ABSTRACT
Physicists (like other scientists in a way) work with systems of laws and theories, with physical principles and concepts which are so well established that they appear untouchable and definitive: if the concepts on which they work are not completely secured yet, the very basis of such work is taken for granted. They thus hold, in their view, the true correspondence, in representational thought, between what exists in nature – bodies, radiations, objects, properties – and the entities referred to as ‘physical systems’ in general. Since these representations, or these elements of representation, are rational (they are related to each other and justified by reasoning, proofs, deductions, inferences and so on), this very rationality seems to be formulated as imaging objective elements, independent of thought, which are supposed to exist in nature: or if not imaging them exactly, such rationality is thought to be based on a narrow correspondence with them.
