Sense-Experience and Shadows

Plato's likening, in book VII of the Republic, of Sense-Experience to shadows, is less than a sound basis for the prototype of a repudiation of Empiricism that it has been taken by many to be over the centuries.  For, to begin with, a shadow is not like Sense-Experience; it is a Sense-Experience.  Second, unlike a hallucination, an after-image, or a Secondary Quality, a shadow does not inhere in the percipient.  Finally, unlike an echo or a reflection, a shadow is no mere copy of an original.  Instead, the cognitive flaw that is the focus of passage is that a shadow is taken to be a self-subsistent entity.  But, that is an error of interpretation, and, hence, an intellectual error.  So, regardless of Plato's intention, what the passage illustrates is a misuse of Sense-Experience, not its Ontological inferiority.