bigcat, of course the senses are indispensable to us just to get around in daily life. And we humans trust them with a lot. (Even though there are times when, say, our "eyes play ticks on us.")
What I wanted to draw attention to however (perhaps the QM analogy was not the best way to do it), is the fact that there are real things that are not available to sense perception. Things like ideas, mathematical theorems, the laws of nature, theories of all descriptions, consciousness, emotions, the feeling part of sensory experience, time, etc., are real though perfectly intangible.
Eric Voegelin had a rather amusing term for such like: "non-existent reality." This sounds like an oxymoron; but it really isn't when you think about the class of "objects" that it describes. They are "real," just as the short list of things in the above specifies real things; but they do not have existence as physical objects available to sense perception.
People who want to make sense perception (understood as extended via increasingly sophisticated observational instruments) the criterion of what is real tacitly deny reality to a huge part of human experience and existence.
Such a definition of reality is really quite absurd. It results in a grotesque reductionism of nature and especially of human nature.
Certainly Truth itself is not available to sense perception. Nor is the idea of "living the right kind of life." And it seems that Plato, Aristotle, and Christianity all agree that you can't do the latter without having a conception or standard of the former.
So if it were true that these aren't "real things," because intangible and therefore unvalidatable by the senses, then what would be the point of human life?
C.S. Lewis once said, if you want to know if the cat is in the cupboard, all the reasoning in the world will not tell you. You have to look in the cubboard.
So if the question is, "where is the cat?" and you look in the cupboard and see her, declaring, "she's in cupboard," isn't that the truth?
If I want to know what the truth concerning the meaning of justice, neither my eyes or any other perception will tell me, but if I want to know the truth of what something looks like, only my eyes will tell me.
Otherwise (except for the Voegelin stuff) I think your analysis is correct. Concepts, even concepts of fictions are every bit as real as rocks and trees, but not real in the same way, and that way must be spedified if what we say about them, as real, is to be true.
Hank