Seems needlessly pedantic to me, since by that definition electromagnetism isn't a force either -- it's not possible to have a force on a charged object without

Seems needlessly pedantic to me, since by that definition electromagnetism isn't a force either -- it's not possible to have a force on a charged object without there being another object that creates the field the first object is interacting with (and vice versa). In fact, Newton's third law kind of implies that it's impossible to have any force in isolation. The same formula argument would apply to Coulomb's law. Now, is it fair to point out that you can model these forces as fields, and that such a model is very useful? Yeah. But it's silly to argue that something is or is not a "force" but is instead a "field" -- these are mathematical constructs used in the models we use for physics. I mean, it's not really accurate to say that "forces" and "fields" exist in the first place (in the sense that the mathematical models themselves are a real thing that exist in the world -- they are simply models). And in the end it definitely doesn't matter, neither the maths nor the real world cares whether you personally consider gravity a force or not. (I expect this is also the case for the strong and weak forces, but I haven't done post-grad physics.)