Thanks for the recommendations. Admittedly I'm just being perverse in applying this to fundamental physical laws but the distinction feels very important in are

Thanks for the recommendations. Admittedly I'm just being perverse in applying this to fundamental physical laws but the distinction feels very important in areas like linguistics (where researchers' ideas of "truth" tend not to be expressible in calculus). That is, I picture an exchange where a deep-learning researcher says "our clustering algorithms found that languages A & B share characteristic C", and a linguistics professor replies "Aha, but the underlying truth is that A & B belong to the X class of languages, and X-like languages always have C". Intuitively the latter version somehow feels more robust, but in practice they're basically equivalent, and the first version arguably carries less baggage.