Abstract

While there are reasons to believe that both component forces and a resultant force operate on a body in combined circumstances, the threat of overdetermination largely prevents adoption of this view. Accordingly, a lively debate has arisen over which force actually exists and which force is eliminated in combined circumstances, the components or the resultant. In this article I present a non-reductive model of resultant force which ensures the existence of both the resultant force and the component forces without overdetermination. According to the non-reductive model, the resultant force is the summation of component forces, where summation is interpreted as meaning that the component forces, when temporally and spatially overlapping, form a superposed mixture which is the resultant force, but which is not identical to the conjunction of component forces taken with temporal and spatial independence