If you have not read Jayne's treatment of the Gibbs paradox, you may enjoy it. He addresses exactly the question of what it means to say we cannot distinguish p

If you have not read Jayne's treatment of the Gibbs paradox, you may enjoy it. He addresses exactly the question of what it means to say we cannot distinguish particles from each other, and how 'cannot' really means 'cannot with our current state of knowledge and tools (including known fields, forces, etc).' See his analysis of two previously indistinguishable versions of Argon which become distinguishable through new tools. I realize that this is in a discussion of classical gas mixing physics, but the principle behind it is the same. So, in short, epistimology does matter if our level of knowledge does not exhaust the ontology. Link: http://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/articles/gibbs.paradox.pdf http://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/articles/gibbs.paradox.pdf