Church's Thesis is an empirical conjecture about physical...

Church's Thesis(Also called the Church-Turing Thesis; surveyed in Section 1.6 of the source text.): The claim that the class REC coincides with the class of effectively computable functions.
Copeland and Proudfoot(as used in philosophy of mind and computation): Contemporary philosophers and logicians who have argued that the laws of physics might allow for forms of computation more powerful than what a standard Turing machine can do.
Empirical conjecture(as used in philosophy of science): An educated guess based on observations and experiments in the real world, rather than something proven by pure reason.
Physical computation(as used in philosophy of mind and computer science): The actual process of computation happening in real computers and devices in the physical world, as opposed to pure mathematical theory.
Revelatory(as an alternative view of what measurement does): The idea that measurement simply reveals or uncovers something that was already there before you measured it, like finding out a coin was heads all along.
Stipulative(as used in philosophy of logic and metaphysics): Something that's just defined or assumed to be true by someone's choice, rather than being proven or justified by evidence and reasoning.
logical necessity(Distinguishing types of necessity): A property of statements that are true in all possible logical contexts, such as tautologies

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Church's Thesis is an empirical conjecture about physical computation, not a logical necessity, as Copeland and Proudfoot argue, leaving the definition stipulative rather than revelatory.