Jon_Heath comments on Universal Law - Less Wrong

39 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 29 April 2007 06:41AM

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Comment author: Jon_Heath 30 April 2007 08:54:30AM 1 point [-]

Are you familiar with Nancy Cartwright's work, in particular "How the Laws of Physics Lie"? She argues that universality is traded off against truthfulness. Specific phenomenological laws can be shown to be strictly true, whereas the artificial assumptions and approximations needed to make the data fit with theoretical laws argues against the truthfulness of the latter.