Physicist Nancy Cartwright has written an important and frequently discussed book, How the Laws of Physics. Briefly, her argument involves the distinction between the phenomenological and the theoretical in physics. Cartwright argues that the lying takes place in theoretical physics. The phenomenological is mostly "outside" the blackbox; the theoretical is entirely within the box.

I concur with Cartwright's judgment but only in the sense that truth is on different levels regarding these two subjects because of the mood of speech -- declarative, interrogative, subjunctive, imperative, petitive, ... -- explicating each subject.

Sentences about the phenomenological can be formulated in the declarative mood ("It is the case that ..."), subject to the usual criterion of "truth". But sentences about the theoretical can only be formulated in the subjunctive mood ("if it were the case that ...").

Elsewhere, ONLINE, my website explicates a vector logic of my creation, with a typical vector (a.k.a. ordered pair) of the form:
[1st part, 2nd part] º [Speaker formulates utterance U in mood M, utterance U].
In the present instance:
[1st part, 2nd part] º [subjunctive mood, phenomenology P is projected by unobservable microstate S] .

I think Cartwright finds lying in the judgment of the second part as true. I find lying in the way that scientists ttansform the first part from subjunctive to declarative.

In another file at this Website, I "picture" science as a blackbox:

                      |------------------|
           Known Input|                  |Known Output
           ---------->| Unknown Interior |------------>
                      |(mechanics? math?)|
                      |__________________|

In present terms:

• The phenomenological INPUT of the blackbox can be explicated in declarative mood, subject to the usual logical criteria for truth.
• The predictive OUTPUT can also be explicated in the declarative mood.
• The theoretical interior of the blackbox, requires the subjunctive mood.

---

On the other hand, it is easy to dismiss "alternative" views of science, treating it, for example, as a literary paper which is open to various determinations. The best science has a mathematical interior which is algorithmic and can be written as a computer program. Any one applying this "incorrigible" structure will arrive at the same result. It is in the philosophy of the science that differing opinionns can arise.

The best example is quantum theory (a.k.a. quantics, quantum mechanics) which has changed our civilization, providing, for example, for the advance of computers. There said to be seven well known interpretions of quantics, each of which fails in some way. But all accept the same algorithm for the theory. In "Why Mathematic Works", at this Wesbite, I discuss this matter.

Precisely this situation was discussed in the extensive work of Kenneth Burke (founder of "The New Rhetoric" in several books: Permanence and Change, Philosophy of Literary Form, The Grammar of Motives, A Rhetoric of Mot9ves, The Rhetoric of Religion. (I have them all.)

Briefly, Burke argues that the famous philsophers who attempted a Philosohy of Everything all failed because he usually emphasized one motive (Act, Scene, Agent, Agency, Purpose) over all others; then, to make this work, parenthetically, made this motive function in the role of all the other motives. He cites the example of evolutionary theory, which take the environment as the Scenic motive; then the theorist is forced to make the environment behave like an Agent.

I think it's possible to "make a case" against all philosophies of any given science, but I argue that this does not counter my notion of "science as a blackbox".