Problem is, we didn’t know beforehand (i.e. in 1800) that the high-level things we saw (like temperatures, heat flow, etc) had anything to do with statistical averages. One could imagine an alternative universe running on different physics, where heat really is a fluid and yet macroscopically it behaves a lot like heat in our universe. If we imagine all the difference ways things could have turned out to work, given only what we knew in 1800, where does that leave us? What low-level structure is implied by the high-level structure?
Problem is, we didn’t know beforehand (i.e. in 1800) that the high-level things we saw (like temperatures, heat flow, etc) had anything to do with statistical averages. One could imagine an alternative universe running on different physics, where heat really is a fluid and yet macroscopically it behaves a lot like heat in our universe. If we imagine all the difference ways things could have turned out to work, given only what we knew in 1800, where does that leave us? What low-level structure is implied by the high-level structure?