Abstract
‘Fundamental’ is a prime example of what philosopher John Post (presumably following legal jargon) called an “accordion word”: highly flexible and capable of expanding or contracting depending on context. Physicists (of a certain stripe) and many cosmologists will view their domain as fundamental, and one will often see the expression ‘fundamental physics’ to describe an actual subject area—the idea being that such practitioners are dealing in ‘compositional ultimates’ (the ‘building blocks’ of physical reality, in journalese).
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Rickles, D. (2019). Of Lego and Layers (and Fundamentalism). In: Aguirre, A., Foster, B., Merali, Z. (eds) What is Fundamental?. The Frontiers Collection. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11301-8_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11301-8_5
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