I've always looked at Newton's second law as being somehow incomplete.
It does not include what I consider to be a causal element. Forces do
cause accelerations, at least that is what my intuition tells me, or I
was successfully brainwashed a long time ago. (This latter possibility
is often referred to as "common sense".) Newton's law, especially
written with a "coefficient of inertia", the mass, does not imply that
forces cause acceleration. If one were to write it as a=HF, where
H=1/m is the coefficient of compliance (or some other such name) it
would look better to me.
Someone clever must have written about this. Anyone out there know a
favorite read on the topic?