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To: Stone Mountain
In fact, almost all of the "rules" in science are actually considered "theories." The "law" of gravity, for instance, is actually considered a theory by scientists.

O.K. This is purely pedantic quibbling, as I agree with your main point: that all scientific claims, whether "laws," "facts" or "theories," are provisional and subject to revision or abandonment, and that "laws" should not be considered to have some inherently higher rank of certitude than "theories," but at the same time I do think that "laws" and "theories" are different kinds of scientific claims.

The general difference is that laws are descriptive generalizations (claiming that some relevant category of facts will always conform to some particular pattern or formula) whereas theories are explanatory in nature (proposing some cause or mechanism to account for why some set of facts are as they are, rather than some other way they might have been.

To rephase that a bit, laws don't really explain anything, they just say "this is how things are," and, ideally, "here is a set of mathematical formulas that predict or model the behavior of systems like this." Theories, on the other hand, explain facts, and laws. (E.g. the kinetic theory of gases explains Boyles Law; the General Theory of Relativity explains, if somewhat incompletely, the Law of Gravity.)

260 posted on 02/04/2002 2:27:23 PM PST by Stultis
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To: Stultis
Very interesting - I had never considered the differences between a scientific "law" and a scientific "theory" but I like the distinction you make.
369 posted on 02/05/2002 12:15:29 PM PST by Stone Mountain
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