Another solution to the problem is that heat as heat is ontologically basic, because it is part of our "native representation". Because that is how we experience heat. It is heat-as-disordered-kinetic-energy which is just a model, not ontologically basic, and is one constrained and domain-specific way of looking at things.
Don't you find it strange that it's your ontology that keeps changing, yet there is always this native representation sitting there unchanged, and that it is thing upon which all of your cognition is based?