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MaoShan comments on Natural Laws Are Descriptions, not Rules - Less Wrong
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The problem with descriptivism in modern physics is that you say physical theory describes something independent, but you end up postulating the things that it describes as part of the description language, you do not provide any additional denotation for them. I.e. you claim that it describes the real stuff, but in fact it only describes the constants of its language. So the descriptive view forces anti-realism. But it seems your mereological reductionism is a form of realism.
Under prescriptivism, the theory postulates reality. So we can remain realists, just uncertain whether we are not mistaken about what is real.
I think that various-level-of-prescription laws are not contradictory. I've heard on LW that arithmetic might cause the calculator to output 4 to 2+2.
Also, continuing to allow cruder levels can help to validate the more fundamental ones, or even falsify them (which would help refine the fundamental ones). If a description that bases its predictions on fundamental axioms turns out to be unreliable, that can point to a problem in the axioms themselves, even if they look flawless to us, it could be clear where the problem is coming from.