[FOM] methodological thesis

[Timothy Y. Chow]

It occurred to me that perhaps a better testbed for Friedman's THESIS than 
philosophy is theoretical physics.  Take, for example, some of Witten's 
papers.  Whether they can be subsumed by mathematically rigorous papers is 
far from clear.  Nevertheless, it seems clear that they represent 
intellectual progress.  If Witten had had the policy of not publishing P 
papers but keeping them in his head until he had transformed them into Q 
papers, we would still be waiting today.

Tim