>>13184660All modern physicists are positivists, although most of them are probably not aware of the name of the philosophy
It is logical positivism that allows you to understand that two coordinate systems for a physical problem are not different, they are really the same, when the predictions for all the sense-impressions predicted by the two systems are equivalent. So if someone insists that the world is really in polar coordinates (perhaps because rotations are important), and someone else insists that the world is really in rectangular coordinates (because translations are important), they are both being silly. Each coordinate system is as good as any other.
The positivism allowed 19th century physicists to convince themselves that fields are actual objects, as real as a chair, because there is a procedure to check if a field is present, just like there is a procedure to check if a chair is present. So it makes the abstract things concrete, whenever you can figure out a solid experimental test to see how the abstract thing is configured. But it also made other questions meaningless, like what is the true rest-frame of the ether? Or where is the electron exactly in the ground state of a Hydrogen atom?
Logical positivism moots a whole bunch of other philosophy, because it suggests that the right way to think of terms in a language is in terms of a reduction to a formal language, much like in mathematics. If you take the positivists seriously, most of the field of philosophy is pointless and stupid.
