I'm not seeing how these distinctions are helpful. Maybe there's a miscommunication?
When we say "gravity isn't a force", it's shorthand for "our best understanding of gravity, with the widest explanatory power that most accurately matches experimental results, says that gravity isn't a force." But that's an exhausting, verbose way to talk. Knowing that GR is incomplete doesn't change that.
No falsifiable theory is 100% guaranteed Truth. Not GR, QM, evolution, or any widely accepted future Grand Unified Theory. Science is one big exercise in affirming the consequent, verifying contrapositives, and finding surprises. Maybe all mental models are wrong. Maybe we're brains in vats. Aaaah!...so what?
Evolution naturally developed eyeballs in mammals. My niece just turned 5. The atoms composing me won't rearrange into a facsimile of Abraham Lincoln tomorrow. I'm not going to add "to our best understanding, given the evidence, granting my incomplete knowledge, etc" about these facts in service of reality obviously being unknowable. It's pointless.
Gravity isn't a force. That's a perfectly "proper answer" -- no need to pontificate about philosophical relativism.
This isn't philosophical relativism. I don't deal in that.
This is precisely where GR doesn't work, so using it to declare with confidence what gravity "is" is as silly as using QM to do it. They don't work on this matter. General Relativity is definitely not a complete description of how the universe works. It's a good approximation, even a very good one.. but no more than that.
We know this. It is well understood. This is not some sort of whacky Time Cube position. The whacky Time Cube position is really the one that says GR is correct so we can declare with confidence that gravity isn't a force.
In the end I don't expect gravity to be different from electromagnetism and the other forces. There's been plenty of efforts to build GUTs from nothing but geometry in which case nothing is a "force". Efforts from the QM side tend to incorporate "gravitons" as the force mediation particle just like the other forces have mediation particles. It seems very likely to me that GR's "gravity is specially not a force" will end up being an error, in that either all the other forces turn out not to be forces either, in which case we'll change the meaning, or it will be a force like every other. I don't think there's a lot of reason to expect this to be anything other than an artifact of GR being an approximation.
When we say "gravity isn't a force", it's shorthand for "our best understanding of gravity, with the widest explanatory power that most accurately matches experimental results, says that gravity isn't a force." But that's an exhausting, verbose way to talk. Knowing that GR is incomplete doesn't change that.
No falsifiable theory is 100% guaranteed Truth. Not GR, QM, evolution, or any widely accepted future Grand Unified Theory. Science is one big exercise in affirming the consequent, verifying contrapositives, and finding surprises. Maybe all mental models are wrong. Maybe we're brains in vats. Aaaah!...so what?
Evolution naturally developed eyeballs in mammals. My niece just turned 5. The atoms composing me won't rearrange into a facsimile of Abraham Lincoln tomorrow. I'm not going to add "to our best understanding, given the evidence, granting my incomplete knowledge, etc" about these facts in service of reality obviously being unknowable. It's pointless.
Gravity isn't a force. That's a perfectly "proper answer" -- no need to pontificate about philosophical relativism.