Physics Avoidance: and other essays in conceptual strategy

Mark Wilson presents a series of explorations of our strategies for understanding the world. Physics avoidance refers to the fact that we frequently cannot reason about nature in the straightforward manner we anticipate, but must seek alternative policies that allow us to address the questions we want answered in a tractable way. Within both science and everyday life, we find ourselves relying upon thought processes that reach useful answers in opaque and roundabout manners. Conceptual innovators are often puzzled by the techniques they develop, when they stumble across reasoning patterns that are easy to implement but difficult to justify. As we collectively improve our inferential skills, we often wander into unfamiliar explanatory landscapes in which simple words encode physical information in complex and unanticipated ways.

At its best, philosophical reflection illuminates the natural developmental processes that generate these confusions and explicates their complexities.
But current thinking within philosophy of science and language works to opposite effect by relying upon simplistic conceptions of cause ,
law of nature , possibility , and reference that ignore the strategic complexities in which these concepts become entangled within real life usage. The nine new essays in this volume illustrate the need for better descriptive tools, through a range of revealing case-studies.