Islands of identification

Abby and I are reading P. W. Bridgman's The Nature of Thermodynamics, with the goal of understanding entropy, degradation, usefulness, etc. in disciplinary terms.  We picked this book because it is a pleasant little paperback, with next to no equations, written in a chatty, accessible style, and because Stamatis said it was good.

Bridgman won the Nobel prize in physics in 1946 for investigations of the properties of matter under high pressure.  He also is credited with coining the term "operational definition"; so I feel in his debt.  This book, published in 1941, starts out with an extended explanation of why his book is not going to be a rigorously logical or mathematical treatise.  The explanation is in terms of personal taste:

[A precise logical] analysis serves certain definite purposes; in particular one may feel a security in the conclusions of such an analysis which is impossible in a less formal structure.  But this I suspect is not the whole reason why those whose analysis runs to this form actually do it; it must be that they enjoy such rigorously precise activities for their own sake.  Personally, my tastes place me in that other group which does not take an intrinsic pleasure in the elaboration of a logically flawless and complete structure.  I would undergo the labor of constructing such a structure only as it might be necessary for some more compelling purpose. (p. vii)

His experience is that what feels to him most like "understanding" is found when physics concepts are expressed verbally, as opposed to in the language of logic or mathematics.  He goes on to suggest that this is not merely his own preference, but is likely something significant about human cognition:  he suggests that if we were to study which concepts and operations have survived in physics, out of all the possible conceivable concepts,

...I am convinced that the verbal factor wold be found to be one of the most important factors determining selection and survival.  The concepts of physics which we inherited ready-made were such that they fit the same verbal pattern as the more familiar objects of daily life; we demand of any new concepts which we are forced to invent to meet new previously unknown situations that they permit the familiar verbal handling. ...For our verbal habits have evolved from millions of years of searching for adequate methods of dealing verbally with external situations, eliminating methods that were not a close enough fit. (p. x-xi)

I have the idea that Bridgman would be pleased by embodied cognition.  I also think he would be a fan of Ochs, based on something he said about the development of atomic theory (long before it had any justification in experiment):

It just seems to be a fact about our thinking machinery that we must have our atoms; we cannot think of the velocity of a uniform fluid without imaging the "particles" of which the fluid is composed... Perhaps the human necessity for its particles is connected with the necessity for "identification" in thinking; the very words we use are little islands of identification in the amorphous sea of our cerebration, and the particle of a fluid is a little materialized piece of identifiability.  (p. 9-10)

I am never going to get to the second law at this rate; but I'm really enjoying myself.