Newton's laws captured part of what he observed at the time. And that's all a model is supposed to do.
That doesn't make it wrong. It makes it limited. You could say it's a "low resolution" view of reality.
If we limited our knowledge only to perfect models, we would be holding ourselves to a standard of omniscience, and we would never know anything.
We clearly have good enough models to design hypersonic aircraft, to pick a semi-random example. But our models are not complete; we don't know everything. But our models are not wrong.
Other commenters who warn that saying "all models are wrong" encourages anti-intellectualism and exactly right. That leads to a bad place.
The opposite of wrong is correct. Newton's Laws are not correct, therefore they are wrong. Technically.
I agree though that saying they're "wrong" has limited utility... Perhaps the more useful way of thinking about models is "give sensible predictions up to certain amount of accuracy in certain contexts".
> Newton's Laws are not correct, therefore they are wrong.
They are correct as long as they are stated with the caveat that they are only known to apply to Netwon's observations, and then, only with a limited amount of fidelity.
I haven't read Newton's original source material, so I don't know if he overstated the universality of his laws.
I feel we're arguing a very minor point here. You seem to be hung up on this "models can be correct when stated with appropriate caveats". Sure. The "all models are wrong" saying has an implicit "at representing the observable reality in full fidelity".
"All models are wrong" is the same as saying "All knowledge is wrong." That's technically incorrect and philosophically disastrous. Ideas like this have a huge impact on people in myriad ways.
> The "all models are wrong" saying has an implicit "at representing the observable reality in full fidelity".
No, it doesn't. This is exactly like saying "All knowledge is wrong" has an implicit "as knowing everything in full fidelity, i.e., being omniscient." You are holding models (or knowledge) to a completely ridiculous standard. They are not supposed to work the way you are implicitly asking them to work.
> That's technically incorrect and philosophically disastrous
How can taking a particular epistemic stance be wrong? What non-epistemic basis would you use to judge it? It might be inconsistent with the stance you have chosen, but that doesn't make it wrong.
And as far as it being disastrous, I know a number of very competent people that take that view--what disasters should I look for in their lives to see how disastrous their stance is?
It's wrong if it contradicts the evidence of raw sense data or knowledge derived logically from the evidence of raw sense data.
You can choose to reject even that, but there is no reason to make such a choice, and it would be supremely impractical to do so.
> And as far as it being disastrous, I know a number of very competent people that take that view
The view that knowledge based on sense data isn't really knowledge was advanced by Kant, and certainly helped make room for the Nazis. Marx also exploited the anti-knowledge ethos of the time with his dialectical materialism. Finally, religion thrives when the ability to know is denigrated; that was Kant's stated goal [1]. Religion is fundamentally dishonest and leads to an infinite plethora of evils.
[1] "I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith" -Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
Sense data in itself can't be contradicted because it contains no propositions.
As for knowledge logically derived from the sense data--it is exactly the choice: "which logic should I choose to interpret this sense data?" that is in question.
If you choose a logic where all models are wrong and some are useful, then it won't contradict knowledge derived according to itself. If instead you choose some other way, you're again not going to run into any contradiction.
The choice of an epistemic theory can only be about utility. Truth and falsity can only come later because they must be expressed in terms of the chosen theory.
Newton's laws captured part of what he observed at the time. And that's all a model is supposed to do.
That doesn't make it wrong. It makes it limited. You could say it's a "low resolution" view of reality.
If we limited our knowledge only to perfect models, we would be holding ourselves to a standard of omniscience, and we would never know anything.
We clearly have good enough models to design hypersonic aircraft, to pick a semi-random example. But our models are not complete; we don't know everything. But our models are not wrong.
Other commenters who warn that saying "all models are wrong" encourages anti-intellectualism and exactly right. That leads to a bad place.