Stebbing disliked this way of explaining physics, because of the casual misuse it made of everyday language, and also because of the much larger implications Eddington encouraged his reader to draw from it. In Philosophy and the Physicists she drew attention to these issues. She argued, for instance, that it simply made no sense to say “the plank has no solidity of substance”. The word “solid” just means having properties such as those of a plank. Whatever developments in physics may indicate, a