate, socially-constructed reality, but so does something like "Donald Trump's reputation"--its exact parameters are highly contested, but no one doubts that "Donald Trump" is real, and that he has a reputation, which is socially constructed from the aggregate of perspectives on his character.
(I would describe "science" as a tool/process/methodology, rather than a body of knowledge.)
Coincidentally Everythingstudies also have a very good article about what real can mean and also how it creates confusion. But here I think is that the distinction is a little bit different: even taking Sherlock Holmes that exists as a fictional character, somebody can say that he also has some other aspects that were socially shaped or that this character himself impacts society in certain way. So if somebody says let's say Sherlock Holmes is racist this can have multitudes of meanings and it is not apparent which one is relevant in context of the discussion: is the character in the novel racist to other characters? Were the novels featuring this character some way perpetuating racism later down the road? Of course it also has to be noted that by playing with words in this way it opens large space of various rhetorical tactics and sophistry.
It is also often a feature, especially if the target of discussion is something else such as social transformation. For instance you can use these words with multiple meanings in order to fish for some hooks that are relevant to your discussion partner, thus finding out which context connects with the other person the best personally - for instance so called Freierian "generative themes". Then you can use other examples and connect it back to the original context, the original theme in a process of recontextualization in order to achieve some other end outside of just discussing ideas. In this sense this vagueness is a feature and not a bug.
Thanks for sharing that article; I thought it was insightful. "X exists" is a particularly slippery phrase, but it's one piece of a larger issue with communication--ultimately, there's a tradeoff between efficiency and precision, and the various aspects of language exist to manage that balance.
Indeed, in fine detail, various languages manage specific micro-equilibria differently, due to local conceptions of where efficiency can be sacrificed to precision, or vice versa.
English pronouns traditionally distinguish among first/second/third person, singular/plural, sex in the third person singular but not elsewhere, subject/object/possessive/reflexive, and so forth. Sometimes combinations of distinctions exist, and sometimes not: "you" is clearly second person, but ambiguously singular or plural--or subject/object, for that matter, it's all context-determined --whereas "I/we/me/us" retains both the singular/plural and subject/object distinctions.
There's a language--I forget exactly where, but I want to say Southeast Asia or Australia?--that has a distinction in its pronouns that English lacks: two different senses of "we," each with its own pronoun. In one sense, "we" includes the person or people being spoken to, in that "you and I" are part of "we." In the other sense, it does not, in that "you" are not part of "we."
"Are we in agreement?" includes the people being spoken to. "We are going to the store; do you want to come with us?" does not, but English uses the same word. The people using this language felt that there was a valuable distinction that justified maintaining two words here; English speakers generally don't even notice the same ambiguity.
Indonesian has that, and I always thought it was a super-useful concept.
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