i don't seem to be able to interest any physicists in squabbling, but let me give a primary example of the sort of thing i mean. so, one idea is that time is relative to an 'observer', specifically because of time dilation, in which time is measured differently by different observers depending on their movement relative to one another. now, this appears to be a quasi-kantian assertion: time is dependent on perception; it is a mental phenomenon or necessarily has a mental or subjective aspect.
but however, as far as i can see, the thought experiments that drive this have absolutely nothing to do with observation. two clocks travelling in different directions display the phenenomen. two plants would age at different rates relatively to each other, or two samples of the same element would undergo radioactive decay at apparently different rates. the thing is no more observer-dependent than radioactive decay in a single sample.
probably physicists must know this; there is no place for observers in the equations and so on. so from one angle it is just a terminological convenience. but i would think of it as a globally misleading terminological mistake. it freaks people into accepting an informally subjective universe as though that was a matter of course. obviously, i completely repudiate the sort of metaphysics that makes time relative to observers. but it rather irritates me that a whole century would assume something like that just because of an abuse of words. one asserts that time is observer-relative. perhaps 'what one really means' is true or something. but what one really said is false. words don't mean whatever you want them to mean.
what happens here is that you perform a thought-experiement: imagine that you were traveling east; now imagine you were traveling west; you're looking at a clock, etc. but you got confused between describing a thought experiment and descibing describing a thought experiment, so that you put the thinker you imagined yourself to be into the imagined world as though it were a necessary feature of that world. you imagined imagining an experiment, when you should have just been imagining an experiment. you made the consciousness which is necessary to perform any thought experiment necessary to the results of that experiment. i do think philosophy might have helped with some of this!
but this reading of relativity and also the subjectivist or phenomenalist reading of the uncertainty principle and so on, is also part of physics pr. it's so wild! only in its false form it's not that wild; it's just warmed-over german idealism. so try to state it in its true form.
